This week’s articles revolve around Chinua Achebe (right), to whom ORbits has been paying tribute this week after he died on 21 March 2013. He was buried yesterday on Thursday 23rd May 2013.

1. “Chinua Achebe“, The Economist: “A small man with an impish smile under his floppy berets, he teased and spoke in riddles, in part to mask a growing rage.”

2. “Chinua Achebe: A Poet of Global Encounters“, Africa is a Country: Jesse Weaver Shipley offers a personal account of his encounters with Achebe.

3. “Achebe Not Father Of African Literature, Says Soyinka”, OsunDefender: “I must tell you that, at the beginning, I was very skeptical of the Heinemann’s African Series. As a literary practitioner, my instinct tends towards a suspicion of ‘ghetto’ classifications—which I did feel this was bound to be…” The full interview with Wole Soyinka.

4. ““Igbo burials: How Nigeria will bid farewell to Achebe”“, BBC News: Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani explains the processes of the “Ikwa ozu”.

5. “How to Write about Africa”, Granta: An extract from Binyavanga Wainaina’s deeply ironic One Day I Will Write About This Place, paying homage to Achebe through its deconstruction of mis-representations of the African continent.

If you would like to suggest a link, please email dominic.davies@st-annes.ox.ac.uk

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Americanah
Fourth Estate, 2013
£12.80
ISBN 978-0-00-730622-0

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The complex relationships of mingled antagonism and emulation between Nigeria and the West—primarily the United Kingdom and the United States of America—has been an important concern in much Nigerian fiction since the publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958). Situated firmly and self-consciously as one of Achebe’s literary descendants, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s first two novels engaged with European and American influences on Nigeria insofar as they shaped and impacted local individual lives: first through a legacy of an intolerant European-centric Catholicism, and then, somewhat more obliquely, through Western involvement in the Biafran War. With Americanah—a term describing Nigerians whose mannerisms and tastes have changed due to living in the United States—Adichie has broadened her narrative focus beyond Nigeria to consider the nexus where these tensions of longing and repulsion are most complex and ambiguous: the lives of Nigerian emigrants, the “Americanah”.

Americanah is an ambitious novel that intertwines careful insight with humour and sorrow. It opens with the protagonist, Ifemelu, heading to have her hair braided before travelling back to Nigeria after thirteen years in the United States. Accompanied by comically accurate observations about the hair braiding salon that would look “like all the other African salons she had known” and would be “full of Francophone West African women braiders”, Ifemelu’s journey to the salon introduces, with a characteristically light touch, the complex of thematic strands that will be woven together to shape Ifemelu’s experience of life abroad. Divided into seven parts, the bulk of the novel is an analeptic narration of Ifemelu’s life that, between each major transition in the story, returns briefly to the narrative present of the salon and the gradual completion of Ifemelu’s braids. This centrality of the salon, together with the careful attachment of each narrative thread to Ifemelu’s present life, gives the novel’s structure something of the feel of the process of micro-braiding. Just as hair attachments are first carefully braided into the natural hair before the process speeds up until the last strands are woven together, so each theme is woven into Ifemelu’s present and past life with the formation of the interwoven braid gaining momentum as the novel progresses.

It is in the gradual introduction into the novel of Ifemelu’s blog—”Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black”—that this structuring can be most clearly seen. First introduced to the blog during Ifemelu’s journey to the salon, we only begin to hear about it more frequently when we are told the story of her arrival in the States. Soon fragments of the blog begin to appear in the narrative, and the final three chapters of part two each close with a short blog post, as is each remaining chapter of Ifemelu’s analepsis in part four (part three’s narrative perspective being given, comparatively briefly, to Adichie’s other main protagonist, Obinze). The slight overlapping of the later section’s narrative pattern with the earlier one is further developed in the chronological layering between the point in the narrative at which the blog appears and the later narrative moment in which Ifemelu actually begins to write it. This layering and fastening of one thread to another recurs throughout the novel and gives it a texture that, in addition to Adichie’s prose style, makes it a pleasure to read.

