Communal Intellection and Individualism in the African Novel

Bibliographic Data

ID13015348
AuthorsAshleigh Harris (0000-0002-6207-3067, Uppsala University, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume9
Issue2
Pages256-262
Publication date2022-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2052-2614 • E-ISSN: 2052-2622
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/pli.2021.48
OpenAlexW4225010685
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited5

If the book has a grand claim, it is that African intellectual traditions are rich in work where a separate space for the thinker corresponds to a separate space for the thought-where ideas, that is, are granted a force and even ontology of their own by a turn to narrative designs that advance individual integrity, as against porosity or dissolution. 1 The advancement of individual integrity as an alternative to the dissolution that concludes so many African novels is a compelling (and, in Jackson's sophisticated analysis, convincing) idea. But I am nevertheless left wondering why so many African novels of ideas do end in states of dissociation and disassociation "in which intellection signals not just social illegibility but literal death"? 2 I wager that if we approach novelistic form as deeply entangled in aesthetic, cultural, contextual, historical, and philosophical codes, we can trace a historical arch of the genre's formal limitations for intellection in African contexts that explains this tendency. To illustrate this claim, I wish briefly to discuss S. E. K

Individualism · Political science · Law · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

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