Building on the work of Third World approaches to international law (TWAIL) scholars, this essay considers the limitations of international law (and the human rights legal framework more specifically) in addressing slavery, and the ways in which contemporary global fiction puts pressure on normative legal and literary conceptions of slavery and freedom. The essay begins with an examination of how slavery and the slave narrative take shape in the context of international law that is rooted in colonial encounters and predicated on the differential recognition of humanity. That analysis leads to investigation of how normative twentieth century human rights law delimits the concepts of slavery and freedom. In its final section, the essay how several contemporary global fictions challenge the familiar, generic logic of the slave narrative and, with it, human rights imaginaries of freedom.

This essay explores how the African novel has confronted the problem of nation and nationalism. While Europe had centuries to adapt to the centrifugal processes of nation formation, Africa had no such luxury of time. The work of nationhood in Africa was a shock imposition, and this shock was captured by African writers in and as storytelling of fragmentation, disruption, and the eventual dissociation of the protagonists from the project of national and individual psychological development. African writers’ turn to the interior – in novels, epics, or praise-songs – was, in fact, a political gesture. Bringing into discussion writers from René Maran to Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ousmane Sembène, Chinua Achebe, and Amos Tutuola to Ahmadou Kourouma, Maryse Condé, as well as writers associated with the Afropolitan like Chris Abani, Taiye Selasi, and NoViolet Bulawayo, this chapter demonstrates how twentieth-century African literature fought to find the space in which the complex dialectic engagement between the individual psyche and the world can be staged and reimagined.