Madhu Krishnan’s book offers an attention-grabbing investigation into the representation of Africa in contemporary African literature in English. Organized in five chapters, this concise volume explores questions of ethics, race, gender, mythopoetics, and address in internationally published works from the African continent. In her introduction, Krishnan notes that globally published African authors work both with and against the conventions of representation usually associated with postcolonial literatures, giving shape to an idea of Africa that “remains caught in a critical schism between authenticity and cosmopolitan detachment.” Investigating the global Africa created and disseminated in novels requires a multilayered study of form, content, and context. By focusing on the intersection of the aesthetic and the political, Krishnan sets out to interrogate what she calls “the complex and often contradictory workings of identification” at play in a reciprocal interaction with larger discourses about Africa. Following a thematic approach and combining close reading with socio-historical and material contextualization, the volume contributes to the framing of a nuanced and deeper understanding of the representations and significations of Africa in a global context.
Chapter One provides some introductory material around the interaction between aesthetic and political modes of representation. This doubling of value, Krishnan argues, should be central to the act of critical and responsible reading. Working against exotic, totalizing, and reductive conceptions of writing, the “interstitial space” thus created repositions the question of address in a complex network of strategies of reading and receiving literary texts.
Throughout the volume, Krishnan consistently champions a balanced understanding of the representations of Africa in literature. Focusing on Brian Chikwava’s Harare North (2009), Nuruddin Farah’s Links (2005), and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s The Book of Not (2006), the second chapter argues that race functions in these works as both “a category of being” and “a site of performativity,” thus operating within a multivalenced process of becoming. In the three novels, Krishnan contends, modes of subject formation use linguistic and narrative innovation to foreground the contingency of raced identities and to display the ambiguity of African selfhood.
Chapter Three investigates the articulation of race and gender in conflict and postconflict African contexts as developed in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), Aminatta Forna’s Ancestor Stones (2006), and Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins (2002). Krishnan shows how feminization and the trope of Mother Africa are subverted as the three texts simultaneously reinforce the precarious position of intersectional identities, perform a critical recuperation of these subjectivities, and deploy the notion of the sacred maternal to provide a contrapuntal reading of gender. In so doing, the three novels give voice to an unvoiced subjectivity and break with the naturalized image of African woman as victim.
The construction of readerships and modes of reading is central to the following chapter, which focuses on Chris Abani’s GraceLand (2004) and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow (2004/2006). Krishnan demonstrates how each novel mobilizes a significant set of mythopoetic motifs to create a sense of collective identification and resist a normative idea of Africa. In both texts, the “newly formed mythologies” serve a multiply-articulated approach that works against totalizing discourses and binary choices to offer instead “a palimpsest containing the traces of multiple views” of African identity and laying bare the fragmentation of communities in the postcolonial era.
In the fifth and final chapter, Krishnan probes the status of global African literature, showing how its “aesthetic universality” is in fact rooted in particular contexts and often defined from the exclusive standpoint of Euro-American systems of literary value and distribution. In this context, Krishnan sheds light on the ability of literary texts to resist appropriation and combine perspectives of representation with a sense of anxiety inherent to writing Africa. Krishnan moves then to discuss Francis B. Nyamnjoh’s The Disillusioned African (1995), G. A. Agambila’s Journey (2006), and Valerie Tagwira’s The Uncertainty of Hope (2006), three locally published texts that offer alternative and creative strategies as a response to universalized discourses. The Africa pictured in these texts is freed from the clutches of a normative global order and connected instead with a form of modernity embedded in local and material realities.
The merit of Krishnan’s book lies in its praiseworthy attempt at pushing critical reading away from normative and one-dimensional interpretations toward “a consistently dynamic negotiation and re-imagination of meaning.” This attempt, however, is confronted with the persistent sense of unease that surrounds African literature and the material subjection of African writing to external mediation, which the author acknowledges in her conclusion. Beyond the ongoing debates about what it should mean to write Africa, Krishnan’s final call to open up the continent to its constitutive plurality is in fact directed at authors, readers, and scholars alike. The remaining question is whether this plurality can be effectively rooted in the intercultural, multilingual, and transnational dynamics of African writing, while resisting dominant modes of representing and reading Africa in both local and global contexts.
