Research

My research focuses on African writing in English, French, and Swahili, with a particular focus on questions of literary form. I have published articles on topics such as the writer-activism of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the reimagining of capitalist forms of value in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, Susan Kiguli’s deployment of the lyric poem to rethink the terms of liberal subjectivity in 1990s Uganda, and the possibility of a viable literary culture in the infrastructural environment depicted by Fiston Mwanza Mujila in his novel, Tram 83. In all of this work, I am especially concerned with the unique and powerful theoretical work that literature has done at particular moments in continental, national, and local histories. I often find that the kinds of politics that emerge from these texts are not readily legible in terms of common frameworks for reading politics in postcolonial and African literary studies. I am therefore increasingly fascinated by the idea of relocating the onus of theorising onto literature itself and reassessing the role of the critical framework.

My current book project argues that modern African writing has consistently functioned as a kind of decolonial practice, one that involves consistently reassessing the kinds of political work that the literary can do. I revisit “moments” in African literary history, ranging from the well-known 1962 Makerere conference, to 1950s Francophone coming-of-age novels, to the recent “boom” of queer writing by Nigerians living in the diaspora. What these apparently disparate moments have in common, I suggest, is that they see literature put under an extraordinary pressure to rethink the terms of subjectivity. This is not merely described by these writers, but part of a literary practice that is ongoing even after a work’s publication. In so doing, my book seeks to examine what the “decolonial turn” means for African literary studies and show how the literary already does its own kind of decolonial work.

Alongside my concern with African literature and politics, I have developed an active interest in methodologies of African literary studies and postcolonial studies, both research-related and pedagogical. To this end, I have published articles on the politics and ethics of author’s archives located in the global north, the “online criticism” of Ikhide R. Ikheloa and its consequences for the field of African literary studies, and, most recently, the benefits of teaching Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard as part of a “decolonial” curriculum. My interest in the translation of literatures written in African languages led me to start, together with my co-editor Dr. Christopher Ouma (Duke University), the African Language Literatures in Translation series, which is currently under contract with University of Georgia Press. If you are involved with a project to translate an African literary text into English and are interested in the series, please feel free to contact me to discuss it.