New Directions
Amatoritsero Ede
In literary traditions, as in nature, there is such a thing as (re)generation; the old gives way to the new; blossoms shoot forth where there had been a shrivelled bulb; new blood flows into an aging stream and thaws its cloth; time and tide flow on. This spirit of renewal and re-generation is symbolised by Chimamanda Adichie’s winning of the Orange prize with Half of a Yellow Sun on June 6th, 2007. And this is only the most recent in a considerable number of new transnational African writing with continental and international visibility, especially amongst an equally transnational and new Francophone Writing. This is not a place to deal with the politics of a western privileging and canonization of certain new African texts, usually in the novel genre more than drama or poetry, which are sympathetic to certain preferred representations of Africa. Beyond the politics of canon-formation is also the vexed notion of occlusion and silencing of otherwise classic new writing, which are marginalised simply due to their having been published, unfortunately, within a land-mined and fractal local field of cultural production – criss-crossed by a postcolonial ‘lack’ – as against a resourceful metropolitan one, which background of giddy capitalist accretions caused local erosions in the first place. Gboungboun, in a recuperative gesture against metropolitan cultural dictation, dedicates a section, ‘Hidden Texts', to such classic but faceless works. There are other sections within this magazine, namely: ‘Writers in the News’, ‘Commentary’, ‘Conference Notes’, ‘Miscellaneous’. Like the ‘Hidden Texts’, the first two of these serve the particular function of generally ‘illuminating’ ‘third generation’ African texts and focusing on their authors in public literary activities; the others engage ancillary topics, information, announcements, etceteras, within an overarching ‘African Studies’ as an area of scholarly research and interest.