Commodity Fictions: Consumption and the World of Kenyan Fiction, 1963-2012

"Commodity Fictions" analyzes the entanglement of literature and consumption in Kenya from the immediate postcolonial moment to the present. Informed by recent studies of consumption in Africa, this cross-disciplinary project examines how local debates over consumption's ethical and political stakes have defined the social world in which Kenyan English-language fiction circulates and from which it speaks. The first three chapters examine a representative group of texts by writers from Kenya who were active during the first fifty years of Kenyan independence. Chapter One examines Grace Ogot's depictions of travel to discuss her advocacy of, and eventual loss of faith in, a literary public sphere in which free and open debate would guide social policy and moral behavior. Chapter Two takes up the popular motif of the "typical" Kenyan bar, as represented in selected works by Charles Mangua and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, to show how alcohol focused concerns about the circulation and instrumentalization of narrative during the consolidation of single-party rule. Chapter Three draws parallels between the profusion of consumer goods available in twenty-first-century Kenya and the explosion of literary styles represented by the new Kwani? literary journal, and tracks the journal's investment in the notion of Kenyan literature as a commodity. Chapter Four turns to archival sources for a different angle on the entanglement of narrative and consumption in Kenya, constructing a history of Kenyan bookselling by focusing on one of the most significant African bookstores, Text Book Centre. By focusing on consumption and on Kenya this project interrogates habits of literary study that constrain understanding of how African texts circulate. The research provides balance in the field of global literary studies by examining how the domestic physical spaces in which Kenyan books are circulated and read --- bars and nightclubs, bookstores, sidewalk book vendors, shopping malls, airports, trains, private homes --- influence the acts of reading and interpretation that occur there. Recovering this Kenyan legacy of thinking about entanglement allows these texts to challenge the current wisdom about what it means to "consume" literature, and therefore to help reshape conversations about how African texts produce the world in which they circulate.