1st Edition
Proximate Histories Entangled Temporalities in Contemporary African Fiction
Introduction: Proximate times: Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country 1
Part I
History and time 27
1 Laminated histories: Achebe, Things Fall Apart 29
2 Expansive time: Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions 44
Part II
Multiscalar time 57
3 Interpellative time: Mujila, Tram 83 59
4 Oceanic histories: Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea 69
Part III
Proximate histories 81
5 Somatic histories: Makumbi, Kintu 83
6 Plaited histories: Serpell, The Old Drift 98
7 Kinetic history: Mengiste, The Shadow King 110
Coda: Signs of the times 125
Bibliography 133
Index 152
Biography
Russell West-Pavlov is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Tübingen. Major publications include Eastern African Literatures (Oxford, 2018), AfrikAffekt (Narr, 2020), Heterotropic Theatres (Narr, 2025) and the edited volume The Global South and Literature (Cambridge, 2018).
Russell West-Pavlov’s Proximate Histories deals innovatively in the colliding and insurgent temporalities of modern and contemporary African literature. Excitingly, fiction is the mode par excellence that exemplifies and makes available for retrieval these divergent—suppressed yet pressing—temporal models. Works ranging from African classics such as Achebe to major novels of the past decade, agitate and invigorate non-sequential, tangled time-frames, thus providing a radically alternative vision to the time of northern authoritarianism and global climate catastrophe that besets us all.
- Elleke Boehmer, University of Oxford; author of Southern Imagining and Ice Shock, both 2025.
West-Pavlov reads eight outstanding works of African fiction for the proximate and multiple modes of temporality that collocate or collide in a single protagonist or narrative. Taking us far beyond the constricted zones of industrial and colonial time, we encounter temporal forms that are more fluid, inclusive, creative and life-enhancing. An exciting and necessary read.
- Sarah Nuttall, University of the Witwatersrand
