Complicity and Responsibility in Contemporary African Writing: The Postcolony Revisited (African Governance)

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. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 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 Chapter 2 Totalitarian politics and individual responsibility in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians Chapter 3 Intellectual commitment and complicity in South African resistance writing during apartheid: J. M. Coetzee and André Brink Chapter 4 Uprooted intellectuals: Multidirectional identifications and traumatic distress in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions Chapter 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 Chapter 6 Representing childhood complicity and hiding behind the law in Michiel Heyns’s The Children’s Day Chapter 7 War, guilt, and childhood fantasies of aggression in Nuruddin Farah’s Maps Chapter 8 Western readers and African narratives: Toward complicitous and responsible reading strategies Index "This book scrutinizes fictional work from West, East and Southern African writers including Ayi Kwei Armah, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nuruddin Farah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Michiel Heyns and J. M. Coetzee. The author contextualizes 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 nations. The author focuses on works that eschew narrative structures through which a political order is offered as a clear enemy and distanced from the fictional characters, and instead represent social and political turmoil as a force that implicates individuals in one way or another, thus becoming capable of bringing notions of individual agency and responsibility into politically difficult situations. Through this framework, the book understands literary resistance movements as arising from and being embedded in their surrounding cultural contexts. Acknowledging the interplay between complicity and commitment enables new forms of shared cultural responsibility to emerge"-- Provided by publisher