Negotiating Afropolitanism: Essays on Borders and Spaces in

Contemporary African Literature and Folklore Edited by Jennifer

Wawrzinek and J. K. S. Makokha (review)

Aaron Louis Rosenberg

Comparative Literature Studies, Volume 50, Number 4, 2013, pp. 714-717

(Article)

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714 C O M P A R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

and finally treats traffic as a condition, even something as traditional as a

metaphor for “contemporary urban life in all its ritual, boredom, nervousness,
frustration, fear, apathy—and also its pleasure” (156). The language may all
be recycled, but it is also, Perloff argues, rearranged, the author not yet dead
but merely on life support.
Regarding both Perloff ’s authors and her central subject, I’m inclined
to adapt D. H. Lawrence’s version of Romantic inspiration: “Not I, not
I, but the words that blow through me.” In 1931 Walter Benjamin comments
on Karl Kraus: “So Kraus’s achievement exhausts itself at its highest level by
making even the newspaper quotable” (qtd. 89). When Goldsmith marks the
millennium by transcribing/scanning the New York Times, we realize that
again Marjorie Perloff clearly has her finger on the pulse of a significant,
if constantly morphing, continuity in the international poetics of the long
twentieth century.
Alan Golding
University of Louisville

Note
1. T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1922),
44, 43.

Negotiating Afropolitanism: Essays on Borders and Spaces in Contemporary

African Literature and Folklore. Edited by Jennifer Wawrzinek and
J. K. S. Makokha. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. 371 pp. Cloth $104.00.

This collection of essays is a welcome addition to African scholarship on

narrative arts. Although certain parts of the volume suffer from problems
that could have been easily solved, the essays do, nonetheless, represent
significant interventions into complex issues surrounding the reconstitu-
tion of identities in African, primarily urbanized contexts. The volume also
attempts to move away from the dominance of discourses about Africa from
European and North American institutions and therefore features authors
from Tanzania, Kenya, and Nigeria, among other countries. This provides
the reader with a variety of perspectives on issues of importance to scholars
of African literature and, oftentimes, with access to materials available only
in Africa, including graduate research work. These same works are often
 BOOK REVIEWS 715

