1st Edition
Complicity and Responsibility in Contemporary African Writing The Postcolony Revisited
This book investigates the many ways in which contemporary African fiction has reflected on themes of responsibility and complicity during the postcolonial period.
Covering the authors Ayi Kwei Armah, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nuruddin Farah, Michiel Heyns, and J. M. Coetzee, the book places each writer’s novels in their cultural and literary context in order to investigate similarities and differences between fictional approaches to individual complicity in politically unstable situations. In doing so, the study focuses on these texts’ representations of discomforting experiences of being implicated in harm done to others in order to show that it is precisely during times of political crisis that questions of moral responsibility and implicatedness in compromised conduct become more pronounced. The study also challenges longstanding western amnesia concerning responsibility for historical and present-day violence in African countries and juxtaposes this denial of responsibility with the western literary readership’s consumption of narratives of African “suffering.” The study instead proposes new reading habits based on an awareness of readerly complicity and responsibility.
Drawing insights from across political philosophy and literary theory, this book will be of interest to researchers of African literature, postcolonial studies, and peace and conflict studies.
Introduction 1. Challenging Moral Corruption in the Postcolony: Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Hannah Arendt’s Notion of Individual Responsibility 2. Totalitarian Politics and Individual Responsibility in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians 3. Intellectual Commitment and Complicity in South-African Resistance Writing during Apartheid: J. M. Coetzee and André Brink 4. Uprooted Intellectuals: Multidirectional Identifications and Traumatic Distress in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions 5. Seductive Promises of Wealth: Ideological Misrecognition and Avoidance of Responsibility in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, The Book of Not and This Mournable Body 6. Representing Childhood Complicity and Hiding behind the Law in Michiel Heyns’s The Children’s Day 7. War, Guilt and Childhood Fantasies of Aggression in Nuruddin Farah’s Maps 8. Western Readers and African Narratives: Towards Complicitous and Responsible Reading Strategies
Biography
Minna Johanna Niemi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Language and Culture at UiT-The Arctic University of Norway.
