IntroductionAuthor(s): Neil LazarusSource: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 26, No. 3, African Literature Issue (Spring, 1993),pp. 251-252Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345834 .

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Introduction African literature seems poised once again to take the world by storm. After

the great flowering of the decolonizing years-an era marked by the emergence and consolidation of such spectacular and diverse talents as Mahfouz, Soyinka, Achebe, Salih, Armah, Ngugi, Beti, Sembene, Oyono, Kourouma, and Laye- the 15 years between 1970 and 1985 bore witness to an overall diminution of cre- ative energy and decisive achievement. To be sure, this partial falling away was offset and compensated for here and there by the rise of such splendid "second wave" writers as Bessie Head, Nuruddin Farah, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Meja Mwangi, and by developments in literature nurtured by the growth of the women's movement in Africa, the unfolding of national liberation struggles in Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Guinea Bissau and elsewhere, the articula- tion of a Black Consciousness philosophy in South Africa, and so on. And yet the general sense was that, relative to such other "postcolonial" literatures as the Indian, the Latin American and the Caribbean, the momentum of African literature had stalled somewhat in the decade and a half that followed the widespread acquisition of political independence in the 1960s.

If this is so, works published over the course of the past few years have be- gun to force a major reconsideration. That Mahfouz and Soyinka and Gordimer have all been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature is surely significant. But even more significant, perhaps, is the fact that, for the first time since decolo- nization, the future of African literature appears to be in the hands of an emer- gent generation of writers, a prodigious cohort whose commitments and aspira- tions are in the main quite distinct from those of their predecessors. Across the board, the most decisive and far-reaching contemporary developments within African literature in the metropolitan languages are being produced not by such figures as Mahfouz or Ngugi or Soyinka, but by younger writers, whether living in Africa or abroad, whose work is only now beginning to find its fullest audi- ence. Among these younger writers, some-Ben Okri, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Tahar Ben Jelloun, for instance-have already drawn considerable critical at- tention, in Africa and the West. Others, however, among them Moyez Vassanji, Njabulo Ndebele, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Assia Djebar, Chenjerai Hove, Kojo Laing, Frank Chipasula, Zaynab Alkali, Jamal Mahjoub, Tanure Ojaide, Biyi Bandele-Thomas, and Fettouma Touati, are still relatively little known and under-appreciated. These are the names that are likely to be invoked with more and more regularity as African literature reaches toward the 21st century.

The generational schema just outlined-a flowering, a period of relative qui- escence, a second explosion of talent and energy-finds little parallel in the domain of African literary theory. There, the orthodoxies of Leavisism and New Criticism-or, in the Francophone contexts, of existentialist humanism- remained dominant well into the 1980s. In some quarters, they are still domi- nant. Combatting these idealist and individualist tendencies, from the mid- 1960s onwards, was a Marxist criticism which, for all its early strategic and ideological indispensability, had itself become leaden-footed and mechanical

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252 NOVEL I SPRING 1993

by the early 1980s, crippled by its economism and its inability to offer a plausi- ble theory of the role of culture in the specific context of anti-imperialist strug- gle. This Marxism was ill-equipped to withstand the challenge posed to it by post-structuralism, which ascended to a position of dominance in African liter- ary studies as in the humanities generally in the 1980s-pre-eminently, but by no means exclusively, within the metropolitan academies.

Today, in the form of "colonial discourse theory," post-structuralism com- mands a privileged epistemological position in the analysis of "postcolonial" texts and cultural practices, African as well as Asian and Latin American and Caribbean. Under these institututional circumstances, I believe that it is neces- sary for those scholars concerned about the corrosive idealism of post-struc- turalist theory to contest its premises rather than to dismiss them out of hand. Cultural nationalist or Afrocentric propositions cannot sustain themselves against post-structuralist critiques; nor does it suffice to revert to time-honored Marxist formulae as though these were not themselves in need of reconstruction and refunctioning. It seems necessary today for materialist theorists of "postcolonial" literatures and cultures to "go through" post-structuralist theory in order to come out on the other side, as it were (but whether as post-post-struc- turalists or as pre-post-structuralists I am not sure).

The essays collected in this special issue of NOVEL, on African literatures, seem to me unusual inasmuch as they use the language and vocabulary of post- structuralist theory in concert with other languages and vocabularies, to return us to questions of material specificity-whether concerning national and per- sonal identity, forms of colonial subjection, writing as a cultural practice, or the status of language and intellectual labor in the anti-imperialist struggle. The essays by Kazan, Boehmer, and Arnove engage debates that are by now fairly well-established, even conventional; each of these essays, however, intervenes in these existing debates in quite new, and potentially transformative ways. The special issue also features thought-provoking interviews with Ama Ata Aidoo and Tsitsi Dangarembga, two of the writers who participated in a week- long Festival of African Writing that was held at Brown University during November 1991.

NEIL LAZARUS, Brown University

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