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Research in African Literatures 34.3 (2003) 173-174



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African Visions: Literary Images, Political Change, and Social Struggle in Contemporary Africa, ed. Cheryl B. Mwaria, Silvia Federici, and Joseph McLaren. Westport: Praeger, 2000. Prepared under the auspices of Hofstra University.

In 1995 Hofstra University sponsored a large multidisciplinary conference on Africa's current state. Publishing the proceedings of such a conference five years later carries a double risk: the results could be either a hodgepodge of unconnected views or out of date by time of publication. Happily, African Visions avoids both traps. The volume is updated and rich, addressing human, political, philosophical, gender, and cultural issues across Africa's entire span. It is impossible here to account for all eighteen of its chapters, but I will note some highlights.

Diane Ciekawy's essay on the public discourse of Kenya's Mijikenda people argues that the Mijikenda sustain a robust conversation on philosophy and human rights. Ciekawy advances "sage philosophy" discussions, offers a good counterpoint to universalistic human rights, and happily does not generalize on fully "African belief systems" as co-editor Cheryl Mwaria suggests she does. Steven Colatrella's chapter on African immigrants in Italy's industrialized Veneto region focuses on ethnographic work among Ghanaians, Nigerians, and Mouride Senegalese, but also extends to the arguably IMF-generated conditions that prompted their migrations. In this and broader comments on current global African migration, Colatrella [End Page 173] offers a strong transnational ethnography that will inform literary scholars of an equally transnationalizing literary scene. Returning to the continent, Silvia Federici's essay on student movements links information from dozens of countries, documenting the awful and proletarianized conditions in many African universities today, and holding IMF policies much to blame. Karim Hirji provides a valuable faculty counterpoint, focusing on the wild contradictions and imbalances prompted by countless Western donor-funded initiatives in otherwise impoverished African institutions.

Moving to the cultural, Odun Balogun's chapter bravely articulates the relationships among four theorists rarely considered together: Anthony Appiah, Paul Gilroy, Molefi Asante, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Though Balogun's Appiah is overly Afro-pessimistic, and though Balogun underemphasizes Asante's many flaws, his essay overall provokes a more holistic understanding of the Africana scene. Nancy Topping Bazin surveys Nadine Gordimer's fiction from 1981 to 1994, focusing on Gordimer's search for the proper role for white women in an imagined postapartheid world. Interestingly, Bazin examines the nine successive (and never filmed) screenplays for July's People, assessing variants on the novel's famously problematic end. Essays by Loren Kruger on popular literacy in South Africa, Alamin Mazrui on the history of socialist literature across Africa, Joseph McLaren on the evolving Nigerian novel, and Soraya Mekerta on Algerian fiction in exile are all of interest for literary scholars. Ngugi's contribution on African languages and global culture recapitulates much of his well-known recent work.

Again, I have here only addressed some of African Visions' many provocative chapters. On the downside, a contribution by an economist would have helped, given the book's many anti-IMF and structural adjustment attacks by anthropologists, literary critics, and political philosophers. The book also starts suboptimally, in co-editor Cheryl Mwaria's tendentious introduction, which incorrectly implies that the contributions will predominantly critique "external" causes (such as past European colonialism, the Cold War, global capital, and now-past structural adjustment policies) for Africa's current ills. Overall, for literature scholars, African Visions has several benefits. First, several chapters speak intelligently to our specific fields. Second, its fully African coverage clearly articulates the linked specificities of a continent too often either wrongly fragmented or taken to be uniform. And third, the many nonliterary contributions valuably broaden horizons for the literati among us.

 



David Chioni Moore
Macalester College

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