![]() ![]() Excavating Tutuolas status as a detour and absence from the canon of African literature, I examine what modes of ∺frican identity are and are not available, at what sites and what moments, as the identities construed from The Palm-Wine Drinkard are mediated by the institutions of publishing and popular reception, national and international canon formation, and the ideologies of scholarly deployment. I argue that the intensity of these early debates indicates the stakes of defining the ∺frican novel, and thus African subjectivity, and that the disjuncture of these reactions suggests how the defining of Nigerian and African identity takes place both within and between the Global North and Global South. ![]() Published before Things Fall Apart, fellow Nigerian Amos Tutuolas surreal novel occasioned a range of contemporary responses from Nigerians (horror at the novels non-standard English and its potential to misrepresent Africans) and from metropolitans (adulation for, alternately, its inventive modernism or African authenticity). This paper seeks to complicate that narrative and the definition of ∺frican literature it instantiates by considering (the failure of) an alternate founding text: The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952). According to convention, Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart (1958) is the founding text of modern African literature. that a non-cursory reading and analysis of The Palm-Wine Drinkard show that the novel has literary qualities that favourably put it on the same aesthetic. ![]()
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