Overview

This book investigates the many ways in which contemporary African fiction has reflected on themes of responsibility and complicity during the postcolonial period. Covering the authors Ayi Kwei Armah, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nuruddin Farah, Michiel Heyns, and J. M. Coetzee, the book places each writer’s novels in their cultural and literary context in order to investigate similarities and differences between fictional approaches to individual complicity in politically unstable situations. In doing so, the study focuses on these texts’ representations of discomforting experiences of being implicated in harm done to others in order to show that it is precisely during times of political crisis that questions of moral responsibility and implicatedness in compromised conduct become more pronounced. The study also challenges longstanding western amnesia concerning responsibility for historical and present-day violence in African countries and juxtaposes this denial of responsibility with the western literary readership’s consumption of narratives of African “suffering.” The study instead proposes new reading habits based on an awareness of readerly complicity and responsibility. Drawing insights from across political philosophy and literary theory, this book will be of interest to researchers of African literature, postcolonial studies, and peace and conflict studies.

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9780367766658

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Reviews

Complicity and Responsibility in Contemporary African Writing succeeds in applying accurate and original thinking into the investigation of essay and fictional approaches to individual complicity. Niemi deserves kudos for offering a theoretically firm and nuanced approach to the expanding corpus of complicity studies in African cultural and literary politics. The ideas she draws from political philosophy and literary theory make her book an important source for scholars of African literature, postcolonial studies, and peace and conflict studies. Charles Kipn'eno Rono, Universität Tübingen, Germany.

Author Information

Minna Johanna Niemi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Language and Culture at UiT-The Arctic University of Norway.

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