Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to search

Literary Criticism General

The Postcolonial African Genocide Novel

Quests for Meaningfulness

by (author) Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba

Publisher
Oxford University Press
Initial publish date
Dec 2021
Category
General
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9781800856875
    Publish Date
    Dec 2021
    List Price
    $157.50

Classroom Resources

Where to buy it

Description

In The Postcolonial African Genocide Novel, Chigbo Anyaduba examines fictional responses to mass atrocities occurring in postcolonial Africa. Through a comparative reading of novels responding to the genocides of the Igbo in Nigeria (1966-1970) and the Tutsi in Rwanda (1990-1994), the book underscores the ways that literary encounters with genocides in Africa's postcolonies have attempted to reimagine the conditions giving rise to exterminatory forms of mass violence. The book concretizes and troubles one of the apparent truisms of genocide studies, especially in the context of imaginative literature: that the reality of genocide more often than not resists meaningfulness. Particularly given the centrality of this truism to artistic responses to the Holocaust and to genocides more generally, Anyaduba tracks the astonishing range of meanings drawn by writers at a series of (temporal, spatial, historical, cultural and other) removes from the realities of genocide in Africa's postcolonies, a set of meanings that are often highly-specific and irreducible to maxims or foundational cases. The book shows that in the artistic projects to construct meanings against genocide's nihilism writers of African genocides deploy tropes that while significantly oriented to African concerns are equally shaped by the representational conventions and practices associated with the legacies of the Holocaust.

About the author

Contributor Notes

Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Winnipeg.