The Problem with English Literature: Canonicity, Citizenship, and the Idea of Africa

Abstract

In "African Literature: Myth or Reality," V. Y. Mudimbe raises important and troubling questions regarding both the historical basis and theoretical validity of African literature. At the heart of his objection is the suspicion that African literature has been massively undertheorized and, in consequence, canonized on the strength of rebuttable historical and identity claims. He muses: "Could we arrive at any explicative norms as to the real nature of African literature which will put it into some sort of relation with other literatures and not give us the uncomfortable feeling that it is somehow an indigenized imitation of something else, or an adapted reproduction of psychological confusions imported from the West?" ("African Literature" 7). Mudimbe's arguments call for a more historically defensible archeology of African literature. Such an archeology would return so-called modern African literature to its specifically colonial origins, what he elsewhere terms the "colonial library." The colonial library describes an "idea of Africa" that is "a product of the West and was conceived and conveyed through conflicting systems of knowledge"(The Idea of Africa xi). Elaborating the idea of Africa normalized by the colonial library, he explains:

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