Affect, empathy, and engagement: Reading African conflict in the global literary marketplace

Abstract

This article considers the intersection of ethics, responsibility, and literature through readings of Aminatta Forna's The Memory of Love and Dave Eggers' What Is the What. Examining the ways in which each novel situates its staging of African conflict against the a priori image of Africa, the article focuses on the ways in which each novel demands a readerly engagement based on alterity. Rather than viewing the text as a passive repository of ethical lessons, the article suggests that by leveraging narrative unreliability both novels create a vision of literature as the active site of ethical engagement and conflict.

Creative Writing as Literary Activism: Decolonial Perspectives on the Writing Workshop

“…Equally, the contours of affect in these comments foregrounds the ways in which emotion operates not as a supplementary aspect of the social function of writing but as integral to its functioning. Critically, this is a view of affect which departs from the relative passivity of the kinds of empathy so often-invoked in discussions of African literary writing in world literary space: rather than operate as a transactional moment predicated on the division between a subject and an object (see Krishnan 2017), emotion becomes part of the collective and the co-produced sociality which that same collective continually brings into being in an iterative process that remains nonetheless timebound to an extent through the structural limitations of the workshop format and production process. Equally, it is precisely in this vision of the affective-social possibilities of literary writing that we identify a move away from the blunter, more developmentalist or instrumental vision of creative practice's function, worth or value, towards one oriented towards a broader and more inclusive horizon.…”

Body Burdens: The Materiality of Work in Rita Wong’s Forage

“…Madhu Krishnan notes how, according to current trends, it is assumed that the (usually Euro-American) reader may enter into the mind, life, and experience of those who remain socially, politically, economically, and geographically remote, thereby both learning to better empathize with these far-flung others while simultaneously effecting social change through the empathic call to responsibility. 44 As a window into another life, literature is assumed to be able to expand the 'Western' imagination and humanise readers whose own experiences are remote from troubled political circumstances, war, environmental degradation, and demeaning labour. In this way, literature ceases to be textual artifice or aesthetic object, and instead becomes an extension of life not only horizontally, bringing the reader into contact with events or locations or persons or problems he or she has not otherwise met, but also, so to speak, vertically, giving the reader experience that is deeper, sharper, and more precise than much of what takes place in life.…”

14 African Readers as World Readers: UNESCO, Worldreader and the Perception of Reading

“…The capacity of reading to change both individual and collective ways of being in the world remains. Understanding the different structural and ideological contexts in which reading occurs is necessary in order to understand how readersand not only what one critic terms the 'Western reader-cum-explorer' situated primarily in the global Northconsume fiction concerning Africa and its populations, and thereby contribute to the continent's 'dense and fraught symbolic role in the global' 63. This chapter has addressed these issues bysurveying a range of existing scholarship on readers based on the African continent, and signalling critical connections to the ongoing effects of development discourse and related ideas of literacy on the perception of readerly agency.…”