Writing Away: Old Affinities and New Itineraries in Contemporary African Writing

This book draws attention to a set of impulses within the current moment in contemporary African and African diasporic writing. It examines how writers are positioning themselves in relation to the intellectual legacies of colonial-postcolonial writing and histories, and it advances the view that some writers are careful not to reproduce the social and political anxieties of the period before and after the era of political independence, a period marked by a crisis of socio-political and cultural identities. By reading for lines of affinity and intellectual itinerary, I argue that these writers are actively staging a new mode of expression that references the trajectories of African writing but also departs at the levels of style, language, and characterisation. There is an overall reluctance to indulge a realist documentation of experience, a resistance to linearity, a simultaneous embrace and suspicion of conventional cosmopolitan practices, an advancement of simultaneity as embedded in the making and unfolding of historical events, and a reliance on movement as discursive and symbolic of multiple intellectual geographies. I show that these strategic tendencies characterize writers who cautiously ‘write away’ from existing assumptions about African writing and what it means to be African in a world where existing connections are now complicated and intensified by new media and constantly shifting conceptions of self and nationhood.