2026/03/01 by Cajetan Iheka
paper · doi:10.1632/s0030812926101722
Abstract The African city has emerged as a robust site of intellectual work in literary and cultural studies in the past two decades. Scholarship on African cities has centered poetics of the city, foregrounding urban agency across Africa. But what if one shifts attention from poetics of the city to poetics for the city? Reading Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness , this essay explores the dynamics of this prepositional shift, with attention to their significance for exploring the relations among resource extraction, African storytelling, and world literature. I argue that this prepositional shift becomes necessary for understanding extractive economies in these texts as allegories for the aesthetic compromises the city demands of the countryside in Africa and that the world demands of its countryside—Africa. Poetics for the city—characterized by narrative inflation and denial of agency—provides a critical vocabulary for reappraising world literature.