Description
Book SynopsisAn Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.
In
The Postcolonial African Genocide Novel, Chigbo Anyaduba examines fictional responses to mass atrocities occurring in postcolonial Africa. Through a comparative reading of novels responding to the genocides of the Igbo in Nigeria (1966-1970) and the Tutsi in Rwanda (1990-1994), the book underscores the ways that literary encounters with genocides in Africa’s postcolonies have attempted to reimagine the conditions giving rise to exterminatory forms of mass violence. The book concretizes and troubles one of the apparent truisms of genocide studies, especially in the context of imaginative literature: that the reality of genocide more often than not resists meaningfulness. Particularly given the centrality of this truism to artistic responses to the Holocaust and to genocides more generally, Anyaduba tracks the astonishing range of meanings drawn by writers at a series of (temporal, spatial, historical, cultural and other) removes from the realities of genocide in Africa’s postcolonies, a set of meanings that are often highly‐specific and irreducible to maxims or foundational cases. The book shows that in the artistic projects to construct meanings against genocide’s nihilism writers of African genocides deploy tropes that while significantly oriented to African concerns are equally shaped by the representational conventions and practices associated with the legacies of the Holocaust.
Trade Review“Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba connects the study of postcolonial African literature produced by Adichie and other notable writers with another field of research that has recently been stimulated by transnational perspectives: the interdisciplinary field of genocide studies. This monograph will make a novel contribution and find an audience within literary and postcolonial studies.”
Lasse Heerten, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
'This ground-breaking study traces the fraught "meanings" associated with genocide in Africa. [...]
The Postcolonial African Genocide Novel is adept at teasing out these tensions and contradictions. [...] This innovative book [...] demonstrates how far literary depictions of genocide on the African continent depart from their Jewish counterparts.'
Bryan Cheyette,
Times Literary SupplementTable of ContentsIntroduction
PART I: Writing Genocide in Africa’s Postcolonies
Chapter 1: Genocide in Africa’s Postcolony
Chapter 2: The Holocaust and Literary Representation of African Genocides
Part II: Artistic Quests for Meaningfulness in the Hells of Postcolonial African Genocides
Chapter 3: Genocide as a Tragedy
Chapter 4: Writing the ‘African’ Holocaust
Chapter 5: Gendering the Postcolonial African Genocide Novel
Chapter 6: The Rwandan Genocide and the Pornographic Imagination
Epilogue