Primarily a love story that narrates the challenges to romance presented by the difficulties of migration, Ifemelu’s recollections begin with secondary school in Nigeria when she falls in love with Obinze. Life in Nigeria during the nineties is vividly depicted in all its variety—an uncomfortable combination of joy and difficulty. It is both a place “starved of hope”, where Ifemelu’s father is fired for refusing to call his boss Mommy, yet inseparably a home rich with laughter and triumphs. For Ifemelu and her friends, though, Nigeria is also characterised by a mocking of, and simultaneous longing to be, an Americanah. As children, they laugh uproariously at Bisi, a girl in their school who returned from a brief trip to America “with odd affectations, pretending she no longer understood Yoruba, adding a slurred r to every English word she spoke”. Yet while American mannerisms and their affectation are ridiculed, to be truly “fluent in the knowledge of foreign things, especially of American things” is considered a mark of distinction, and living abroad is the ultimate dream. Part of Obinze’s appeal for Ifemelu is precisely the glamour of the Americanah: he has lived abroad, speaks with ease of Manhattan, and says graduate instead of postgraduate school. Ifemelu and Obinze’s relationship develops quickly into a strong connection, however, and when Ifemelu receives a scholarship to study in the United States they plan to maintain their relationship over the distance.

Upon arriving in the United States, Ifemelu’s dream of America swiftly loses its allure. It is the discovery of a discord between America’s image and its reality, the revealing intertwining of worlds, that forms the core of the novel. With a scholarship that covers only three quarters of her university tuition, and an aunt who is unable to offer any financial help, Ifemelu is quickly faced with a desperate situation. Racial prejudice, employment restrictions, homesickness and a sense of dislocation intertwine into a gripping portrayal of the trials and desperation faced by some African immigrants—a story that is briefly echoed in Obinze’s short time in London. Throughout her struggles though, and also as life gradually improves, Ifemelu never loses her perspicacity. The bright and varied characters that she meets, and the diverse situations that her romantic life (estranged now from Obinze) and career as a blogger place her in, are all subjected to a penetrating assessment that provides the raw material for the blog posts punctuating some of the novel. While Adichie’s detailed unpicking of Ifemelu’s life in America is generally done well, presenting a nuanced and engaging story, some of Ifemelu’s assessments are presented with a certainty that makes them seem naïve and reductive. The blog posts themselves provide an intratextual gloss on events that occasionally detracts from the novel by providing a (somewhat authorial) first person interpretation of events and therefore reducing the nuance. Ranging from the topic “Travelling while Black” to “What Academics Mean by White Privilege” to “Is Obama Anything But Black?”, the posts nonetheless provide thoughtful points for reflection and are connected with the narrative in interesting ways.

One of Ifemelu’s more prominent observations is the difference between being an American Black and a Non-American Black. It is a thread that is intricately developed as the story continues. Consciousness of race did not begin, for Ifemelu, until she arrived in America, as she observes that “race was not embroidered in the fabric of her history; it had not been etched on her soul”. However true this may be—and it is interesting to ask how this relates to the idealisation of all things European and American—when Ifemelu returns to Nigeria race ceases to be an organising concern. With her braids complete, and the interwoven stories of her past retold, Ifemelu travels to Nigeria, having closed the blog, and faces a new set of challenges. The detailed narrative braids that culminate in the return journey, the journey back not only to her home but to Obinze, make it a poignant negotiation of internal and external change, and the confrontation of old love. With Obinze now married and father to a daughter, the romantic challenges are significant, as are those of reacclimatising to life in Nigeria after thirteen years of absence. In foregrounding the journey out of Nigeria, however, Adichie has given us an enjoyable and insightful representation of the United States and London that tells an often untold story, and which could serve as an inverted sequel to Achebe’s novel of return, No Longer at Ease (1960).

Vincent van Bever Donker completed his D.Phil. in English Literature at Wadham College, Oxford, in 2012. He now lives in Oxford where he is teaching English language and literature.

Postcolonial Writing and Theory Seminar, University of Oxford
Chinua Achebe and the African Writers Series at 50
2nd May 2013

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“Where were you on the 22nd March of this year?” James Currey asked a captive audience at the Postcolonial Writing and Theory Seminar at Wadham College, Oxford on 2nd May. Both James Currey and Becky Ayebia Clarke, two former editors at Heinemann’s pioneering African Writers Series (AWS), could instantly recall where they had been the day the news broke of Chinua Achebe’s death, at the age of 82. Currey had just arrived in South Africa (where he was hounded, almost immediately, by Channel 4 journalists requesting comment and contacts), while Ayebia Clarke was in Charleston, South Carolina, at the conference of the African Literature Association. The news about Achebe “dropped like a bomb”, she recalled, as the many leading figures in African studies gathered there quickly began making their tributes.

The significance of Achebe’s many-sided contributions to the field of African literature (as writer, editor, critic, broadcaster, to name a few) made it clear that the celebrations of 50 years of the AWS at Oxford’s Postcolonial Seminar should rightly focus on the first, and most popular, author of the Series.

