Materials, Structures and African Literary Criticism: A Response

Abstract

The essays collected in this special issue, brought together under the title of 'The Materials of African Literature', position themselves as a collective effort to fill what they identify as a gap in current scholarly examinations of African literary writing, both as a body of work and as an institution (a term I use, following Peter D. McDdonald, 1 in both its meanings asto evoke the dual meanings of 'institute' as both a noun and a verb). Central to the claims underpinning these interventions is the belief that what we might broadly characterise as the 'materialist turn' in African literary studies has yet to fully realise a robust engagement with the text as an aesthetic artefact. Asha Rogers, drawing on the work of Gisèle Saprio, observes that literary criticism today remains divided between methods that can be broadly defined as either 'internal' (that is, concerned largely with the text through its internal structures and forms, preoccupied with close readings and literary analysis) or 'external' (focused more primarily on the text's social function, the triad of production, circulation and reception and the author's embeddedness within a larger sociality); for the authors of the pieces in this special issue, materialist criticism has for too long favoured the latter over the former, as evidenced, for instance, in recent scholarship which seeks to read the literary text through post-Marxist and dependency theories, spatial geographies and the constitution of space, book history and print cultures, economic and financial lenses and so on. Without denigrating the insights derived from these approaches, this special issue seeks to develop methods which might enable an engaged and invigorated reckoning with the text as a text by paying particular attention to its diverse 'materials'. Commented [r1]:Could this be clarified / simplified? 'institution' can't be a verb… Commented [JZ2]: Perhaps worth expanding the gloss? To indicate external analysis also concerned with author's sociality, and with aspects of production, circulation and consecration?