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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2017
In “African Literature in the Post-Global Age” Tejumola Olaniyan is to be found asking: Where is the world at—and Africa with it? And for Olaniyan, the contemporary world is most ideally mapped as “post-global.” The purview of the post-global—its “field commonsense”—yields a world of humanity beyond the boundaries of nation, race, and territory, joined in commonalities of global need and planetary responsibility. What are the implications of the world thus known for Africanist literary practice? Can it rightly continue to be a particularist practice dedicated in restricted humanist service to Africa known in racialist, nationalist, and nativist particularity? Or ought Africanist practice to direct its humanism expansively to the service of a world in transnational and cosmopolitan linkage? Olaniyan wants Africanist literary practice to be post-global—and therefore universalist. But is Africanist literary practice well served in discarding the particular? This essay is guided in answer by Aimé Césaire’s caveat: “There are two ways to lose oneself: by segregation in the particular or by dilution in the universal.”
1 Achebe, Chinua, Arrow of God 2e (Oxford: Heinemann, 1986), 46 Google Scholar.
2 Olaniyan, Tejumola, “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3.3 (2016): 387–396 Google Scholar.
3 Ibid., 387.
4 Ibid, 387.
5 On cognitive mapping, see Jameson, Frederic, “Cognitive Mapping,” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 347–360 Google Scholar.
6 Ibid., 389.
7 Bulawayo, NoViolet, We Need New Names (New York: Little, Brown, 2013)Google Scholar.
8 Olaniyan, 391.
9 Ibid., 389.
10 Ibid., 389.
11 Ibid., 389.
12 Ibid., 390.
13 Ibid., 391.
14 Ibid., 392.
15 Ibid., 390.
16 Ibid., 392.
17 Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1968), 50 Google Scholar.
18 Olaniyan, 392.
19 Ibid., 393.
20 Ibid., 393; emphasis added.
21 Ibid., 393.
22 Ibid., 394.
23 Ibid., 394; emphasis in original.
24 Ibid., 394.
25 Ibid., 394.
26 Ibid., 393.
27 Ibid., 395.
28 Ibid., 396.
29 Ibid., 395.
30 Ibid., 395.
31 https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch07.htm. Accessed on April 17, 2017.
32 Césaire is quoted in Christopher Miller, Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 24 Google Scholar; emphasis added.
33 Minow, Martha, Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 20 Google Scholar; emphasis added.
34 http://www.myjoyonline.com/news/2017/April-9th/learn-genocide-lessons-ghana-govt-told-as-rwanda-marks-23rd-anniversary.php, accessed April 9, 2017; emphasis added.
35 Jeyifo, Biodun, “Literature in Postcolonial Africa: Repression, Resistance, Reconfigurations,” Dissent (Summer 1992): 356 Google Scholar.
36 Olaniyan, 392.
37 Gikandi, Simon, “Literature and Moral Considerations,” Research in African Literatures, 32.4 (2001): 16–17 Google Scholar.