James Currey, manager of the AWS for seventeen years (he also founded the Arab Authors Series and Caribbean Writers Series) and author of the rich memoir Africa Writes Back (2008), recounted Achebe’s generous contribution to the AWS not only as a writer, but as an editor as well. A “magnet for young writers”, Achebe spent ten years working unpaid for the AWS, wading through manuscripts of all kinds. He played a crucial role in the dynamic editorial processes that characterised the truly expansive character of the AWS. “He was the sort of person who would attract scripts, and my goodness did he,” Currey added.

The encouragement of emerging writers in Africa was the biggest success of the AWS according to Currey, and was inextricably linked to the belief that African writers could write and get published. Achebe was proof of both. Currey described the sight of the stacks of AWS paperbacks lining the walls of campus bookshops in the 1960s and 70s. The characteristic orange covers and black and white author photographs captured the attention of the book-buying public in Britain. With tongue firmly in cheek, Currey recounted their initial surprise: “‘Good Lord,’ they thought, ‘these Africans are writing books!’”

A submissions editor at the AWS between 1991 and 2003, before setting up her own company Ayebia Clarke Publishing Limited, Becky Ayebia Clarke testified to the appeal the AWS exerted on its junior readers in Africa. The orange covers “caught like wildfire”, she explained, recalling the playground competitions to see who could recite what from which title. Amassing over 350 titles by the time Harcourt decided to discontinue the Series in 2012, African Ministries for Education accounted for roughly 80% of all AWS sales. In April 1982 the collapse of the Nigerian Foreign Exchange prompted Heinemann Educational Books to turn its attention to the expanding educational markets for African literature in Britain and the US.

For Ayebia Clarke, the significance of AWS came from its critical position at the frontline of what she described as a new modern identity for Africa and its people, both at home and abroad. The AWS was seen as “the canon and carrier” of the African struggle, she claimed, citing titles such as Things Fall Apart (1962, AWS no.1), Kenneth Kaunda’s Zambia shall be free (1962, AWS no. 4) and Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1969, AWS no. 43). Clarke concluded by recounting her experience of Achebe the man, including his response to the news that higher powers had decided to close the AWS. Tasked with conveying the bad news to the writers themselves, Ayebia Clarke’s interchange with Achebe (who disapproved of the publisher’s exercise in damage limitation) prompted her to set up her own independent publishing company. Celebrating ten years of Ayebia Clarke Publishing this year, she remains committed to breaking down the dependence of African literature on publishing conglomerates. Taking her inspiration from the pioneering work of Currey, Achebe and others at the AWS, Ayebia Clarke acknowledged the crucial financial support of the Arts Council England in the tentative stages of setting up shop.

Currey and Ayebia Clarke are collaborating once more in 2013, as editors this time, on a book of tributes to Achebe with contributions as wide-ranging as Bernth Lindfors’ enigmatically titled piece, “Achebe in Texas”. As the accounts of Achebe’s impact continue to rise to the surface, the anecdotes offered by Jame Currey and Becky Ayebia Clarke gave Oxford a unique glimpse of the complex histories of writing, publishing and collaboration that have shaped the development of a modern category of African letters.

Asha Rogers is reading for a D.Phil. in English literature at St Anne’s College, Oxford.

Elleke Boehmer
Chinua Achebe: An Obituary
16th November 1930–21st March 2013

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If it is true that legends never die, only grow and transmogrify, then the death of the African literary giant Chinua Achebe on 21st March this year, at the age of 82, will do nothing to dim his already assured status as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. This Thursday, 23rd May, he will be buried in his home town of Ogidi in Anambra state, Nigeria, after a week of funeral rites in both the national and the state capitals, as well as at Nsukka University, where he worked as an academic in the early 1970s. The ceremonies will aim to extol his ‘impact’ on world letters (as journalist Levinus Nwabughiogu writes in Vanguard).

Since the publication of Achebe’s classic, Things Fall Apart in 1958, several generations of African writers have defined their voices through a process of interacting with his characteristic mixed Igbo-and-English inflections. His influential perspectives on such key African, yet also global themes such as the interaction of modern life with tradition and myth, as well as the colonial incursion and the struggle for national freedom, have marked the work of the many who have written in his wake, both in Nigeria and more broadly. As Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, one of his literary daughters, aptly put it, Achebe ‘gave permission’. The British-Nigerian writer Ben Okri relatedly wrote in 1990 that Achebe allowed all of humankind to dream more richly.

