15 - The critical reception of the African novel

Summary

From the mass of critical responses to the African novel, it is possible to identify a set of recurrent themes and ideas that have come to dominate the field of reception and to feature in one form or the other in the responses of critics and commentators. In this chapter, therefore, I intend to give systematic attention to these themes to emphasize the critical labor involved in the emergence of the African novel as an object of critical inquiry and to highlight the construction, through its reception, of a field of knowledge production organized around particular issue domains. I will attempt to do this by focusing on patterns of critical and conceptual engagement that recur again and again in various readings of the African novel. This approach, I believe, has the advantage of emphasizing the fact that the critical reception of the African novel has led to the construction of a field of knowledge in which the conventional terms of novelistic discourse are reconceptualized and reconfigured in relation to other (African) forms and traditions of verbal expression and other (African) social and historical contexts, which generate different questions and thus call for different grammars of discourse. / Changing terrains, conditioning reception / To begin with a gross generalization, the critical reception of the African novel has turned overwhelmingly on the question of “Africanness” and the novelistic form. Africanness as defined here spans the entire spectrum from the representation of African worlds, through the representation of African subjects or forms of subjectivity, to the representation of African epistemologies, narrative traditions, and modes of verbal expression.