African Writing and the Double Bind of Globality

Theoretically broad ranging and grounded in close readings that are attuned to the opacity of African works, African Writing and the Double Bind of Globality advocates for an attentive reading posture that treats African literature as a philosophically productive entity that informs our sense of 'world' and 'literature.'

The book argues that African writing cannot move on the global stage on equal terms, as writers face two simultaneous and contradictory injunctions, to accentuate their difference while also being universally legible. Taking such kinds of constraint as an enabling element and feature of African and African Diasporic works, the book asks: what does African writing produce when creative autonomy and self-determination are structurally foreclosed by the global cultural industry? It proposes a sobering answer, contemporary African literary objects negotiate the confines of global cultural production at a granular level, deploying opacity, a kind of presence that persists in absence, in order to work through the tension between creative and market pressures.

Engaged in close analysis of an African literary archive-from Chinua Achebe and Assia Djebar, to an unpublished manuscript by contemporary South African writer Julie Nxadi, to more visible authors in circulation like Teju Cole and Taiye Selasi-this book examines how African writing stages aesthetic strategies that move us beyond the categories that world literature uses to judge it, to frame it or to render it visible in the global literary arena.