African Writing and the Double Bind of Globality

Theoretically broad ranging and grounded in close readings that are attuned to the opacity of African works, African Writing and the Double Bind of Globality advocates for an attentive reading posture that treats African literature as a philosophically productive entity that informs our sense of 'world' and 'literature'.

The book argues that African writers face two simultaneous and contradictory injunctions—to accentuate their difference while also being universally legible. Taking such kinds of constraint as an enabling element and feature of African works, the book asks: what does African writing produce when creative autonomy and self-determination are structurally foreclosed by the global cultural industry? It proposes a sobering answer: not silence, not protest, but an opacity as well as a sense of presence that persists in absence. The book argues that African writing cannot move on the global stage on equal terms. Instead, African aesthetic objects navigate the confines of global cultural production sentence by sentence, working through the tension between creative and market pressures.

Engaged in close analysis of an African literary archive—from Achebe and Djebar, to an unpublished manuscript by a contemporary South African writer, to more visible authors in circulation like Teju Cole and Taiye Selasi—this book examines how African writing stages aesthetic negotiations that move us beyond the categories that world literature uses to judge it, to frame it or to render it visible in the global literary arena.