Writing the Noncolonial Self: Modern African Literatures and the Politics of Subjectivity

How African literary forms imagine ways of living and being within coloniality

Writing the Noncolonial Self suggests a new way of thinking about the connections between politics, subjectivity, and literary practice. In this groundbreaking study, Alexander Fyfe reveals how African writers have used literary forms to reimagine subjectivity in new terms, a category of practices he calls the "noncolonial." Examining the work of a diverse set of practitioners such as Bessie Head, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, and Akwaeke Emezi, Fyfe shows how African literature has taken on the challenge of rethinking the self in ways that exceed constructions of the subject, eschewing intelligibility under regimes of coloniality in favor of an investment in its own capacity to articulate alternative ways of being. Intervening in key debates in African literary studies, Writing the Noncolonial Self makes a case for the literary as an essential kind of noncolonial practice, one that at every moment rethinks its own horizons of possibility.