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), the tragic tale of Okonkwo the yam-farmer whose intransigence fatally comes up against missionary infiltration in Igboland, remains the best-selling African novel of all time with 10 million copies sold in 50 languages. Yet Achebe also published four other important novels, including No Longer At Ease (1960), about a Nigerian civil servant ‘been-to’ (English-educated and full of colonial airs and graces), the finely wrought The Arrow of God (1964, many readers’ personal favourite), and a withering satire of neo-colonialism, A Man of the People (1966). The Booker-shortlisted Anthills of the Savannah (1987) again looked at the woes and self-division of Africa’s neo-colonial elites.

Achebe also published literary essays, poetry, short stories and acidic polemic (including the eye-opening 1984 excoriation of post-independence corruption, The Trouble with Nigeria). For nearly twenty years following his harrowing involvement in the Biafran or Nigerian Civil War (1967-70), in which he supported Igbo secession and lost beloved friends and family, he produced no fiction, preferring the more direct and immediate channel of shorter forms like the essay. Achebe’s long-awaited personal history of the Biafran War, There was a Country—which was published only last year—raised considerable controversy in Nigeria for its still markedly Igbo nationalist point of view. Achebe won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Beware, Soul-Brother, also entitled Christmas in Biafra (1971). In 2007 he was the winner of the Man Booker International prize recognizing a life-time’s literary achievements. Since a car accident in 1990 that left him wheelchair-bound, he held professorships at Bard College and Brown University in the US.

Though often called the father of African literature, Achebe was not strictly speaking that (given the anglo- and francophone African novelists active in the 1920s). However, as Lyn Innes has written, he can be credited with the foundation of modern imaginative literature from the continent in the post-war period. Not only was he a practitioner; he was also the editor of the influential African Writers Series for nearly a decade. In English departments across the Anglo-American world he became well-known—not to say notorious—for his talking back to institutional racism and the biases of the English literature canon, most prominently in an essay that attacked Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for its representation of Africans. Ironically, given his receptive attitude towards the English language as at once a colonial language whilst also an African lingua franca, he became regarded as the combative black African voice, especially after the 1988 inclusion of the essay in the Norton Anthology. In fact, his views were always a great deal more ameliorative, nuanced and conciliatory, as is clear from his debates about English as a medium of African expression with more radical writers like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

Yet it is not only for his foundational position, nor for his willingness to speak truth to power and indict the western world for its unquestioning racial biases, that Achebe deserves his readers’ undying respect. Achebe’s reputation as a truly great world writer rests centrally on his staggering success in wresting Africa into non-African frameworks of cognition through the medium of the novel form, whilst, importantly, without ever compromising or substantially changing the novels’ structures of mythic and cultural reference. As I write these sentences newspaper reports once again observe that the world’s image of Africa is almost terminally negative. Achebe, by contrast, let us know that Africa—the many countries and communities that make it up—is a vast cultural universe unto itself, coherent, involving, richly textured, the same as any other complex cultural universe. The philosopher Achille Mbembe warns us that when we write of Africa we should always remember that this must not become merely a pretext to write of Europe. Achebe’s great achievement has been always to write of Africa as the core and also the whole of the world.

Elleke Boehmer is a novelist and Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford.

Chinua Achebe, author of the ground-breaking Things Fall Apart amongst numerous other novels, poems and works of literary criticism, is widely recognised as the Founding Father of African Literature. He is pictured here with Nelson Mandela, who has famously described Achebe as “the writer in whose company the prison walls came down”, and who “brought Africa to the rest of the world.” Achebe’s contribution to both literary and academic fields, as well as his broader social and political contribution to his home-country of Nigeria, the African continent and beyond, was prolific and invaluable. He died on 21st March of this year in the US, where he held a professorship at Brown University. His funeral took place in Nigeria on Thursday, 23rd May 2013.

To mark the death of this literary great, ORbits is this week running a special “Chinua Achebe Week”. Each day ORbits will publish an article about or relating to Chinua Achebe and his broader literary, historical and political context, including an obituary written exclusively for ORbits by Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, a review by Asha Rogers of a recent postcolonial writing and theory seminar held to mark the 50th Anniversary of the African Writers Series, and a review of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s latest novel, Americanah, by Vincent van Bever Donker. We’ve also a special Chinua Achebe oriented Weekly Roundup with links to a range of articles relating to Achebe.

This week’s articles take Britain as their focus. As spring finally brings out the blossom here in the UK, the political landscape, as evidenced by these articles, remains bleak and dreary.

1. “Everybody Out“, The Economist: Urban Housing: Race or Class.

2. “Balls warns of “despair” over welfare cuts after bedroom tax suicide“, The Corporation: “There is no doubt this policy is driving people to the edge of despair in their many thousands across the country.”

