The African imagination: Postcolonial studies, canons, and stigmatization

Garuba, Harry

The African imagination: Postcolonial studies, canons, and stigmatization

Journal Article

2003

Journal Title

Research in African Literatures

Link to Journal

https://aaas.osu.edu/about/publications/ral

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Department of English Language and Literature

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

In the prefatory remarks to his new book, The African Imagination, Abiola Irele traces the trajectory of his professional career from his initial location in Africa to his present base in an American university. The Africa phase of his career, he emphasizes, was marked by an awareness that he was involved in the definition and mapping of a distinctive terrain of imaginative expression and a new academic field known as African literature within the context of a local community of scholars and students mutually engaged in a cultural activity that they felt was central to the needs of an evolving national community. In relocating to the center of the Western academy in the United States, he continues, he now pursues his professional career in an environment within which this literature is marginal. Indeed, the literature is not only marginal, it is more often secondary, serving only to provide validating material for other disciplines and/or evidence for consolidating the paradigms of dominant discourses or epistemologies.