Introduction

Abstract

Like nationalist discourses, African literary criticism revolves around the question of authenticity. The distinctiveness of the African text, its distance from or subversion of European literary forms, constitutes, it seems, its authentic quality. Thus, the ‘Africanness’ of the African text is elaborated and celebrated through positing its appropriation of the oral tradition – both in terms of form and content – as well as the use of myth and ritual. Within African literary criticism, these considerations often provide the impetus for political judgements, prescriptive and proscriptive. This ideological move establishes the primacy of the political in the discipline. This is not surprising as African postcolonial cultural praxis, from its beginning, has allied itself in varied ways to the process of decolonisation and social critique. The relation between the text and the world was pre-eminent. Writers like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Ayi Kwei Armah engaged with the extratextual world through narrative strategies that were often oppositional and disjunctive. If we agree with Jonathan Culler that ‘the novel serves as the model by which society conceives of itself, the discourse through which it articulates the world’ (189), then the African world presented to us is one rent by conflicts and contradictions: the scatological and the sublime, the demonic and the utopian, the mythical and the historical.