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This paper identifies and intervenes in the problems posed by reading postcolonial texts as representative, or encompassing of, the nation with which they are associated. Alternatively, it proposes that reading at the scale of the city offers a method for circumventing the elision of particularity which occurs when the nation, continent or globe are foregrounded in Western or Western-facing responses to these texts. The paper models what such a “scaled-down” reading might look like, attending to Dambudzo Marechera’s House of Hunger (1978) and Ivan Vladislavic’s Portrait With Keys: Joburg and What-What (2006), and their intricate relationships to the urban spaces of Harare and Johannesburg, respectively. At stake in these analyses are opportunities to identify what Jacques Rancière terms dissensus, or political contestation, rendered in spatial terms. This establishes a pliable counterdiscourse of the city which seeks and discerns meaning not through consensus or “sanctioned representation”; but through the complexities of affective attachments, the plurality of experiences, and the teeming heterogeneity of physical and literary spaces that have been previously flattened.

Marlene van Niekerk's 1994 Triomf is a plaasroman , or farm novel, without the farm; it formally resembles a nostalgic pastoral genre initiated by the collapse of Southern African agricultural economy around the time of the Great Depression, but removes even the symbol of the farm as aesthetic compensation for material loss. In the process, van Niekerk composes a post-apartheid tragicomedy of a lumpenproletariat white supremacist family coming into long-belated class consciousness, an epiphany which, surprisingly, survives the novel's translations from Afrikaans to South African English to 'international' English. Crucially, this understanding is mediated by a critical tendency to appraise Triomf in the context of Faulkner and the Southern Gothic, a generic comparison which gets a lot wrong but is ultimately very revealing, less about Triomf than about the imperial world-system through which it circulates and is consecrated. Consequently, the novel stages globally what seems at first to be a parochial question: how is one supposed to imagine democratic reconciliation and integration after apartheid, when one of the classes to be reconciled lacks historical self-consciousness and has no obvious place in either the apartheid regime or the post-apartheid dispensation? By analyzing van Niekerk's novel and the institutions which consecrate it, the paper fleshes out critiques of world-literary hermeneutics, specifically for its naive handling of genre and context, and of post-apartheid 'reconciliation' under capital.

This paper considers Achebe’s No Longer at Ease in terms of its modest canonical fortunes and its peculiar formal construction. The paper argues that the novel’s urban setting is produced through an emergent and local noir style, that this setting indexes the increasing centrality of the city in late colonial African life, and that it formally responds to the success of Achebe’s rural Things Fall Apart and its problematic status as a paradigmatic African text. The paper suggests that No Longer at Ease’s foreign and local horizons of interpretation, as symptoms of an ongoing imperial world-system, are internalized and symbolically resolved by the novel’s instantiation of Lagos as chronotope. The paper’s methodological intervention offers a hermeneutics of literary setting through which to elaborate the relationships between form, literary institutions, and material conditions in the postcolony.

This essay identifies and intervenes in the limitations of both the social and the medical models of disability in the postcolonial context, suggesting that those limitations may apply to theorizations of disability more broadly. It suggests that Bessie Head's novel A Question of Power, which represents mental illness and disability without positing a stable etiology for them, illustrates the inapplicability of these ways of thinking about disability under instances of extreme precarity. As such, Head offers a test case for how mental illness and disability writ large might be theorized without the suppositions implicit to the liberal subject.

“Literary Cities & the Postcolonial Canon: Writing Dublin, Lagos, and Johannesburg in the Twentieth Century” begins by asking a question about a peculiarity of the postcolonial canon: why is Things Fall Apart, a novel from 1958 set in a fictional Nigerian village, still taught and read as the paradigmatic African literary text, when half of Africa’s population has lived in cities since 2015? It seems as if canonicity’s longevity poses a problem for postcolonial writers in a way that it has not for Western writers, and that this problem is made visible by paying attention to postcolonial literary setting. But the anachronism and non-representativeness of the postcolonial canon, I argue, is not merely the material consequence of a global literary industry that sells visions of the postcolony as variously corrupt, rural, war-torn, and underdeveloped to readers based primarily in the Global North. It is also the formal consequence of the postcolonial literary field being constituted by writers developing strategies for depicting their specific geographical contexts to both local and transnational audiences; that is, the consequence of the postcolonial literary field being constituted by its postcolonial setting.Over three chapters, taking Dublin, Lagos, and Johannesburg as its primary sites, Literary Cities reads Irish, Nigerian, and South African novels of independence to show how postcolonial writers have negotiated their geographical and canonical peripherality through their formal handling of setting; how these negotiations get taken up by consecrating institutions nearer to the imperial metropole; and how that taking-up reshapes the meaning and longevity of these postcolonial novels within the postcolonial canon. Chapter One compares the construction of setting in James Joyce’s hypercanonical metropolitan novel, Ulysses (1922), against that of Elizabeth Bowen’s semicanonical rural novel, The Last September (1929), and demonstrates how their respective aesthetic strategies determine their canonical fortunes at home and abroad over the course of the twentieth century. Chapter Two considers Chinua Achebe's No Longer at Ease (1960) in terms of its canonical marginality and, paradoxically, its profound literary influence. The chapter argues that notwithstanding the novel’s tendency to cite canonical works of European modernism, its urban setting is principally produced by drawing on an emergent and vernacular tradition of detective fiction; that this setting indexes the increasing centrality of the city in late colonial African life; and that it formally responds to the success of Achebe’s rural Things Fall Apart (1958) and its problematic status as a paradigmatic African text. Chapter Three reads the Afrikaans novelist Marlene Van Niekerk’s Triomf (1994), a tragicomedy of a lumpenproletariat white supremacist family coming into long-belated class consciousness at the end of apartheid, alongside its global reception after being translated into “international English,” and considers the causes and consequences of Van Niekerk’s work being frequently compared to that of William Faulkner. My conclusion makes explicit the genealogy being posited here across these sites and these writers, before turning to some more contemporary figures to consider the role of literary setting in the new global novel.This comprehensive study of urban setting over a century of anticolonial and postcolonial cultural production offers translatable interpretive methodologies for literary and cultural studies, a firm grounding in the cultural and material histories of Dublin, Lagos, and Johannesburg, and a robust theorisation of the relationships between literary form, literary institutions, and the material conditions of the postcolony.

Achille Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason advances an argument familiar to scholars of critical race theory with respect to the advent of modernity, namely that the invention of blackness as a racial category and mechanism of exclusion, and the construction in Europe of reason as a fundamental attribute of, and condition of inclusion in, humanity, are not merely coeval, but contingent upon one another.