Fictions of the Untold City in Postcolonial Sub-Saharan Africa Restricted; Files Only

Abstract

This dissertation examines how urban novels from five major Sub-Saharan African cities rewrite their respective imaginaries to foreground possibilities. This project engages seven novels from Francophone, Anglophone and Lusophone Africa to conceptualize how contemporary African authors write the places, people and stories at the heart of urban everyday life. To what extent can literature reshape our understanding of African cities and the people who inhabit them? As the African continent becomes increasingly urbanized, its literary fiction gives voice and place to the concerns and strategies of its oft-neglected urban dwellers, as expressed through the literary works of contemporary African writers such as Ken Bugul, Aminata Sow Fall, Calixthe Beyala, Marie-Louise Mumbu, as well as Angolan writer Ondjaki and Nigerian writers Chibundu Onuzo and A. Igoni Barrett. I argue that attending to an urban literary imaginary is all the more needed when dominant discourse is disproportionately steeped in an ethos of lack and failure, as is especially the case of Sub-Saharan African cities. In the five chapters that comprise this dissertation, I analyze writing from Dakar, Kinshasa, Douala, Lagos, and Luanda as generative of a new ecology, brought about through the efforts of the most vulnerable inhabitants, who manage to ingeniously negotiate their way out of and through hostile socio-political and economic conditions. In doing so, I conceptualize a poetics of African urban literature that brings to the fore literary forms of vulnerability, resistance, solidarity, and survival that draw from and expand upon the creative potentialities particular to the urban.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Novel Imaginaries of Urban Africa.................................................................................................. 1

Chapter 1

Walking Rebellions: Dakar in Ken Bugul’s Aller et Retour and Aminata Sow Fall’s La Grève des bàttu     28

Chapter 2

Article 15: Narrative Delinquency and the City in Marie-Louise Mumbu’s Samantha à Kinshasa 79

Chapter 3

The Literary Urban Imaginary as Palimpsest in Lagos Novels: Chibundu Onuzo’s Welcome to Lagos and A. Igoni Barrett’s Blackass   141

Chapter 4

Reclaiming the City: the Ville-Bidon in Calixthe Beyala’s Les honneurs perdus....................... 194

Chapter 5

Writing the Transparent Voices of Luanda: Ondjaki’s Os Transparentes.................................. 220

Conclusion

Vitality in the African City......................................................................................................... 256

About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	French
Degree	Ph.D.
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	African Studies Literature, African
Keyword	Cities Sub-Saharan Africa Urban Humanities Francophones Studies Postcolonial Studies Urban Africa
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Subha Xavier, Emory University
Committee Members	Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, Emory University Ana Catarina Teixeira, Emory University Valérie Loichot, Emory University Elissa Marder, Emory University

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