grounded in the lived experiences of the scholars themselves, which are

made use of in tandem with published works to provide a fuller picture of
the realities with which African literatures are grappling. From a theoreti-
cal standpoint the collection is founded in the ideas expressed by Achille
Mbembe in which he emphasizes the shifting and cosmopolitan nature
of African peoples’ experiences. This is a crucial observation that opens
up a distinct trajectory of thought about identities in Africa and works
against the outmoded (if it was ever valid) perception that African lives
are ruled by tradition and stasis rather than fluid systems of associations.
One of the most remarkable and desirable aspects of the anthology is
that it seeks to cover a large spectrum of sub-Saharan African writers. The
compilation also makes an effort to include African literature north of the
Sahara, with a single article that deals with Frantz Fanon and Driss Chraïbi.
In addition there is an attempt made to include works other than those writ-
ten in English, although this is primarily limited to French, with a single
chapter on lusophone writing by the Angolan author Pepetela. A notable
exception to this emphasis on English- and French-language literature is
certainly the essay by Alina N. Rinkanya, which deals with Sheng literature
from Kenya. In this particular case the focus upon Sheng provides a valuable
and rarely trodden inroad into the real manner in which discourses much
closer to the common pulse of the country are carried out.
Many of the chapters focus upon specific works by specific authors such
as Nuruddin Farah, Moyez Vassanji or Wole Soyinka, Patrice Nganang, and
Ben Okri. Other scholars make use of specific works in order to provide
insight into an entire national literary tradition. A case in point is the chapter
on Goretti Kyomuhendo’s novel Waiting, which succeeds in providing a vision
of the oftentimes fractured progression of Ugandan postcolonial history and
how it has played out through literary expression. Another commendable
characteristic of the collection lies in the fact that the authors have taken on
the increasingly important task of confronting the reality of “minority” com-
munities such as the Afro-Asians in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. A wide
variety of authors such as Peter Nazareth, the omnipresent M. G. Vassanji,
Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Yusuf Dawood are explored in no fewer than five
essays—in fact, the entire third part of the book, entitled “Unhomeliness,
Diasporic Narration, Heteretopia.”
All of this being said, there are a few nagging issues that flare up into
serious problems at times. The first of these is that there is an apparent lack
of copy editing, which manifests itself in, at times, obvious ways. Although
ultimately this problem does not diminish the significance of the scholarship
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itself, it does make for fairly turgid reading at times. This lack of attention to
editing even at times bursts out into statements that seem to border on the
problematic, to say the least, such as the following: “In Starbook, the prince is
the sacrifice just like Olunde in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman,
Piggy in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Jesus in Jewish mythology” (70;
emphasis added). Now, regardless of one’s personal feelings about whether
religious texts should be called “mythology” (and I refrain from expressing any
such opinion here), it seems difficult to defend the use of the phrase “Jewish
mythology” to discuss Jesus for the simple reason that Jesus and his life story
are not considered a part of Jewish religious thought. A more appropriate
phrase might have been “Abrahamic mythology” or something to that effect.
My intention here is not to dwell on points of doctrine and religious divisions
but, instead, to point out the fact that more careful copy editing might have
eliminated such troublesome points in an otherwise valuable work.
Another detail that struck me as somewhat odd is the assertion at one
point that there is a disproportionate amount of scholarship being carried
out on Tanzanian writers writing in Kiswahili and not enough being done
to bring to light the work being created and published in English (206).
The author in fact at this point rolls out a whole list of writers publishing
in English who are at present being neglected. Now, to clarify the point
I am trying to make. I have nothing against Tanzanian writers publishing
in English and have myself recently published an article on one of these
writers, Elieshi Lema, in the journal Wasafiri. At the same time, however,
I feel that it is more than a little excessive to portray the field as unreasonably
tilted toward Swahili authors. Although there certainly have been significant
advances made in the attention given to Swahili, such as through the journal
Swahili Forum, that scholarly investment pales to the point of invisibility
when placed alongside the volume of scholarship dealing with African lit-
erature in nonindigenous African languages. Additionally Swahili is, after
all, the national language of Tanzania, and I don’t think that emphasizing
the importance of writers such as Shaaban Robert (which I have endeavored
to do elsewhere) is a disservice to anyone.
A final point that I would like to bring up relates to the lack of an
index in the book, which leads to the necessity to leaf repeatedly through
the pages of the text to track down references to authors and critics. Given
the computerized technology available nowadays, and most certainly used
in the production of this book, it would have been a simple matter to work
up an index and therefore make the book’s contents much more accessible
to the reader.
 BOOK REVIEWS 717

In summary, the volume Negotiating Afropolitanism is a work of lucid and

relevant scholarship on new identity paradigms being formulated in Africa
that is hampered at certain points by a lack of systematic and effective editing.
Aaron Louis Rosenberg
Colegio de México

Globalizing American Studies. Edited by Brian T. Edwards and Dilip

Parameshwar Gaonkar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
348 pp. Cloth $80.00, paper $27.50.

This collection of essays deliberately aspires to illustrate the current global

register of the American studies discipline. The edited volume offers a sur-
vey of the field to exemplify the variety of lines of inquiry that contribute
to and substantiate the imperative to look beyond the geographic, political,
and ideological borders of the United States. With the United States as
the common denominator, the individual chapters provide a set of diverse
examples of studies that emphasize the transnational connections and com-
parisons among the United States, its cultural products, and other cultures
around the world. The editors situate the collection in the escalating trend
in American studies of focusing less on the United States as a singular,
exceptional nation and culture and instead emphasize the vast, enlightening
comparisons between international reference points and U.S. culture and
its development. Though the shift to a transnational focus in the study of
U.S. culture has already been firmly institutionalized, often polemically, the
ethical imperative driving the shift, and this volume, is as timely as ever.
As many scholars in the discipline have articulated, the transnational turn
in American studies is ethically driven to undermine the imperial characteristics
of the way U.S. culture and ideology circulate globally. The goal, as articulated
by the editors of this volume, is to allow the United States to remain no longer
the privileged, unchallenged center of global interactions. According to the
introduction, the collected essays “trace variously the emergent consciousness
of America as one among many—even with all its imperial impulses—in an
emerging multilateral imaginary. Hence, these articles posit a ‘spectral America’
in various circulations, where ‘America’ may lose its referent or exist only as a
specter” (6). In referring to “spectral America,” the editors articulate the desire
to decentralize America, which in the book and in the name of the field is used