| My dissertation examines the historical basis and theoretical validity of African literature. It turns out V. Y. Mudimbe's counterintuitive contention that African literature, ostensibly an authentic creative and critical practice, relies on the colonial library for its legitimation and is therefore not "African." Mudimbe calls for the generation of explicative norms as to the real nature of African literature that will put it into some sort of relationship with other literary discourses without creating the impression that African literature is but an indigenized imitation of the so called Western tradition.;My project accepts and attempts to defend Mudimbe's provocative hypothesis. What does contemporary literary criticism of canonical texts amount to if it is not an African practice? Can there be an authentically African literary practice? Finally, I attempt to trace the implications of Mudimbe's hypothesis for the discipline of literary studies as a whole: Is contemporary American criticism American? In short, I trace the connection between the concept of "representation" as the foundational trope in contemporary aesthetic inquiry and the concept of "representation" as the foundational trope in contemporary democratic governmentality, between canonicity and citizenship.;My dissertation hinges on relatively familiar questions concerning literary value: Why, in an age when identity politics has ostensibly been theoretically repudiated, do the canons of English literature everywhere continue to be defined by the continental, national, racial, sexual, gender, and other identities of both authors and readers? More specifically, why does African literature continue to occupy a relatively marginal place in English programs in the West? Why is Africa thought to be the natural home for a limited set of high canonical texts written in historically European languages and aesthetic forms? Why does the value of African literature (in universities both in the metropole and the postcolony) seem to turn on the extent to which that body of writing is thought instrumentally to convey cognitive information about African history, economics, politics, anthropology and, above all, subjectivity? I suggest that high canonical literary objects disclose their authors' vexed relationship with colonial modernity rather than fundamental truths concerning Africa. |
