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.

This article discusses Tejumola Olaniyan’s submissions in his essay “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense” by problematizing some of his submissions on the temporalities, especially the global and the post-global, that have inflected the field of African literary discourse since the second half of the twentieth century. In doing this, the essay queries the idea that the category of the nation-state has been exhausted or overwhelmed by the global and the post-global. The essay suggests instead that the nation-state has been retooled and rearmed by a nascent temporality, the post-truth, in ways that have significant consequences for African literatures.

A response to my interlocutors and a reaffirmation, through a consideration of the place of Africa in the modern world, of the post-global as a productive reading frame.

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.”

In response to Olaniyan’s article “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense,” this paper suggests that Olaniyan’s conception of the “planetary” provides a metaphor for imagining a politics of responsibility in the post-global and anti-globalization age. The urgency for planetary thinking is framed within the current ascendancy of big man or “oga” politics represented by the rise of neoliberal populism around the world and in Huntingtonian “clash of civilizations” logic espoused by both elite nativists such as Donald Trump and grassroots ethnonationalists such as Boko Haram. The paper suggests that African studies continues to play a crucial and increasingly urgent role in amplifying, translating, and supporting various African ways of being and knowing that have long served as critiques of the disenfranchisement of those in global south.

“Yes, but . . .” subscribes fully to the arguments on the basis of which Tejumola Olaniyan refutes the often unspoken axioms such as the “corporeal” test by which what counts as genuinely “African” in African literary scholarship is determined. In those arguments, which appear in “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense” (PLI 3.3 [2016]: 387–96), he outlines very explicitly the views about the objects of study, methodologies, and critical theories that have implicitly guided the most powerful scholarship on African literature at least since the 1990s. It expresses some concern, however, that, in calling for a reformation of the “ideological test” that appears to tether African Marxist criticism to the critic’s identity, Olaniyan may have inadvertently left open a back door through which the corporeal axiom could sneak back into African literary criticism. To preempt this, it questions the narrative of globalization on the basis of which he posits the category of the “Post-Global Age.” More specifically, it argues that the temporal scheme represented in the “post” in the “post-global” on which his understanding of globalization rests is flawed. Finally, substituting “late capitalism” for globalization, it argues that “If what late capitalism/globalization longs for is to render capitalism as ineluctable ‘as fate,’ then African literary criticism is obliged ‘to consider the possibility that, to the question, “Are “post,” “trans,” and globalist/neo-universalist propositions now (more than ever) definitionally viable for African literature’ ” that Olaniyan poses, “the answer could be a qualified interrogative rather than a simple affirmative: ‘Yes, but . . . ?’ not ‘Yes.’ ”

An exploration of African literary studies and what might be its most salient and informed tools of self-constitution and self-understanding in the contemporary moment. More than half a century after formal literary studies emerged in Africa, much of the field is still fixated with a deep suspicion of the true provenance of its own production. The paper theoretically distills some of the expressed or implied evaluative canons of belonging, explores their methods of application, and critically assesses their contemporary relevance—or even resonance. The goal is to arrive at what might be a most enabling conception of African letters for an age I conceive as “post-global.”