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World Literature Beyond the Postcolonial?

Afropolitanism in Contemporary African Diasporic Literature in English and German

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World Literature and the Postcolonial

Abstract

There is evidence across a range of languages and countries that recent developments in literature broadly defined as postcolonial are now taking some writers beyond postcolonial discourse and beyond the postmodern aesthetic often associated with canonical postcolonial works in French and English from the 1960s to 1980s. This chapter explores the interface between these literary moves beyond postcolonial discourse and the debate about world literature in three related but distinct areas of African diasporic writing: Anglophone Afropolitan writing by prominent authors such as Taiye Selasi, Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the worlding of Indian Ocean cosmopolitanism in Canadian-East-African Indian author M. G. Vassanji and lesser-known corresponding developments in contemporary German literature by Black authors such as Luc Degla, Auma Obama and Victoria Robinson. Themes considered include the shifting role of (post-) colonial memory in the new phase of globalisation since the 1990s; tensions between new cosmopolitanism and social emplacement in Afropolitan poetics; the cultural geographies of worlding in these texts; and the significance of linguistic and cultural hegemonies for the recognition of world literature.

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  1. University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom

    Dirk Göttsche

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  1. Dirk Göttsche
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Correspondence to Dirk Göttsche .

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  1. Thessaloniki, Greece

    Elke Sturm-Trigonakis

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Göttsche, D. (2020). World Literature Beyond the Postcolonial?. In: Sturm-Trigonakis, E. (eds) World Literature and the Postcolonial. J.B. Metzler, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61785-4_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-61785-4_7

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  • Publisher Name: J.B. Metzler, Berlin, Heidelberg

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