3. “The Coalition’s Serial Abuse of Statistics”, The New Statesman: Ian Duncan Smith’s manipulates data to label 8000 people scroungers.

4. ““Labour voters increasingly turning against the poor, study says”“, The Guardian: The British public somehow slip ever further to the right as class distinction and alienation intensify.

5. “23 Sultry MP Moments”, Buzzfeed: If you can’t beat the politicians, you may as well laugh at them.

If you would like to suggest a link, please email dominic.davies@st-annes.ox.ac.uk

St Anne’s Equalities Forum
Minority Groups: Rivals or Allies?
Mary Olgilvie Lecture Theatre, St Anne’s College
10th May 2013

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Last Friday a small group collected in the Mary Ogilvie Lecture Theatre at St Anne’s College, Oxford. They formed an interested audience prepared to give up a couple of hours of their Friday evening to attend an event ran by the St Anne’s Equalities Forum. As the audience participation throughout the event revealed, for many their commitment and interest extended beyond this one evening’s engagement into various other outlets and forums for campaigning, volunteering, and generally initiating social change. Though this provided fertile ground for some productive discussion, one of the event’s major concerns—raised throughout the evening by an audience member—was that everyone in the room was ‘preaching to the converted’. That seems an ugly phrase, and it might be better termed, here at least, as ‘informing those already socially and politically aware of the issues at stake.’

Nevertheless, there was a huge amount of information to be absorbed from such an incredible panel, even for those who work on these issues on a daily basis. It is only a shame that there weren’t more present to hear some of the inspiring accounts and meet some of the astonishing speakers, all of whom have dedicated their lives to campaigning for the rights of minority groups. Their firsthand experience of the different forms of oppression—sometimes subtle and sometimes overt, sometimes obvious and sometimes complex and unpredictable—suffered by minority groups across the United Kingdom quickly dispelled any illusions that Britain is, as some (though, in recent years, surely not that many) may believe, an ‘equal’ society. Chaired by Rosemary Radcliffe, CBE, a St Anne’s alumni and PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Chief Economist in Europe before her retirement in 2001, the panel spoke both to questions submitted before the event and to live audience responses and queries, covering various inequalities that still permeate almost every sector of society.

The ambiguous question that the event initially posed—”Minority Groups: Rivals or Allies?”—seemed to be asking whether or not minority groups were rivals or allies with each other. The intersections between comments made by the panel members, comprised of speakers working with a whole range of different minority groups, quickly answered this question. Peter Purton, the Trade Union Council policy officer for disability and LGBTQ rights, answers it simply by giving his job title. Denise Milani, the current Director, Diversity and Citizen Focus Directorate at the Metropolitan Police Service, was the first African-Caribbean and non-uniformed female member of staff to complete the Strategic Command Course (the highest Police Officer Development course in the country) in 2006, also embodying these intersections between minority groupings. She told touching stories about her children, a disabled daughter and black son, who have managed to thrive despite the statistical odds against them as minorities. Perhaps the intimate nature of the event, with the discussion taking place between a fairly small group, added weight to these accounts. But I’m inclined to think that such an informed and aware group of speakers know what they want to say—what, in fact, they need to say—and are prepared to offer their insights to any who will listen.

Peter Quinn, the Head of Oxford University’s Disability Advisory Service, Fiona McClement, the Equality and Diversity Adviser at University College London, and Suzanne Holsomback, the outgoing Vice President (Women) at OUSU, completed the panel. Each offered a unique insight into the formations, intersections, and persecutions of minority groups on varying social, national and international levels. Though the event ran over, a day-long conference would not have been long enough for the debate to exhaust itself. Indeed, one of the points that surfaced during the session was that these issues will always be debated, and necessarily so. Society as a whole, if one can conceptualize such a thing, will tend to maliciously discriminate against, or sometimes just thoughtlessly overlook, the various minority groups moving within its structures. As educated and informed citizens, it is surely a responsibility to share knowledge, to spread insights, and to initiate small social changes on a daily basis. These combine, as the panel themselves proved, into broader social movements with positive effects and impacts for so many of the minority groups of which our society is comprised.

