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Celebrating Afropolitan Identities? Contemporary African World Literatures in English

  • Birgit Neumann EMAIL logo and Gabriele Rippl
Published/Copyright: March 15, 2017
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Abstract

Against the background of today’s debate on Afropolitanism, this article discusses three contemporary African novels as instances of world literatures, focusing on their creative modelling of open, non-Eurocentric worlds in motion. Taking existing research in the field of world literature into account, we argue that the affective and effective uniqueness of world literatures only comes to the fore when considering their distinct power to creatively make worlds. We suggest understanding world literatures in terms of their capacity to create open, polycentric worlds, which enmesh diverse places, multiple temporalities, situated practices and locally grounded experiences into open networks of reciprocal change. In theorizing world literatures as pluralized and multiple, we also try to overcome the privileging of western literature. The final section negotiates how these imaginative worlds interact, intersect and possibly collide with that world which is configured by labelling, marketing and canonizing a specific text as ‘world literature’.

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Published Online: 2017-3-15
Published in Print: 2017-3-1

© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Articles
  3. Anglophone World Literatures: Introduction
  4. Postcolonial Worlds and Translation
  5. For ‘Global Literature’, Anglo-Phone
  6. Changing Spaces: Canonization of Anglophone World Literature
  7. New York, Capital of World Literature? On Holocaust Memory and World Literary Value
  8. Contemporary American Literature as World Literature: Cruel Cosmopolitanism, Cosmopoetics, and the Search for a Worldlier American Novel
  9. Ngugi wa Thiong’o and the Conceptual Worlding of Literature
  10. Indian Writing in English and the Discrepant Zones of World Literature
  11. Caribbean Spaces and Anglophone World Literatures
  12. Celebrating Afropolitan Identities? Contemporary African World Literatures in English
  13. Reviews
  14. Michael Klotz and Thomas Herbst. English Dictionaries: A Linguistic Introduction. Grundlagen der Anglistik und Amerikanistik 41. Berlin: Schmidt, 2016, 287 pp., € 19.95.
  15. Jonathan Davis-Secord. Joinings: Compound Words in Old English Literature. Toronto Anglo-Saxon Series 20. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016, xi + 245 pp., $ 65.00.
  16. John F. Vickrey. Genesis B and the Comedic Imperative. Maryland, MD: Lehigh University Press, 2015, xii + 325 pp., $ 85.00.
  17. Cecilia A. Hatt. God and the Gawain-Poet: Theology and Genre in Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Cambridge: Brewer, 2015, x + 249 pp., £ 60.00.
  18. Anne Hudson. Doctors in English: A Study of the Wycliffite Gospel Commentaries. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015, cliv + 116 pp., 5 figures, £ 75.00.
  19. Nicholas Perkins (ed.). Medieval Romance and Material Culture. Cambridge: Brewer, 2015, xiv + 285 pp., 37 illustr., £ 60.00.
  20. Dieter Henrich. Sein oder Nichts: Erkundungen um Samuel Beckett und Hölderlin. München: C. H. Beck, 2016, 493 pp., € 39.95.
  21. Vera Nünning. Reading Fictions, Changing Minds: The Cognitive Value of Fiction. Schriften des Marsilius-Kollegs 11. Heidelberg: Winter, 2014, 343 pp., € 45.00.
  22. Caroline Lusin (ed.). Empathie, Sympathie und Narration: Strategien der Rezeptionslenkung in Prosa, Drama und Film. Anglistische Forschungen 450. Heidelberg: Winter, 2014, 234 pp., € 40.00.
  23. Derek Attridge. The Work of Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 320 pp., £ 35.00.
  24. Marie-Luise Egbert (ed.). The Life of Birds in Literature. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2015, 182 pp., € 23.00.
  25. Heike Paul. The Myths That Made America: An Introduction to American Studies. Bielefeld: transcript, 2014, 456 pp., € 24.99.
  26. Johanna Hartmann, Christine Marks and Hubert Zapf (eds.). Zones of Focused Ambiguity in Siri Hustvedt’s Works: Interdisciplinary Essays. Buchreihe der Anglia/Anglia Book Series 52. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2016, vii + 425 pp., € 99.95/£ 74.99/$ 140.00.
  27. Books Received
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