Anglophone African Detective Fiction 1940-2020: The State, the Citizen, and the Sovereign Ideal

FAIN: FT-254859-17

Matthew J. Christensen
University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (Edinburg, TX 78539-2909)

Research leading to publication of a book on the role of detective novels in social and political debate in twentieth-century Africa.

Unsovereign Bodies: The State and the Individual Subject in African Detective Fiction traces the history of the detective genre as a mode of critique in Anglophone African writing. By playing on narrative codes that promise full disclosure of criminal deception and justice for hardworking, innocent individuals, Anglophone African writers, I argue, have transformed the detective novel’s ideological preoccupation with liberal capitalism and its discontents into a broader critical engagement with the collectivist ideals of decolonization, the valences of vulnerability, and the untenable governmentalities available to the postcolony. For their local readerships, the novels consequently ask how do individuals and communities manage risk and resources given the radical instability of the sovereignty of the state and rights-bearing citizen?

Associated Products

Anglophone African Detective Fiction 1940-2020: The State, the Citizen, and the Sovereign Ideal (Book)
Title: Anglophone African Detective Fiction 1940-2020: The State, the Citizen, and the Sovereign Ideal
Author: Matthew J. Christensen
Editor: Ranka Primorac
Editor: Stephanie Newell
Abstract: Providing a survey of Anglophone African detective fiction, from the late 1940s to the present day, this study traces its history both as a literary form and a mode of critical exploration of the fraught sovereignties of the African state and its citizens. Since the late 1940s, African writers including Cyprian Ekwensi, Arthur Maimane, Adaora Lily Ulasi, Hilary Ng'weno, Unity Dow, Parker Bilal, and Angela Makholwa have published over 200 murder mysteries, police procedurals, spy thrillers, and other fictional narratives of investigation and discovery in English-language newspapers, magazines, and novels. Distributed widely across the continent's diverse cultural and political geographies, these texts share aesthetic characteristics and thematic preoccupations that reflect transnational networks of production, circulation, and influence. Anglophone African Detective Fiction, 1940-2020 surveys this literary history and examines how African writers have repeatedly harnessed the detective story to interrogate postcolonial realities of selfhood and the state. It argues that African writers have turned the detective story into a highly productive, while at the same time suspense-filled and entertaining, mode of social and political critique, first of colonialism and the independence era and latterly of neoliberal governance. Offering an overview of paradigmatic texts, from Ghana to Kenya and Sudan to South Africa, the book traces the contours of the history of Anglophone African detective fiction that is at once a cultural history of a uniquely African assessment of the ongoing problematics of sovereignty and decolonization.
Year: 2024
Primary URL: https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781847013873/anglophone-african-detective-fiction-1940-2020/
Publisher: James Curry/Boydell and Brewer
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781847013873
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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