It is, however, hard not to come away from such an event a little frustrated, with a healthy dose of disillusionment sticking in one’s stomach. Initiating social change might be one thing, but given the proliferation of discriminatory headlines in the media and the range of stigmas and stereotypes that pervade popular culture and society, the question that the event initially posed seems to be thrown into a different light. Minority groups may not be rivals with each other, but are they seen as rivals with mainstream society, by that society’s members? Some of the horrific statistics quoted by the speakers might suggest that this is indeed the case. But when we look at the grass roots experiences brought to the table by this panel, the gap between representation and reality manifests itself. Minority groups are almost always people who have contributed, or are willing to contribute, to that society in a way that only allies would, so long as the structures are in place to give them the opportunity to do so. Though much of the discussion revolved around the negative statistics and forms of oppression suffered by minority groups, the positive is embodied in the work and lives of the people in that room. Next time an event such as this takes place, we can only hope there are more of them in there.

Dominic Davies is reading for a D.Phil. in English literature at St Anne’s College, Oxford. He is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Daniel Mihailescu’s photograph shows a man stretching a 750kg European Union flag before the parliament buildings in Bucharest, Romania, to mark Europe Day (5 May for the Council of Europe, 9 May for the European Union). Though it may have gone unnoticed in the UK, ironically overshadowed by debates surrounding Britain’s EU membership, Europe Day is widely observed in Eastern Europe as well as in EU candidate countries such as Turkey. The flag is an important symbol of European solidarity.

Transnational and Global History Group
Global Knowledge Workshop
Ertegun House
10th May 2013

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The Global Knowledge Workshop, held at Ertegun House last Friday, was part of a two-day event organised by the Transnational and Global History Group. After kicking off with a rigorous panel discussion with the likes of Chris Bayly, John Darwin, Cassandra Pybus and Richard Drayton on the Thursday afternoon, the workshop was designed to facilitate further conversation about the movement of knowledge in its various forms across national boundaries.

Professor Chris Bayly’s opening remarks set the tone for the day. While talking specifically of colonial India, Professor Bayly nevertheless situated his examples in the broader context of knowledge circulation. He drew attention to a burgeoning body of scholarship on the constitution of disciplines in the colonial world, the rise of the newspaper, the imposition of new education systems, and the development of race discourse theory, among a whole range of new research. More importantly, he drew the audience’s attention to the importance of thinking not only about how knowledge moves, but also the methods and practices that aid or resist this process. What is at stake is not just the question, how does knowledge globalise, but rather a more urgent, basic counter-part: does knowledge globalise at all?

The 23 workshop papers (given by graduate students and early career researchers) covered an ambitious and impressive range of geographical and historical situations, ranging from nineteenth-century Mexico and eighteenth-century China to late-colonial India and post-independence Africa. Nevertheless, the papers came together in surprising ways to explore several similar strands, themes and ideas. A common preoccupation that emerged was a concern with the material objects of transmission—books, newspapers, archival records, college and training centre newsletters, maritime notebooks, official letters and scandal broadsheets were just a few that were mentioned during the day. This led to a fruitful set of discussions regarding the position of the archive in historical research, and specifically what bearing it has on the reality of historical events: what does an archive reveal? Can it trick us? Can we always believe what they reveal? And can we intuit what they do not reveal?

So while the objects of knowledge seem to take these very tangible forms, as monstrous piles of paper threatening to burst out of their storage containers, they can nevertheless remain slippery and elusive, constantly thwarting the scholar’s search for information—sometimes, simply though perhaps unexpectedly, by presenting the researcher with just too much information. This takes us back to a central point that Professor Bayly made in his opening remarks: while, for example, colonial administration was single-mindedly geared towards the collection of data, more often than not, the uses of this data remained uncertain.

The conference also made apparent that behind the collection of information was also a lurking fear of this material falling into the wrong hands. Several papers throughout the day examined the measures taken by states to prevent its subjects from hearing of its activities and, even more interestingly, learning stories about other subjects in other parts of the colonial world. The infectious nature of these circulating and constantly-evolving stories was a concern in places and times as disparate as eighteenth-century China and late-nineteenth-century Algeria. The movement of knowledge between empires also received much critical attention. The concluding panel of the day drew attention to Spain’s status as an imperial power in the eyes of the British, the interaction of US and British colonialist tendencies, and French-Algeria’s perceptions of surrounding African colonies.

In the shadow of knowledge’s transnational journeys are, of course, the processes by which these journeys are made. What obstacles and difficulties are encountered on its way? Several of the day’s papers looked at the interaction between the imposition of alien knowledge systems and indigenous practices of knowledge assimilation, whether it be specific contexts such as the colonial Indian subject’s need to reorient himself to a codified system of place and address necessitated by the arrival of the postal system in the nineteenth-century, or broader questions such as the interaction of Islam and the West.

