Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - "How Achebe ruined African literature"

hi ikhide
i share your enthusiasm for on-line publications.
as for adichie, she has made an enormous splash, esp w americanah.
she is very good indeed. i don't really get into the game of who is better than whom. it's a question of taste, in the end. i listed oyeyemi and forna, and then cole, because i loved their works. i liked everything adichie has written since Purple Hibiscus, which seems to me as a text that addresses late adolescents, or young people (like college students); the novel's dark vision under the abusive father is harder for me to connect with.

thanks for the interview w cole. i don't really care a lot what people call themselves (except on a personal level). what makes an african writer "african" is something i've been grappling with for a while. frieda ekotto and i had a conference on that topic 4 years ago, and a book will appear shortly with indiana u press.
my interest in the issue is not tied to "identity," not the identity of the authors, but rather the field of african literature and culture. i am interested in asking the question, how do we think about african literature/culture, how do we imagine its practitioners are shaping the field today, what are the cultural milieux in which they live, what traditions or contexts are shaping their work, and also--to your point--how is the mediation shaping the field. that includes how they are marketed, where their works can be sold and read. etc.  how are the works received, in other words.

all of that is part of the question, what is african literature today.
the answers get complicated. just look at moretti and the idea of distance in the readers' relation to the text, and we can see that notions of insider and outsider are no longer what they once were.
i can understand how cole would see himself as part of "World Literature." but that is a very vexed category, along with World CInema, and i hope to disrupt that categories in my  work for the next few years, disrupt them by trying to figure out how their exclusions work with (against) african literature and cinema.
best
ken

On 3/30/14 6:55 AM, Ikhide wrote:

Ken,

Teju Cole demurs when referred to as an "African writer", preferring the label, "internationalist" a la Salman Rushdie, whatever that means. I agree with him and respect his choice of identity. Not sure the West cares, they are bent on making him and writers of African descent, the other. Because even though they protest too much, many of these writers have spent a lifetime making money and fame from hawking themselves as "the other." Here is a NYT interview of Teju Cole on the re-release of his debut book Every Day is for the Thief  in which he clarifies his identity -  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/20/books/teju-coles-every-day-is-for-the-thief-comes-to-the-us.html

I will only add that "African literature" in the 21st century to the extent that it is only judged through analog books by "critics" schooled in the 20th century Achebean era will always distort our history and stories. The vast proportion of our stories is being written on the Internet by young folks who do not have the resources that the West availed Achebe et al in the 60's. Why are we judging African literature only through books? Why?

There may be some truth to the notion that many African writers who write fiction are yet to wean themselves of Achebe's influence. The critics who make these charges should look in the mirror - and then get off their lazy butts and go read new African writers. They are out there on the Internet, and in literary magazines doing us proud. And how you can do a literary critique of contemporary African writing without once mentioning Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie beats me. 

- Ikhide

On Mar 29, 2014, at 10:21 PM, kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:

i can't help adding that i just taught teju cole's Open City for the second time, meaning i've read it 4 times now, and i can state with complete assurance that it is one brilliant book. very very smart, beautifully, incredibly beautifully written, smart, different, ... but "african literature"? i don't know about that, when it is so much set in new york, in milieux that have very little to do with africa or africans.
ken

On 3/29/14 6:24 PM, kenneth harrow wrote:

nice answer!
i chose oyeyemi
and in close second, forna

On 3/29/14 1:44 PM, Emma Onyeozili wrote:

Between Achebe and Soyinka, I will choose Chimamanda; case closed, abi?

Emma Onyeozili

 Chidi Anthony Opara <chidi.opara@gmail.com> wrote:

Truth is that the Achebe and Soyinka schools would continue to sponsor this type of discussion, hoping that the unnecessary question of who is better between Achebe and Soyinka would be resolved some day, positioning the winning school as the gate keeper of African Literature.

Truth again is that the question can never be resolved either way.

CAO.

On Saturday, 29 March 2014 03:08:54 UTC+1, Kenneth Harrow wrote:

i might hazard two comments, without joining in the fruitless debate,
who's better. one, better by whose standards?
more importantly, better known= better writer? historically that's
nonsense; anyone who studied british 19th c lit could tell you that. i
once knew the name of the most famous irish writer of the 19th c, but
lost since forgot it...as has everyone else.
but worse, better= more $. ??
wow, that's really interesting. almost every famous writer you can think
of, nowadays, would fail by that standard. not to mention painters,
musicians, etc. bach was largely forgotten in the 19th c till mendelsohn
resurrected him; ditto for shakespeare in 19th c, till folks like goethe
came along. melville wasn't even noticed when he died, el greco, etc.
for a long time djibril diop was in eclipse; even senghor had faded in
his last years, or should i say last decades.
so what's really at stake in this achebe vs soyinka argument? at the
time of chinweizu i knew the answer. nowadays it must be something
different from those old tired arguments, esp when it is an outsider
posing it.
ken


On 3/28/14 9:05 PM, Ikhide wrote:
> "Such pointed dissents from multiculturalist orthodoxy may explain the strange fact that although Soyinka is, by most accounts, a better and more interesting writer than Achebe, he is not nearly so well known. His marvelous plays are rarely assigned in Western classrooms. In commercial terms, Soyinka has never been a huge success, whereas sales of Achebe's books accounted for as much as a third of the revenue coming in from the African Writers Series even in the 1980s, decades after they had first been published. When Soyinka won the Nobel Prize in 1986, he was cornered at a reception by one particularly effusive admirer who proceeded to praise his work in the most gushing terms. When Soyinka asked, "What have you read by me?" the admirer answered, "Things Fall

>   Apart." -
>
> - Helen Rittelmeyer
>
> "... Soyinka is, by most accounts, a better and more interesting writer than Achebe" ???!! Okay, I hear! What do I think? Awful essay blighted by Rittelmeyer's ideological bias. Simplistic, patronizing and dated. She needs to read more contemporary writing by Africans.
>
> http://www.claremontinstitute.org/index.php?act=crbArticle&id=114#sthash.sr9bATJ5.5p7MYiZP.dpuf
>
> - Ikhide
>

--
kenneth w. harrow
faculty excellence advocate
professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
har...@msu.edu

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--   kenneth w. harrow   faculty excellence advocate  professor of english  michigan state university  department of english  619 red cedar road  room C-614 wells hall  east lansing, mi 48824  ph. 517 803 8839harrow@msu.edu

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