This article reflects on some textual and institutional elements that distinguish literary life in Portuguese-speaking African countries. These elements concern, firstly, the peculiarities of the Portuguese empire. Combining precarity, epistemological backwardness, and violence in equal proportion, it inspired an artistic response that was consolidated even before the independences. Secondly, they relate to the type of decolonization produced in these territories. Contrary to the majority of other African contexts, their independence was not negotiated, but conquered through armed struggle. Thirdly, there are the thematic and formal aspects: the “animal,” the “dead,” and an internationalist geographical imaginary play a structuring role in the literary fields. Thus, this article demonstrates how these contexts, unique to African literatures, can also offer new data for the analysis of cultural goods in the twenty-first century.

Situated within contemporary studies of Cormac McCarthy’s work, this article argues that existing discourse around Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian suffers from a lack of critical engagement with the novel’s racial and colonial politics. Using racial capitalism as a framework, the article posits that McCarthy’s novel can be read not only as a story about American storytelling traditions, but how these traditions are themselves contingent on the reproduction and reification of white supremacy. This rereading of Blood Meridian additionally takes into account how the novel’s narrativization of white supremacy and settler colonialism manifests in both the novel’s form and content, arguing that the novel stages encounters with blackness and Indigeneity to mimic the mechanisms through which white supremacy was (violently) produced.

The article provides an analysis of the spatial configuration of the Hindi novel Naukar kī kamīz by Vinod Kumar Shukla (translated into English as The Servant’s Shirt). In highlighting the argumentative and structural similarities between the content of the novel and various concepts of social space and literary spatiality developed by Catherine Régulier, Henri Lefebrve, Edward Soja, Mikhail Bakhtin, and others, the article proposes to read the novel not only as a rare example of a detailed engagement with the social space of a postcolonial small town, but also as a text that provides a useful method and indeed a theory for the analysis of such a small town and its literary representation.

This article theorizes the Zimbabwean writer Stanlake Samkange’s turn from the novel to philosophy as an effort to circumvent the representational pressure exerted by African cultural traumatization. In breaking with the novel form to coauthor a philosophical treatise called Hunhuism or Ubuntuism in the same year as Zimbabwe achieves independence (1980), Samkange advances a comportment-based, deontological alternative to the psychic or subjective model of personhood that anchors trauma theory. Revisiting the progression from his most achieved novel, The Mourned One, to Hunhuism or Ubuntuism thus offers fresh insight into the range of options available to independence-era writers for representing the relationship between African individuality and collectivity. At the same time, it suggests a complementary and overlooked relationship between novelistic and philosophical forms in an African context.

My argument in the two-part essay focuses on the dilemma of nahḍah as an unfinished mission; a transition as Țāhā Ḥusayn calls it. I join many scholars who are trying to see through its problematic nature, but I see it also in relation to the immediate past with which it has maintained an uneasy relationship. The recent premodern or medieval past, I argue, could have been read and approached differently to build up a better link with the masses that the nahḍah intellectual bypasses or disparages. The past as a significant period of constellations and knowledge construction could have helped the search for new paths that could also accommodate European knowledge. Other models, alluded to by my insightful respondents and interlocutors, confirm the validity of this proposal, despite the fact that the medieval Islamic republic of letters—as a blanket term for multidimensional efforts—offers more venues in knowledge construction that challenge Casanova’s one single model.

This essay on postcolonialism, genre, and Africa will jump scales (in its own version of geo-aesthetic impossibility). The general idea is not to think generic incommensurability as necessarily disabling, but rather that the ill-fitting tropes of genre identification are productively engaged in a politics of non-conformance, here elaborated as a logic of counter-fitting. Counter-fitting, what does not fit generic expectation, is not counterfeiting as false but is a politics of aesthetics in which generic authenticity is put into question by the very unevenness of cultural contact and expression. Like the counterfeit, however, the counter-fit reveals something of the logic of exchange in the circulation of genres while also calling into question the attachment to a pure representation. Drawing on this interpretation of the counterfeit, counter-fitting is less a “paradigm of difference,” to borrow from V. Y. Mudimbe, but rather focuses attention on how such a material production of otherness is problematized at the level of genre. Some examples drawn from Algerian fiction will help to clarify this approach.