Both serving to remind all the participants that knowledge inevitably comes hand in hand with ignorance, whilst demonstrating the necessity and effectiveness of interdisciplinary and comparative frameworks, this excellent workshop was food for thought, organized by a dynamic and student-run group who are sure to provide interesting events in future. You can visit their website for information on forthcoming seminars and to join their mailing list here.

Priyasha Mukhopadhyay is reading for a DPhil in English at Wolfson College, Oxford.

Saikat Majumdar
Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire
Columbia University Press, 2013
£27.50
248 pages
ISBN 978-0231156943

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When a reviewer turns to a book with the term “banality” in the title, the possibility of numerous quips and puns on the “banal” and “boredom-inducing” quality of the text inevitably springs to mind. It is with great regret, however, that I, lover of puns that I may be, shall have to endeavour to restrain myself from such jokes. For though the title of Saikat Majumdar’s first academic monograph includes the word “banality”, this appears alongside a whole cast of strikingly broad terms: “Prose”, “World”, “Modernism”, and “Empire”—we might start to consider that this monograph can’t actually be long enough. The book is some 200 pages, but a bibliography of the material that has been written on these subjects since just the turn of the 21st century would not fit between the covers. To write across, suture together, and traverse all these huge topics would require the development of a complex theoretical paradigm that conceptualises an historical framework for a very long 20th century. And of course Saikat Majumdar, Associate Professor at Stanford University, has attempted exactly this.

No small feat then. The component parts of the book’s title are in fact taken from just two quotations: that opening confident and somewhat totalising phrase, “Prose of the World”, is sourced only once throughout the text and is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a quotation of Hegel. The reader of this review should be warned that if they think a text heavily inflected with Hegel is going to  attempt to configure the broad motions of history into a convenient yet intricately theorised narrative, then, well, they would be right. This globe-encompassing theory is developed in the book-end chapters that serve as introduction and epilogue and that speak generally and confidently as only an Associate Professor at Stanford might. The geographical breadth of the argument (the “world”) is matched only by the historical weight that Majumdar ascribes to his argument. Though there has been much critical work in recent years that has traced the subversive impact of modernist literature on the discursive constructs of “Empire”, Majumdar pushes this further, extending it to a critique of Enlightenment thought more broadly. Though this conceptualisation is far from original (it has been present in critical discourse at least since Jean-François Lyotard coined the term “Enlightenment Grand Narratives” in 1979, if not before), no one has before argued that literary texts perform these subversive motions through a “narrative aesthetic of the banal”.

The central argument Majumdar develops is basically this: colonial and postcolonial history is littered with extremely important and often violent events—from genocides to wars of independence to the rise of various nationalisms—that quite rightly often become subject matter for (post)colonial anglophone literatures (one of the few limits Majumdar places on his analysis is to restrict it to the English-speaking world, as formed by the British Empire). These “dramatic” (Majumdar’s word) events are often invoked in postcolonial literature as part of a project of anti-colonialism and de-colonisation, depending on where the texts fit into the historical progress of the struggle. However, in direct contrast to these dramatic episodes is the ongoing banality of life on the colonial periphery. Indeed, the contrast becomes a complex dialectic. This is not only recorded in much of this body of literature, but finds formal articulation in a specifically “banal” narrative aesthetic that Majumdar argues becomes intensely subversive of the dominant power structures and historical narratives in each historic-geographic moment. The “Prose of the World” is, for Majumdar, writing that gives priority to all those in-betweens, those non-events, the spatio-temporal arenas that form the unarticulated backdrop to the movements of upheaval and political contestation in the global history of the 20th century.

This was unfortunately not made clear to me until I’d finished the epilogue, and though retrospectively I now understand that this was being gestured towards throughout the text, the introduction and intervening chapters didn’t serve to drive it home. Though from the title we might have expected the Fredric Jameson of the “Modernism and Imperialism” essay to emerge, it is in fact Jameson’s more controversial article, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”, that serves as a critical foothold for Majumdar’s argument. Majumdar at first constructs a binary between dramatic and banal, locating the political impetus of the former within the concept of the National Allegory as theorised by Jameson in that much-contested essay. He then demonstrates how such a binary, based inherently on a deeper opposition of political and apolitical, is in fact misconstrued and false. The “banal” narratives that Majumdar identifies are just as political as those more obvious allegories of anti-colonialism and nationalism: they often serve as a reflexive critique of those postcolonial narratives by disaggregating postcolonial populations into varying sub-groups such as the local, gender, class, and so on. This configures, for Majumdar, a political movement that subverts the grander allegorical narratives.

