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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2017
Twenty-first-century African literary production has generated a number of conundrums for scholars invested in African literary studies as one recognizable field of study. Some of these conundrums drive Tejumola Olaniyan’s declaration of a post-global condition in African literary studies in “African Literature in the Post-Global Age.” Understanding that essay demands a detour through an intellectual history of African literary studies from about 1990 to 2010.
1 Olaniyan, Tejumola and Quayson, Ato, “Introduction,” African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, eds. Tejumola Olaniyan and Ato Quayson (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 1–3 Google Scholar, esp. 1.
2 López, Alfred J., “ ‘Everybody else just living their lives’: 9/11, Race and the New Postglobal Literature,” Patterns of Prejudice 42.4–5 (2008): 509–529 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Krishnan, Sanjay, Reading the Global: Troubling Perspectives on Britain’s Empire in Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 1 Google Scholar.
4 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.
5 Olaniyan, Tejumola, “African Writers, Exile, and the Politics of a Global Diaspora,” West Africa Review 4.1 (2003): 1–8 Google Scholar, esp. 5–6.
6 This was in response to Kwaku Korang’s demands for new “expansive and transitive” definitions of African literature. See Olaniyan, “African Literature in the Post-Global Age,” 387.
7 Olaniyan and Quayson, “Introduction,” 3.
8 The debate on literary sophistication is a thorny issue, which Olaniyan addresses elsewhere. I think Olaniyan is much more direct in his recollections of the thirtieth ALA convention in Wisconsin-Madison at which he organized a seminar titled “On Theory.” See Tejumola Olaniyan, “Introductory Comments: Ato Quayson’s Calibrations: Reading for the Social,” Research in African Literatures 36.2 (Summer 2005): 95–96.
9 Olaniyan, Tejumola, “Thinking Afro-Futures: A Preamble to an Epistemic History,” South Atlantic Quarterly 108.3 (2009): 449–457 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 456.
10 David Scott, “Prologue,” Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 1–22.
11 Olaniyan, Tejumola, “Political Critique and Resistance in African Fiction,” Teaching the African Novel, ed. Gaurav Desai (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009), 70–86 Google Scholar, esp. 84.
12 For an elaboration of the now historical affiliations between African and African American literary studies, see the introduction by Gates. Gates, Henry Louis Jr., “Introduction: ‘Tell Me, Sir, . . . What Is ‘Black’ Literature?’ ” PLMA 105.1 (1990): 11–22 Google Scholar.
13 For a very different account of an encounter between Gayatri Spivak and a scholar of African literary studies, see Tejumola Olaniyan, “African Cultural Studies: Of Travels, Accents, and Epistemologies,” Rethinking African Cultural Production, eds. Kenneth W. Harrow and Frieda Ekotto (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 94–108, esp. 95.
14 See Adams, Anne V. and Mayes, Janis Alene, eds., Mapping Intersections: African Literature and Africa’s Development, Vol. 2 (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1998), 212 Google Scholar. See also Dorothy Randall-Tsuruta, “In Dialogue to Define Aesthetics: James Baldwin and Chinua Achebe,” Conversations with James Baldwin (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1989): 210–21;
Schwarz, Bill, “After Decolonization, After Civil Rights: Chinua Achebe and James Baldwin,” James Baldwin Review 1 (2015): 41–66 Google Scholar; Achebe, Chinua, “The Day I Finally Met Baldwin,” Callaloo 25.2 (2002): 502–504 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
15 See Hanchard, Michael George, “Black Transnationalism, Africana Studies, and the 21st Century,” Journal of Black Studies 35.2 (2004): 139–153 Google Scholar.
16 See especially Olaniyan, Tejumola, “Economies of the Interstice,” Problematizing Blackness: Self-Ethnographies by Black Immigrants to the United States (2003): 53–64 Google Scholar. See also
Ọláníyan, Tejúmólá, “Contingencies of Performance: The Gap as Venue,” Theatre Survey 50.01 (2009): 23–34 Google Scholar; Olaniyan, Tejumola, “African Cultural Studies: Of Travels, Accents, and Epistemologies,” Rethinking African Cultural Production, eds. Kenneth W. Harrow and Frieda Ekotto (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015), 94–108 Google Scholar.
17 See Olaniyan, Tejumola, “Economies of the Interstice,” 53–64 Google Scholar.
18 Olaniyan, “Economies of the Interstice,” 62–63.
19 Olaniyan, “African Literature in the Post-Global Age,” 391.
20 Olaniyan, “African Cultural Studies,” 95.
21 Olaniyan, “African Cultural Studies,” 104.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., 105.
24 I cite the PMLA because of my reference to the 1990 special issue. See especially the essays by Akin Adesokan, Grace Musila, Susan Kiguli, Terri Ochiaga, Meg Samuelson, and Godwin Siundu.
25 As examples, see Strauhs, Doreen, African Literary NGOs: Power, Politics, and Participation (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2013)Google Scholar; Krishan, Madhu, Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Crowley, Dustin, Africa’s Narrative Geographies: Charting the Intersections of Geocriticism and Postcolonial Studies (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2015)Google Scholar.