The garden is often regarded as a feminine space of withdrawal. By contrast, this essay examines how Jamaica Kincaid envisions the garden not as a retreat from the world but as an opportunity to delve into the colonial histories of plants. Kincaid traces the twinned histories of botany and empire, highlighting how the botanic garden served as a laboratory for the development of plantation crops and therefore played a pivotal role in imperial and capitalist expansion. I concentrate on Kincaid’s use of ekphrasis, which reveals the many aesthetic, scientific, and colonial discourses that construct the garden as a both discursive and material space. Kincaid’s ekphrastic prose produces an effect of “overterritorialization,” in which loco-descriptive details do not provide the reader with a sense of place; rather, the overabundance of details overwhelms and even unsettles the reader. Kincaid’s garden writing thus shows us an alternative model of reading postcolonial environmental literature.

The African liberation movements and the early phases of nation-building on the continent, intertwined with the Cold War and the global student movement, left behind an array of textual, visual, and sonic traces that circulated through underground and clandestine networks across Africa and beyond. These cultural products, which include materials in African languages, remain marginalized in studies of African history and arts. This article posits the cultural underground of decolonization in Africa as a productive category for historical and literary inquiry and argues that exploring the literary and aesthetic aspects of this archive offers other ways of knowing and temporal epistemes important for the reconsideration of aesthetics, politics, and histories in and of Africa. I explore poems and songs from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, and Senegal to show how they provide avenues for a renewed engagement with decolonization and revolution.

The three reflections joined together in this essay develop a notion of “the sociality of secularism”—a phrase that gestures to how secularism structures the social field, becoming an intimate part of the practice of self for subjects who are always inextricably intertwined with others in a network of connectedness that is central to what it means to be worldly. The first reflection, by following the English word priestcraft to colonial India, delineates a mode of Enlightenment focused on persons not ideas. The second asks how the secularist division between the public and the private relegated religion to the feminized domestic sphere. The third argues that postcolonial ethics has, from its inception, presented the self as inherently social. A substantial conclusion unites these threads by asking how religio-political writing from colonial India can reframe contemporary debates about the place of the “free” subject in the global political order.

This article is part of a special forum on Pooja Rangan’s award-winning monograph Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary (Duke University Press, 2017).

This article examines postcolonial representations of the jungle and the desert, focusing on two novels in particular: Étienne Goyémidé’s Le silence de la forêt (1984) and Tahar Djaout’s L’invention du désert (1987). Postcolonial literary representations of these “extreme” landscapes are layered with allusions and almost always engage in an intertextual conversation with the colonial genres that influenced readers’ conception of these spaces. The specificity of jungle and desert serves in contemporary postcolonial literature as a foil to homogenizing forces of both the past and the present, as seen in the stylistic techniques authors employ to depict these spaces. These stylistic techniques often work in two seemingly opposing directions: they “naturalize” landscapes that are often portrayed as inhuman and contrast them to the “unnatural” structures of colonial and postcolonial society, while at the same time embodying and claiming the distortion or disorientation inherent in those landscapes. These complex, multifaceted, geographically rooted descriptions, which incorporate and react to a variety of historical and cultural factors, take what I call an ecosystem approach, rather than continuing to rely on a false nature/culture division.

In 1914, an epidemic of bubonic plague ravaged colonial Dakar. The panicked French colonial administration blamed the native population and evicted indigenous Africans from the city center before burning their homes. The Dakarois fought back through a general strike, political maneuvering, and, finally, by taking to the streets. Out of this year of disease, politics, racism, and resistance came the new, segregated neighborhood of Médina, which was created to house the displaced African population of Dakar. Over the twentieth century, as Dakar swelled into a metropolis around it, Médina was a unique space in the Senegalese capital—a hotbed of cultural creativity, a crossroads for waves of migrants, and a potent and enduring contrast with the nearby downtown, known as the Plateau. This article explores the ways in which the plague of 1914 reshaped Dakar and left a lasting impression on a century of Senegalese cultural production.

The South African Constitution is widely regarded as one of the world’s most progressive, and this essays looks to a series of novels concerned with the nation’s transition beyond apartheid in order to examine the challenges of transformative constitutionalism. Through readings of Nadine Gordimer’s None to Accompany Me, Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying, and Ivan Vladislavic’s The Folly,1 it explores the prevalence of the language and imagery of architecture in describing national rebuilding and South African constitutional jurisprudence alike. The essay ultimately argues, however, that the architectural metaphor casts post-apartheid recovery as a success story that belies political and economic reality.