Winner of the 2020 ALA Book of the Year Award - Scholarship
Examines the ways in which space and spatial structures have been
constituted, contested and re-imagined in Francophone and Anglophone
West African literature since the early 1950s.
From the "imaginative geographies" of conquest identified by Edward Said
to the very real and material institution of territorial borders,
regions and geographical amalgamations, the control, administration and
integration of space are known to have played a central and essential
role in the creation of contemporary "Africa". Space continues to be a
site of conflict, from separatist struggles to the distribution of
resources to the continued absorption ofAfrican territories into the
uneven geographies of global capitalism.
In this book, Madhu Krishnan examines the ways in which the anxieties
and conflicts engendered by these phenomena are registered in a broad
set of literarytexts from British and French West Africa. By placing
these novels in dialogue with a range of archival material such as
territorial planning documents, legislative papers, records of
liberation movements and development projects, this book reveals the
submerged articulations between spatial planning and literary
expression, generating new readings of canonical West African texts as
well as analyses of otherwise under-researched material.
MadhuKrishnan is a Senior Lecturer in 20th/21st Century Postcolonial
Writing in the Department of English at the University of Bristol. She
is author of Contemporary African Literature in English: Global
Locations, Postcolonial Identifications(2014) and Contingent Canons:
African Literature and the Politics of Location (2018)
