The panel comprises contributions related to the ebb and flow of people, cultures and discourses into Africa and away from it. As such, it seeks to end a certain restrictiveness or narrowness of approach to Africa – as if Africa should be self-contained, so that white diasporas entered it and destabilised it, or black diasporas left it and weakened its internal creativity. The panel will discuss literary representations of an Africa that is cosmopolitan, and in which both incoming and outgoing diasporas help constitute societies dynamic, multi-faceted, and engaged with the tensions of a wider world.
The panel comprises contributions related to the ebb and flow of people, cultures and discourses into Africa and away from it. As such, it seeks to end a certain restrictiveness or narrowness of approach to Africa – as if Africa should be self-contained, so that white diasporas entered it and destabilised it, or black diasporas left it and weakened its internal creativity. The panel seeks to discuss an Africa that is cosmopolitan, in which both incoming and outgoing diasporas help constitute societies dynamic, multi-faceted, and engaged with the tensions of a wider world. Simultaneously, these diasporas assume their own hybrid identities, so that, e.g. the white settlers of what was Rhodesia depicted in their creative literature archetypes of a masculine heroism that was both ‘white’ (in its contradistinction to those who were ‘black’), yet more ‘knowing’ of the African condition than indigenous Africans themselves. Ranka Primorac aims to discuss this in her contribution to the panel. Sheila Boniface and Georgie Horrell seek, in their contribution, to discuss the South African writers and artists away from the continent, and their sense of both repulsion from the Africa of today and continuing attraction to a sense of being African. Daria Tunca’s paper addresses the fluctuating identities that come into being through the themes and styles of the creative work of migrant ‘Nigerian’ writers, whereas Ide Corley’s contribution looks at a model of youthful diasporic identity in Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1969 novel Fragments, and how it complicates the official model of Pan-African identity advanced by Kwame Nkrumah’s government in Ghana after 1957.
Throughout the history of South Africa; before, during and after Apartheid, writers have been captivated and repelled, stifled and invigorated by their bond with this land of extremes. For many, a life of exile was – and still is - a political, emotional and creative necessity. We argue that despite their distance from ‘home’, however, the lives and work of these writers remains inextricably caught up in the memory and life of a continent that stays in the blood, infecting and rendering them marked. This paper will represent and interrogate a project that had its initial expression in a conference held in Cambridge in March 2004 - The Letters Home Festival: South African Exiles and Émigrés Writing Abroad.
The paper deals with the revival and strategic permutations of the Rhodesian discourse – the textual configuration that justified and supported colonial-settler presence in Southern Rhodesia, and bemoaned their sidelining and victimisation in independent Zimbabwe – in the 1990s and the 2000s, and especially under the impetus of the ‘fast-track’ land redistribution and the current crisis in Zimbabwe. The postcolonial transformations of colonial-era claims to do with African ‘savagery’, white settler entitlements based on sacrifice and hard work, and the shortcomings of the independence dispensation, will be discussed in conjunction with colonial-era writing and especially the postcolonial narratives by writers such as Alexandra Fuller, David Lemon, Derek Huggins and Catherine Buckle.
Authors such as Ben Okri, Chris Abani, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Karen King-Aribisala have all been called “Nigerian” at least once in the course of their careers. However, it may seem surprising that they should be fitted into the same category, since they have all either left Nigeria or immigrated to it, or else gone back and forth between their homeland and another territory. In this paper, I will argue that these writers’ migratory movement is not only synonymous with one or several changes of location, but that it has also given rise to a sense of fluctuating identity in their creative work. I intend to approach this cultural hybridity from two complementary, yet different angles: through an analysis of the thematic concerns of their novels, and by examining the language used in their fiction.
This paper will consider a model of youthful, diasporic identity in Ayi Kwei Armah’s novel, Fragments (1969), one that complicates an official model of Pan-African identity advanced by Kwame Nkrumah’s government in Ghana after 1957. Starting with his interest in African American music, the protagonist, Baako Onipo (whose name means ‘everyone’), recuperates cultural memories of the Atlantic slave trade and, in doing so, he defies official attempts to figure Nkrumah as national hero and as the incarnation of a Pan-African father or progenitor. When Onipo describes Ghanaian vernacular culture as ‘cargo culture,’ he establishes a homology between Ghanaian and African-American identity through the figure of the slave’s body and rejects a Pan-Africanist ‘cult of authenticity’ that appropriates ‘African personality’ for the state. By drawing on Leo Bersani’s aesthetic theory of ‘primary narcissism’ in The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art, where ‘literary language’ is described as a kind of non-catastrophic violence that prevents figurative violence from stopping, or from ‘tak[ing] place,’ I will argue that the protagonist’s traumatic recollections disavow cultural dislocations associated with the Atlantic slave trade. When the novel explores Onipo Baako’s interest in African America music as displacement, it construes the postcolonial moment in Ghana as a moment of repeated displacement and rejects both bourgeois demands for ‘progress’ and cultural nationalist demands for ‘authenticity.’