Black on Black: (In)Visibility in African Literary Heterotopias
In The African Image, Es'kia Mphahlele wonders "What is the African's literary image of himself?," a question he answers when he observes that "Africa is still the African's burden," therefore underlining the connection between the concerns of Africans and their literatures. Femi Osofisan, arguing that African authors cannot but be inspired by the very issues (famine, war, etc.) that today represent Africa's distinctive traits, contends that such issues should remain a priority of African literature. If the presence of "hypervisible topics" in world media does not imply a real visibility of Africa on the global political scene, those topics, however, remain at the core of its history. Does this condemn Africa to be portrayed as the sum of its problems? Does the literary discussion of African priorities necessarily lead to enforcing the stereotype of Africa? This paper will discuss how African literary "heterotopias"—Femi Osofisan's Kolera Kolej, Buchi Emecheta's The Rape of Shavi, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow—deal with both the positive and negative stereotypes of Africa, consciously employing them to construct a political and representational counter-discourse.
East and Central Africa
In line with increasing scholarly interest in the landscapes of postcolonial literary production and the politics of literary awards, perhaps a good place to start introducing this year’s list is with a growing body of work that traces the dynamics and institutions involved in East/African literary production. 2013 saw the publication of Caroline Davis’ Creating Postcolonial Literature: African Writers and British Publishers and Doreen Strauhs’ African Literary NGOs: Power, Politics, and Participation [see General Studies: Regional]. Read alongside each other, the two studies offer a fascinating vantage point from which to view both the histories of literary publishing in East Africa and present developments in the region. Davis’ book features an excellent exploration of the history of Oxford University Press in Africa (including a chapter on its East African branch), of the strategic ways in which OUP navigated both the commercial and cultural imperatives that framed its presence in colonial East Africa, and, most intriguingly, of how it profiled itself to ensure an ongoing presence in post-independent African states. Davis traces the ‘hand-in-glove’ relationship between the British Colonial Office across Africa and British publishers in the early twentieth century, illustrating how publishing supported British imperialism across Africa, due to a shared investment in the Englishlanguage teaching agenda, for different reasons: for OUP, this meant a lucrative market for educational publishing while serving the British imperial civilising mission and its emphasis on education. What remains remarkable though, is how OUP managed to retain its strong presence in post-independence Africa, a feat which, for Davis, was made possible by, among other factors, OUP’s self-presentation as a charitable supporter of African literature and scholarship, and not a commercial institution. On her part, Doreen Strauhs offers an engaging portrait of African literary NGOs, chief among these Kwani Trust in Kenya and FEMRITE in Uganda. Given the centrality of these two literary NGOs in the region’s literary landscape, Strauhs’ study is a welcome opportunity not only to trace the transnational networks that have mediated literary production in the region for more than six decades, but also to make sense of the complex range of institutions, social capital, patronage networks and innovative collaborative initiatives that facilitate local publishing platforms. In her attentive reading of the two landmark literary NGOs, Strauhs excavates the complex layers of East African literary histories by tracing 553749 JCL0010.1177/0021989414553749The Journal of Commonwealth LiteratureEast and Central Africa research-article2014
Browning's Lyric Intentions
No poet was ever more fascinated by intentions than Browning, or more willing to insist upon their significance. In Sordello (1840), in his prose essays on Chatterton (1842) and Shelley (1852),' and elsewhere, Browning asserts that what a poet writes is less than what he means; that realization betrays impulse; that form even at its best expresses purpose inadequately.2 Criticism written in recent decades, in its just recoil from superficial assessments of poetic intentionality like those issued by the Browning Societies, has been ill at ease with those who would champion intentions. Criticism has not been slow to draw from Browning's assertions the conclusion that he so prized the poem-as-intention that he disdained the poem-as-artifact; nor has it been slow to disdain him in