Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T08:15:33.377Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Introduction: Genre in Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2017

Abstract

In this introduction to this special issue, “Genre and Africa,” Jaji and Saint theorize genre from the perspective of the African continent to explore how such an orientation necessarily interrogates and transforms previous understandings of genre. After a brief review of pivotal work in genre studies, the authors turn to Africa’s particular colonial and postcolonial predicaments to theorize the specific interventions to genre theory that such a vantage point affords. Interwoven are summaries and commentary upon the six essays included in the issue. The introduction then concludes by highlighting several new directions of genre study occasioned by this issue’s contents, including the rise of new media and renewed interest in the intersections of popular forms and affect studies.

Type
Introduction
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Adejunmobi, Moradewun, “Introduction: Science Fiction,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3.3 (2016): 265272 Google Scholar.

2 Special Topic: Remapping Genre,” PMLA 122.5 (2007)Google Scholar; Levine, Caroline, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015)Google Scholar; Haynes, Jonathan, Nollywood: The Creation of Nigerian Film Genres (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Empson, William, Some Versions of the Pastoral. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1935)Google Scholar; Leavis, F. R., Mass Civilization and Minority Culture. (London: Heffer, 1930)Google Scholar.

4 Mothobi, Mutloatse, Forced Landing: Africa South, Contemporary Writings (Ravan Press, 1980), 5 Google Scholar.

5 Gandhi, Leela, Affective Communities: Anti-Colonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 7 Google Scholar.

6 Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press), 201 Google Scholar.

7 Levine, Forms, 3.

8 Todorov, Tzvetan, “The Origin of Genres,” Modern Genre Theory, ed. David Duff (Harlow, England: Longman, 2000), 193209 Google Scholar.

9 Barber, Karin, The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 44 Google Scholar.

10 Derrida, Jacques, “The Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronell. Critical Inquiry 7.1 (1980): 59 Google Scholar.

11 Wynter, Sylvia, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3.3 (2003): 281 Google Scholar.

12 Ibid., 281.

13 Weheliye, Alexander, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Thought, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

14 Mbembe, Achille, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017)Google Scholar.

15 See also, Gikandi, Simon Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

16 Hitchcock, Peter, “The Genre of Postcoloniality,” New Literary History 34.2 (2003): 299330 Google Scholar.

17 wa Ngugi, Mukoma, Nairobi Heat (New York: Penguin Global, 2009)Google Scholar; Ngugi, Black Star Nairobi (New York: Melville International Crime, 2013)Google Scholar; Bugul, Ken, Rue Félix-Faure (Paris: Éditions Höebeke, 2005)Google Scholar; Abani, Chris, The Secret History of Las Vegas (New York: Penguin, 2014)Google Scholar.

18 Tendai Huchu, in discussion with the author, April 12, 2017; citing The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician: A Novel (London: Parthian, 2015).

19 Obiechina, Emmanuel, An African Popular Literature: A Study of Onitsha Market Pamphlets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973)Google Scholar.

20 Édouard Glissant, Traité du Tout-Monde, Paris, Gallimard, 1997. Cited in translation in by Roxanna Nydia Curto, Inter-Tech(s): Colonialism and the Question of Technology in Francophone Literature (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2016).

21 Ibid., 175.

22 Fabian, Johannes, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014)Google Scholar.