This essay examines the recent rise in popularity of science fiction in Africa. I argue that this growth can be traced to key shifts within the logic of structural adjustment programs. Over the last twenty years, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have begun to place a heightened emphasis on “poverty reduction strategies” (or PRSs). These PRSs have taken the two organizations’ longstanding commitment to free-market policies and adapted them to the rhetoric of social and economic justice by suggesting that “sustainable” welfare programs can only be constructed through the “long-term” benefits of well-planned “institutions.”

As I show, this vision of long-term development has encouraged a move toward fictional forms capable of speaking to elongated temporal scales. Using Nnedi Okorafor’s novel Lagoon as my primary example, I investigate how sci-fi narratives have struggled to represent social agency within the longue durée of institutional planning.

Over the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, colonial observers repeatedly recorded Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices in the French Caribbean. “Ritual Observances” charts four such records; the 1698 journal of Jean Baptiste Labat, trial records from 1784, Moreau de-Saint Merie’s 1794 Description Topographique, and Drouin De Bercy’s De Saint Domingue. Although these records span distinct historical periods and textual mediums, they all employ a set of recognizable forms to express the convergence of disgust and desire that have historically attended colonial observations of Afro-Caribbean agency. I argue, however, that the significance of this ambivalence is constitutive of the historical moment in which it appears and that these observations are connected by more than a “shared” ambivalence. Instead, we might categorize these records as themselves ritualistic. The term ritual observance gestures to the act of observing a ritual, but also the way in which the observation is itself ritualistic. The repeated and sequential forms, or “actions” as I term them, of the ritual observance work to inscribe a legible history over the turbulence of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French colonialism.

This essay on genres acknowledges the constructed nature of the fluid classifications that form around recognized and recognizable types of creative work. Some systems of classification owe their recognition to powerful cultural intermediaries. Others, often located in the realm of popular culture, emerge without input from cultural intermediaries. As constructed groupings of works, genres matter for their ability to generate distinct circuits of transmission that allow for a specific type of encounter with the work and a type of response to the work.

“Yes, but . . .” subscribes fully to the arguments on the basis of which Tejumola Olaniyan refutes the often unspoken axioms such as the “corporeal” test by which what counts as genuinely “African” in African literary scholarship is determined. In those arguments, which appear in “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense” (PLI 3.3 [2016]: 387–96), he outlines very explicitly the views about the objects of study, methodologies, and critical theories that have implicitly guided the most powerful scholarship on African literature at least since the 1990s. It expresses some concern, however, that, in calling for a reformation of the “ideological test” that appears to tether African Marxist criticism to the critic’s identity, Olaniyan may have inadvertently left open a back door through which the corporeal axiom could sneak back into African literary criticism. To preempt this, it questions the narrative of globalization on the basis of which he posits the category of the “Post-Global Age.” More specifically, it argues that the temporal scheme represented in the “post” in the “post-global” on which his understanding of globalization rests is flawed. Finally, substituting “late capitalism” for globalization, it argues that “If what late capitalism/globalization longs for is to render capitalism as ineluctable ‘as fate,’ then African literary criticism is obliged ‘to consider the possibility that, to the question, “Are “post,” “trans,” and globalist/neo-universalist propositions now (more than ever) definitionally viable for African literature’ ” that Olaniyan poses, “the answer could be a qualified interrogative rather than a simple affirmative: ‘Yes, but . . . ?’ not ‘Yes.’ ”

This article discusses Tejumola Olaniyan’s submissions in his essay “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense” by problematizing some of his submissions on the temporalities, especially the global and the post-global, that have inflected the field of African literary discourse since the second half of the twentieth century. In doing this, the essay queries the idea that the category of the nation-state has been exhausted or overwhelmed by the global and the post-global. The essay suggests instead that the nation-state has been retooled and rearmed by a nascent temporality, the post-truth, in ways that have significant consequences for African literatures.

This essay is a brief response to Tejumola Olaniyan’s article titled “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense.” Taking up the concept of the “post-global” advanced in Olaniyan’s article, this essay argues for the continued relevance of the concept of postcoloniality as it emerged in literary and cultural criticism in the 1990s.

In response to Olaniyan’s article “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense,” this paper suggests that Olaniyan’s conception of the “planetary” provides a metaphor for imagining a politics of responsibility in the post-global and anti-globalization age. The urgency for planetary thinking is framed within the current ascendancy of big man or “oga” politics represented by the rise of neoliberal populism around the world and in Huntingtonian “clash of civilizations” logic espoused by both elite nativists such as Donald Trump and grassroots ethnonationalists such as Boko Haram. The paper suggests that African studies continues to play a crucial and increasingly urgent role in amplifying, translating, and supporting various African ways of being and knowing that have long served as critiques of the disenfranchisement of those in global south.

Twenty-first-century African literary production has generated a number of conundrums for scholars invested in African literary studies as one recognizable field of study. Some of these conundrums drive Tejumola Olaniyan’s declaration of a post-global condition in African literary studies in “African Literature in the Post-Global Age.” Understanding that essay demands a detour through an intellectual history of African literary studies from about 1990 to 2010.

In “African Literature in the Post-Global Age” Tejumola Olaniyan is to be found asking: Where is the world at—and Africa with it? And for Olaniyan, the contemporary world is most ideally mapped as “post-global.” The purview of the post-global—its “field commonsense”—yields a world of humanity beyond the boundaries of nation, race, and territory, joined in commonalities of global need and planetary responsibility. What are the implications of the world thus known for Africanist literary practice? Can it rightly continue to be a particularist practice dedicated in restricted humanist service to Africa known in racialist, nationalist, and nativist particularity? Or ought Africanist practice to direct its humanism expansively to the service of a world in transnational and cosmopolitan linkage? Olaniyan wants Africanist literary practice to be post-global—and therefore universalist. But is Africanist literary practice well served in discarding the particular? This essay is guided in answer by Aimé Césaire’s caveat: “There are two ways to lose oneself: by segregation in the particular or by dilution in the universal.”