READING, RECOGNITION AND THE POSTCOLONIAL

Abstract

In this essay I discuss representations of reading in African literature and in particular the relationship between reading and recognition in these texts. Reading may often be about recognizing the self as known, identifiable or acknowledged by a text, as if for the first time. Certainly, recognition, or the lack of it, has dominated and generated much post-colonial theorizing. I discuss ways in which post-colonial critics have understood the term as it relates to reading and show how these constructions relate to the politics of identity and difference. I go on to investigate a body of non-canonical African texts which place emphasis not so much on recognition as on unexpectedness in reading. The act of reading, these texts imply, is about being taken beyond or outside of the self, and occurs in a register of the abandonment of the known self. A discussion of texts by Amos Tutuola, Yvonne Vera, Nuruddin Farah and others attempts to resituate current conceptions of the text, the self and the world in African literary criticism and aims to test some of the assumptions behind current post-colonial theorizing. I argue that an increasing plurality has come to characterize African literature and the modes of reading it now implies.

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