The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing

by Jeanne-Marie Jackson

Overview

An ambitious look at the African novel and its connections to African philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries

The African Novel of Ideas focuses on the role of the philosophical novel and the place of philosophy more broadly in the intellectual life of the African continent, from the early twentieth century to today. Examining works from the Gold Coast, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, and tracing how such writers as J. E. Casely Hayford, Imraan Coovadia, Tendai Huchu, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, and Stanlake Samkange reconcile deep contemplation with their social situations, Jeanne-Marie Jackson offers a new way of reading and understanding African literature.

Jackson begins with Fante anticolonial worldliness in prenationalist Ghana, moves through efforts to systematize Shona philosophy in 1970s Zimbabwe, looks at the Ugandan novel Kintu as a treatise on pluralistic rationality, and arrives at the treatment of “philosophical suicide” by current southern African writers. As Jackson charts philosophy's evolution from a dominant to marginal presence in African literary discourse across the past hundred years, she assesses the push and pull of subjective experience and abstract thought.

The first major transnational exploration of African literature in conversation with philosophy, The African Novel of Ideas redefines the place of the African experience within literary history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691186450
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	01/12/2021
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Jeanne-Marie Jackson is assistant professor of English at Johns Hopkins University and the author of South African Literature’s Russian Soul.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Disaggregating Liberalism 1

Book Structure 19

Chapter Summaries and Conceptual Guide 23

Part I National Horizons 29

Chapter 1 Ethiopia Unbound as Afro-Comparatist Novel: The Case for Liberated Solitude 31

Comparison between the Global and the Decolonial 33

J. E. Casely Hayford and Philosophy as Historical Redemption 49

Flash-Forward: Implications for the Postcolonial Anglo-Fante Novel 60

Chapter 2 Between the House of Stone and a Hard Place: Stanlake Samkange's Philosophical Turn 68

The Public Intellectual in Late Rhodesia 70

The Mourned One and the Search for Replicable Selfhood 79

Hunhuism or Ubuntuism: Philosophy as Way of Life 90

Coda: Samkange's Literary Surrounds 96

Part II Global Recessions 105

Chapter 3 A Forked Path, Forever: Kintu between Reason and Rationality 107

"The Great Ugandan Novel"as Periodizing Device 109

Reading Kintu's Twins: Individuation versus Subjectivization 123

Curses as History in Recent East African Fiction 137

Chapter 4 Bodies Impolitic: African Deaths of Philosophical Suicide 145

Philosophical Suicide as a Conceptual Tool 147

Tendai Huchu's Maestro of Lonely Learning 156

Imraan Coovadia's Measured Thinking 166

Coda: Masande Ntshanga's The Reactive and the Rewards of Self-Affliction 175

Conclusion 180

Epilogue: Speculations on the Future of African Literary Studies 181

Notes 191

Works Cited 199

Index 213

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Jackson’s lucid and stimulating book single-handedly opens up completely new sources to examine what the African novel does and how we might continue to productively read it. This accessible work provides an electric jolt to African literary studies."—Ato Quayson, Stanford University

"The African Novel of Ideas combines erudition with logical precision to transform the relatively homogeneous body of ‘postcolonial’ fiction and theory into a constellation of arguments that think with and through African fiction and philosophy from a strategic selection of nations and regions. Rather than uneven development in Western terms, the result is a stunning picture of different kinds and angles of perspective on global Anglophone culture that scholars will have to reckon with for years to come."—Nancy Armstrong, Duke University

"The African Novel of Ideas is generous and imaginative—Jackson shows, in one skillful reading after another, that narrative is one of the vehicles of philosophical reflection and intellectual innovation across the African continent. This unique book will help lead African studies and literary studies to a new place."—Imraan Coovadia, author of Tales of the Metric System

"Here is the rare work of contemporary literary scholarship that speaks plainly to the question of what the novel can offer philosophy and vice versa. Jackson’s glosses of several recent African novels, particularly Jennifer Makumbi’s Kintu, chart their metaphysical substance with an invigorating exactness."—Mark de Silva, author of Points of Attack

"For too long, African writers have struggled against representations and analyses limiting their work to ethnography. This thorough and crucial intervention presents African literature, not merely as products of exotic traditions that titillate outsiders and Africanists, but as intellectual pursuits grounded in ideas. Accessible and rigorous, The African Novel of Ideas does great justice to the notion that African literature can distinctly represent both the thinker and abstract thought."—Elnathan John, author of Born on a Tuesday

"Examining the artistic and intellectual output of five regions in Africa, this book is a much-needed redressing of the neglect of the African novel’s status as an artifact of philosophical inquiry. It challenges inherited means of reading the African writer, and offers a spirited alternative to the binaries that have come to dominate debates in postcolonial literature."—Masande Ntshanga, author of Triangulum

Editorial Reviews

"Honorable Mention for the Book of the Year Award, African Literature Association"

"Jackson raises essential questions for a field yet to appreciate fully the extent to which African literature contributes to and problematizes disciplinary debates. . . . The African Novel of Ideas provides excellent navigation across an impressive and conceptually challenging range of material."—-Joseph Hankinson, Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation

"The African Novel of Ideas, which draws impressively on literature from all Anglophone regions of sub-Saharan Africa, is an important study not only for those of us who think with African literature but also for those who are invested in a more thoughtful comparative method."—-Yuan-Chih (Sreddy) Yen, Research in African Literatures

"The African Novel of Ideas gives us a historiographical exposition of how the intellectual landscape of pre- and post-independence Akan literature is determined by a struggle of competing philosophical principles rather than by a clearly delineated dichotomy of colonialist dialectics."—-Benjamin Kreitz, Theoria

"Jackson is a muscular, masterful critic who strikes many blows, and strikes them with pinpoint accuracy. She puts her argument forth in a lucid and polemical fashion that dispatches with many of the regnant orthodoxies of African studies. . . . [S]he offers a vision of African literature that is indisputably worthwhile and challenging. Her book should open important debates within African studies, at the very least asking critics to take more seriously an alternate canon of African writing and thinking."—-Timothy Wright, Comparative Literature

From the Publisher