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Full Description
This book explores how African fiction offers revolutionary models for understanding temporality and reimagining history in our catastrophe-ridden twenty-first century. Examining eight works from diverse African writers—ranging from Achebe's classic Things Fall Apart, via works by Coetzee and Dangarembga, to contemporary novels by Makumbi, Mengiste, Mujila, Owuor and Serpell—the book demonstrates how these authors eschew linear Eurocentric historicism in favour of bold, immediate confrontations with history in the making and its temporal fabric. Drawing from fiction across Africa, the book proposes a composite theory of 'proximate historiographies' encompassing the entangled, plaited, expansive, interpellative, somatic, and kinetic temporalities that emerge from these pathbreaking works. Taken together, they reveal Africa as a laboratory of futurity rather than a place outside history. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of African literature, postcolonial studies, and contemporary fiction. It will also appeal to those working in environmental humanities, decolonial theory, and innovative approaches to historiography.
Contents
Introduction: Proximate Times: Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country
PART 1 History and Time
Chapter 1: Laminated Histories: Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Chapter 2: Expansive Time: Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions
PART 2 Multiscalar Time
Chapter 3: Interpellative Time: Mujila, Tram 83
Chapter 4: Oceanic Time: Owuor, The Dragonfly Sea
PART 3 Proximate Histories
Chapter 5: Somatic Histories: Makumbi, Kintu
Chapter 6: Plaited Histories: Serpell, The Old Drift
Chapter 7: Kinetic History: Mengiste, The Shadow King
Coda: Signs of the Times
