2024/05/22 by Katherine Hallemeier · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
paper · doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197610640.013.11
openalex publication_date 2024/05/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Abstract The global African novel, as a genre, describes realist fictions that map contemporary migrations of the African diaspora in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It has been understood as uniquely attuned to localized effects and regional experiences of global migration, particularly across the Black Atlantic. Focusing on the novelistic pairing of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, this chapter investigates how the global African novel participates not only in structural critique but also in the theorization of realism as a genre. Both Dangarembga’s and Bulawayo’s fictions, narrated from the perspective of the dispossessed, Black, maddened, “nervous” child, exemplify how African realism is constitutively critical of (neo)colonial modes of representation, including those realist modes that privilege the implicitly objective critique of global systems. Literary predecessors are invoked to clarify how the global African novel offers a disorienting account of the violence of the contemporary global capitalist system.