Two “Africas”, Canonization, and the Immediate Future of African Literary Studies: Random Reflections
Pius Adesanmi

Let me confess to a dilemma. I once authored an essay entitled, “Europhonism, Universities and Other Stories: How Not to Speak for the Future of African Literatures”[i], in which I took Ngugi wa Thiong’o to task for making what was, in my view, meretricious projections into the future of African literature and scholarship in an essay he had published in Research in African Literatures.[ii] Now that fate has played a fast one by putting me in a position in which I must make projections into the future of African studies, albeit through literature, I can only hope that the glass house I built – and from which I must now hurl stones into the future – would remain intact at the end of the exercise! That said, it is tempting to ask the organizers why the year 2020 has been selected as the temporal destination of the proleptic analysis we have been asked to undertake with regard to the nature and shape of African (ist) knowledge production. After all, regnant intellectual orthodoxies have been known to be so resilient as to invite the obvious question: are a decade and three years enough time span to imagine the very possibility of seismic shifts that would make the field of African studies radically different from what it is today by the year 2020?

The trajectory of knowledge production in the specific field of modern African literatures is a good indication of the resilience of certain modes of engaging literary texts since the inception of the field in the first half of the 20^th century. The emergence of Négritude poetry – and its enabling philosophy and ideology in the Black Paris context of the 1930s - is, arguably, the most significant development in Francophone African literary and critical production. After the publication of Jean-Paul Sartre’s seminal essay, “Orphée noir”, Negrutidinist and/or Negritude-informed analyses of Francophone African literatures and cultures became the inevitable backcloth of Francophonic production of knowledge. It didn’t matter whether writers and critics agreed or disagreed with Negritude; it didn’t matter whether some – like Stanislas Adotévi and the Anglophones, Wole Soyinka and Eskia Mpahlele – became quasi-professional disparagers of the current; what seemed insurmountable was a certain Négritudinist literary and cultural ambience into which succeeding generations of Francophone African writers and critics were conscripted.

Indeed, the more dissenters declared Négritude passé, the more its shadow has continued to loom over that branch of African studies we refer to as Francophone African literatures. The advent of a new form of novelistic corpus produced by writers born mostly after 1960 or in the 1960s – the era of African independence – has not significantly moved the production of knowledge in the Francophonic context beyond the Négritudinist aura; those new writers, according to the Franco-Djiboutian novelist Abdourahman Ali Waberi, can be described as “les enfants de la postcolonie” (children of the postcolony). When France-based writers (and writing!) as far removed from Négritude as Waberi, Calixthe Beyala, Fatou Diome, Kossi Effoui, Daniel Biyaoula, and those based in the United States, such as Alain Mabanckou and Natalie Etoke are ‘discoursed’ as “migritude writers”, what better proof that Négritude critique has merely morphed into the concerns of contemporary postcolonial and postmodernist criticism by instrumentalizing migrancy and Diaspora, two inescapable staples in the production of contemporary knowledge?

With regard to the Anglophone African scenario, the language question offers a parallel window into the longevity/atavism of certain hermeneutic protocols in the field of African literary studies. The details are by now sufficiently familiar: Obiajunwa Wali’s 1963 essay, “The Dead End of African Literature?”, presaging the identitarian preoccupations of contemporary postcolonial and cultural theorizing, placed a question mark on the identity, authenticity, and, I daresay, ontology of the literatures produced in the European languages of conquest and dehumanization. The ensuing polemic, which involved such luminaries as Chinua Achebe, Gerald Moore, and Eskia Mpahlele among several others, provided the crucial inflatus for the theoretical bifurcation that subsequently pitched nativists/traditionalists against modernists in an increasingly variegated field of knowledge. The tensions between these two positions, anchored on such issues as the very definition of African literature, the conditions and modalities of its production, have maintained an astounding topicality: as recently as 2005, Abiola Irele, eminent African literary critic, entitled his keynote address delivered at the African Literature Association’s conference in Boulder, “What is African Literature?”  Ngugi wa Thiong’o has, of course, sustained the language debate as originally framed by Wali to the present day. As the whirlwind of postcolonial theory spread across literature programmes in North America, the language question, like Négritude, found its entry point in the Prospero-Caliban equation and was quietly recast around issues of authenticity, otherness, and identity.

It should be obvious from this snapshot that the discursive strategies and agendas of modern African literary studies have largely been shaped by hermeneutic strategies that have lasted since the 1930s - in the case of Negritude, and the 1960s - in the case of the language question. Given this scenario, my initial question regains its pertinence: do we have sufficient indications that the next thirteen years on the road to 2020 could produce the sort of discursive tsunami required to reshape the field and make it radically different from what obtains today?