AFROPOLITANISM AND THE NOVEL: DE-REALIZING AFRICA

The place of the novel as a literary form in Africa is contested. Its colonial origins and its unaffordable for most Africans make it a bad fit for the continent, yet it was also central to the creation of most postcolonial African National literary canons. These bipolar traditions remain unresolved in recent debates about afropolitanism and the novel in Africa today. This book extends this debate, arguing that Africa’s ‘de-realization’ in Global representation and the global economy is reflected in the African novel becoming dominated by afropolitan, rather than African, aesthetics, styles, and forms. Drawing on close readings of a variety of major African novels of the 2000s, the volume traces the tensions between the novella complicity with and resistance to such self-realization