Abstract
This chapter aims to contextualize Nigerian diaspora literature. It is first concerned with the historical and sociological formation of the new African diaspora, which has developed in the largely voluntary migration movements to the United States and Europe that have been under way since the 1980s. Secondly, it considers Nigerian diaspora literature in the context of Nigerian literary traditions. Like the literature of their predecessors, the work of the diaspora writers is distinctly political, which is particularly expressed in their impetus for cultural nation building, that is, their contribution to the Nigerian imaginary. Thirdly, the chapter discusses the global literary market and the category of ‘African literature’. In order to get published, writers from Africa need to fulfil several requirements, including marginality, cultural difference, mobility/migration, and political engagement and resistance.
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Notes
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‘Diaspora’ has also increasingly been adopted for usage in the natural sciences, such as biology and cancer research, where the term refers to the distribution of spores and the spreading of cancer cells, respectively.
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For further reference, see Rogers Brubaker (2005, 12), Paul Tiyambe Zeleza (2009, 32) and, in particular, Stuart Hall (1993, 402), who advises to use the term ‘diaspora’ “metaphorically, not literally”. He argues that it is “defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference.”
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Paul Tiyambe Zeleza (2009, 42), for example, distinguishes between four diasporas in the United States: (1) the historic communities of African Americans, who are the descendants of former slaves; (2) the migrants from diasporic locations, such as the Caribbean; (3) the recent immigrants from Africa; and (4) the African migrants, who themselves originate from diasporic communities in Africa, such as East African Asians and South African whites. In addition, there are sizeable migration movements from Africa to other regions of the world, to Europe, Central and South America, and Asia, while a significant proportion of African migration also takes place within the African continent.
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(1): Adichie’s Americanah (2013), Oguine’s A Squatter’s Tale (2000), and Ndibe’s Foreign Gods, Inc. (2014); (2) Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005), Evans’s 26a (2005), Irenosen Okojie’s Butterfly Fish (2015), and Selasi’s Ghana Must Go (2013); (3) Cole’s Open City (2012) and Every Day Is for the Thief (2007), Atta’s A Bit of Difference (2013), Selasi’s Ghana Must Go (2013), and Afolabi’s Goodbye Lucille (2007); (4) Abani’s GraceLand (2004), Habila’s Waiting for an Angel (2002), and Obioma’s The Fishermen (2015); and (5) Unigwe’s On Black Sister’s Street (2009) and Atta’s Swallow (2010).
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For an influential account of the three generations of Nigerian literature, see Pius Adesanmi and Chris Dunton (2005, 2008) and Adesanmi (2006), as well as Wendy Griswold (2000, 36; 527). Important predecessors of the three-generations-model for African literature are Frantz Fanon (1990, 179) and Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo (2007, 157).
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Frantz Fanon, whose The Wretched of the Earth (1961) is a key text for the period of decolonization and the struggle for independence, is also relevant for an understanding of the postcolonial era. In the chapter ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ he warns of the possible problems and failings of the nation after independence and thus effectively predicted the direction Nigeria would take in the years after the end of formal colonialism.
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Robert Young (2001, 45) defines neocolonialism as “a continuing economic hegemony that means that the postcolonial state remains in a situation of dependence on its former masters, and that the former masters continue to act in a colonialist manner towards formerly colonialized states”.
- 12.
In National Identity Anthony D. Smith (1991, 14–15) defines the nation as “a named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members”. While the nation thus “signifies a cultural and political bond, uniting in a single political community all who share an historic culture and homeland”, the state refers “to public institutions, differentiated from and autonomous of, other social institutions and exercising a monopoly of coercion and extraction within a given territory”. To become nation-states “modern states must legitimate themselves in national and popular terms as the states of particular nations”.
- 13.
While, according to Griswold, in the twentieth century, 85 per cent of Nigerian novelists were male, the first years of the twenty-first century have brought more balanced numbers, with women accounting for more than half of the literary output. Of the twenty novelists considered in this study, eleven are female and nine male, responsible for twenty-three and eighteen books, respectively. Hence also the increased importance of female perspectives in the Nigerian novel, where one can find a “challenging reconfiguration of national realities in which the feminine is neither essentialized and mythologized nor marginalized, but unapologetically central to the realist representation of a recognizable social world” (Bryce 2008, 49–50).
- 14.
Nobody exemplifies the attempt to counter colonial discourses with literature better than Chinua Achebe, of course, who, in his famous essay from 1965, ‘The Novelist as Teacher’, wrote that he wanted to teach Nigerians that “their past—with all its imperfections—was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them” (Achebe1990, 45). In another essay, ‘The Role of the Writer in a New Nation’, Achebe argued that the writer’s duty is to restore his fellow Africans’ dignity, self-respect, and a sense of their history “by showing them in human terms what happened to them, what they lost” and that “African peoples did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans” (Achebe1964, 157).
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- 16.
For discussions of the occurrence of Bildungsroman features in Nigerian diaspora literature, see, for example, Okuyade (2011, 142), Harrison (2012), Dannenberg (2012), and Phillips (2012). Other works of the Nigerian diaspora that are not exclusively set in Nigeria also employ elements of the Bildungsroman, such as Oguine’s A Squatter’s Tale (2000), Selasi’s Ghana Must Go (2013), Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005), and Adichie’s Americanah (2013).
- 17.
I refer here to Pierre Bourdieu’s discussions of the literary field that can be found in the essay collection The Field of Cultural Production (1993), as well as in Les règles de l’art (1992; Eng.: Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, 1996).
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Feldner, M. (2019). Contexts: New African Diaspora, Nigerian Literature, and the Global Literary Market. In: Narrating the New African Diaspora. African Histories and Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05743-5_2
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