The significance of this is that in order to draw forth such a theorisation, it is necessary to generate the beginnings of a critique of early postcolonial novels, such as Midnight’s Children—indeed, Salman Rushdie  bears the brunt of Majumdar’s chapter on Amit Chaudhuri, though the argument operates mostly through positive rather than negative critique. Much of Majumdar’s argument is implied rather than conveyed through direct attacks, but it is well done and refreshing. Within Majumdar’s project is the poignant implication that—because many of the anti-colonial movements are now a half-century in the past—we can begin to recover all those other narratives, produced from the more banal locations and gaps in the spatio-temporal paradigm that postcolonialism takes as its field of inquiry, and re-configure them as playing an equally central, political role in the evolution of various post-independent nation-states in the second half of the 20th century. Majumdar seizes the historical moment for this articulation wisely and makes it with a care and sensitivity that should be admired and adopted by other postcolonial critics.

Nonetheless, there are some difficulties with Majumdar’s monograph, rooted perhaps in the book’s subtitle, Modernism and the Banality of Empire. The term “banality” is, as an opening epigraphic quotation informs us, taken from Caribbean writer Jamaica Kincaid. And yet, Kincaid’s work features nowhere else in the text, aside from a brief mention of the cited quotation in the introduction. Virginia Woolf too is deployed in this way, her own critical work drawn on throughout the introduction but with no attention paid to her literary role in this process. Majumdar acknowledges this oversight, claiming that his concern is with the movement between colonial periphery and imperial metropole and that therefore Woolf does not fall within his “literary archive”. But such an acknowledgement overlooks Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), and a reading of this relatively neglected text would have been appreciated by this reviewer at least. It should be pointed out in fact that despite Majumdar’s grand theorising, there are one or two notes regarding the limitations of his argument’s applicability, comments we then swiftly lose sight of when Hegel returns to the conversation. Majumdar could simultaneously cast his critical net wider, bringing in not only Virginia Woolf but also Leonard’s The Village in the Jungle—and perhaps Joseph Conrad, another eerily absent figure—while honing his theoretical configurations and engaging with a little more historical and geographical specificity.

The work primarily focuses, then, on four authors, two “colonial” and two “postcolonial”, in the technical or temporal sense. James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield receive a chapter each in the first half of the book, and Zoë Wicomb and Amit Chuadhuri in the second half. Rather unsurprisingly, Majumdar struggles to write across such contrasting and disparate geographical and historical locations: colonial Ireland and New Zealand, apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, and postcolonial India. Though Majumdar impressively tackles each author’s œuvre—encompassing everything from Ulysses to the manuscript of Stephen Hero in his analysis of Joyce, and including Chaudhuri’s work as a literary critic as well as his novels—there is very little comparative work, leaving the actual application of the broader theories negotiated in the introduction and epilogue somewhat problematically untransferable across the spatio-temporal locations of each author. Majumdar’s clear enthusiasm for Joyce is an exception to this rule: the buoyancy of his narrative in the chapter on Joyce is noticeable when contrasted with the others, and Joyce is the only author to recur with any sort of regularity throughout the remainder of the book. Aside from this, the author-based chapters hang like individual essays somewhat isolated from one another, raising doubts as to whether Majumdar can in fact theorise such a general and broad topic as “Prose of the World”.

Majumdar does offer a generalised key to each of these authors, located very explicitly in his concept of the “banal”, a word that recurs in each of his analyses. However, banality becomes rather too broad and un-falsifiable for what is otherwise an impressively rigorous academic study. We are presented with banal objects, banal time, banal space—almost anything in fact that suits Majumdar’s reading and that can be configured, very roughly and a little arbitrarily, as banal. In a work of such sharp technical theorisation, this fluid and unspecific term is unsatisfying. It feels like Majumdar has attempted to marry two clearly inter-related but nevertheless distinct literary interests: modernism, in the form of Joyce and Mansfield (but especially Joyce) and postcolonialism. These two have a long heritage of intersection in critical debates over the past few decades, but the pertinence of Majumdar’s argument is not quite grounded in the modernist canon on which he draws. This is not to say that such a grounding would not be possible—and indeed, Majumdar opens various lines of inquiry that might be pursued to solidify this process in various and more convincing ways. But from a literary critic of such skill, with such a breadth of knowledge and refreshingly conscious socio-political engagement, I would expect a slightly tighter methodological and thematic approach. Puns aside—and do excuse a moment of self-indulgence—the only banal aspect of Prose of the World is the concept of ”banality” itself.

Dominic Davies is reading for a D.Phil. in English literature at St Anne’s College, Oxford. He is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.