Alexander Fyfe – författare

How African literary forms imagine ways of living and being within coloniality Writing the Noncolonial Self suggests a new way of thinking about the connections between politics, subjectivity, and literary practice. In this groundbreaking study, Alexander Fyfe reveals how African writers have used literary forms to reimagine subjectivity in new terms, a category of practices he calls the "noncolonial." Examining the work of a diverse set of practitioners such as Bessie Head, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, and Akwaeke Emezi, Fyfe shows how African literature has taken on the challenge of rethinking the self in ways that exceed constructions of the subject, eschewing intelligibility under regimes of coloniality in favor of an investment in its own capacity to articulate alternative ways of being. Intervening in key debates in African literary studies, Writing the Noncolonial Self makes a case for the literary as an essential kind of noncolonial practice, one that at every moment rethinks its own horizons of possibility.

How African literary forms imagine ways of living and being within coloniality Writing the Noncolonial Self suggests a new way of thinking about the connections between politics, subjectivity, and literary practice. In this groundbreaking study, Alexander Fyfe reveals how African writers have used literary forms to reimagine subjectivity in new terms, a category of practices he calls the "noncolonial." Examining the work of a diverse set of practitioners such as Bessie Head, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, and Akwaeke Emezi, Fyfe shows how African literature has taken on the challenge of rethinking the self in ways that exceed constructions of the subject, eschewing intelligibility under regimes of coloniality in favor of an investment in its own capacity to articulate alternative ways of being. Intervening in key debates in African literary studies, Writing the Noncolonial Self makes a case for the literary as an essential kind of noncolonial practice, one that at every moment rethinks its own horizons of possibility.

The enormous success of writers such as Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie demonstrates that African literatures are now an international phenomenon. But the apparent global legibility of a small number of (mostly Anglophone) writers in the diaspora raises the question of how literary producers from the continent, both past and present, have situated their work in relation to the world and the kinds of material networks to which this corresponds. This collection shows how literatures from across the African continent engage with conceptualizations of 'the world' in relation to local social and political issues. Focusing on a wide variety of geographic, historical and linguistic contexts, the essays in this volume seek answers to the following questions: What are the topographies of 'the world' in different literary texts and traditions? What are that world’s limits, boundaries and possibilities? How do literary modes and forms such as realism, narrative poetry or the political essay affect the presentation of worldliness? What are the material networks of circulation that allow African literatures to become world literature? African literatures, it emerges, do important theoretical work that speaks to the very core of world literary studies today.