Conclusion: Local Aesthetics

Summary

The general mode for the postcolonial is citation, reinscription, rerouting the historical.

(Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, cited in Gikandi 2012: 309)

Black counter-historical projects … have never been able to install themselves as history, but rather are insurgent, disruptive narratives that are marginalized and derailed before they ever gain a footing.

(Saidiya Hartman, cited in McCorkle 2020: 132)

For many people caught in the vortex of colonialism and what comes after, the main indexes of time are the contingent, the ephemeral, the fugitive, and the fortuitous.

(Achille Mbembe, cited in Daly 2020: 6)

In an article published in The New York Times in 2014, the creative writer and journalist Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani highlighted the centripetal power of Western literary markets and their distorting effect on local literary cultures. ‘Some of the greatest African writers of my generation may never be discovered’, she wrote, ‘either because they will not reach across the Atlantic Ocean to attract the attention of an agent or publisher, or because they have not yet mastered the art of deciphering Western tastes’ (NYT 28 November 2014). As Nwaubani's ironic tone indicates, the celebration of African literary ‘discoveries’ in the West contributes to the naturalisation of uneven global economic and cultural power relations: the identification of greatness by Western literary agents and publishers propagates Eurocentric categories of discernment circulating around literary markets in the Global North. However, she also indicates that an abundance of great literary works circulates locally outside Western centres of taste and recognition.

This book has sought to show how anglophone literary tastes were negotiated in colonial West Africa within local print cultures that occupied distinctive times, political spaces, literary logics and relationships with international English-language genres. Literary tastes in West Africa were shaped by educated elites throughout the colonial period in the context of British colonial power. Led by educated local intellectuals for whom the printing press provided an ideal vehicle for the expression of individual and collective opinions, newsprint writing involved agreements and disagreements within and between diverse publics, the exercise of cultural power, persuasion and exclusion as well as public displays of rules about what readers ought or ought not to derive from print. As I hope to have shown, studying these past literary processes yields fascinating details about the negotiation of local aesthetic principles as part of new class formations in the colonial and immediate postcolonial periods.