Writers and Social Thought in Africa

African writers have captured, and continue to capture, important aspects of
the totality of Africans’ experience of the world. This is evident in Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart, a discourse of the clash of ‘culture’ and colonialism, stability
and change, as well as in Camara Laye’s ambivalent reflections on colonialism
in African social history in A Dream of Africa. It is also manifest in Sony Labou
Tansi’s The Anti-People, a harangue against postcolonial governmentality and
disorder, as well as in Dennis Brutus’ Sirens, Knuckes, Boots (1963), a collection
of poems dependent, to use the words of Niklas Luhmann (2001: 16) ‘upon a
reference to a pre-given “beingness”’.
This special issue of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies is
dedicated to examining social thought/social theory in the works of African
writers – in all genres. Questions to be considered by contributors include – but
can also go beyond:
• the relationship between literature and social theorizing in and about
Africa;
• the role of literature in the articulation or illumination of social thought;
• the evolution of social thought in African fiction;
• the subject and context of social thought as reflected in, and reflexive
through, literature;
• the aesthetics of social thought in Africa;
• African writers’ conceptions of, and disputations about, power, authority,
legitimacy, agency, history, gender, sexuality, culture, ontology,
epistemology, modernity, globalization, etc.
We expect contributions which engage with social theory and the social thought
of African writers, as well as those that challenge the assumptions (patriarchal,
racist, ethnic, religious, traditional, modernist, etc.) that undergird the works of
African writers.
Abstracts should be sent to Wale Adebanwi (anadebanwi@ucdavis.edu) by
August 30, 2013. Full papers by those whose abstracts are accepted must be
submitted by December 15, 2013.
References
Diamond, Larry. 1989. ‘Fiction as Political Thought’ (Review Essay). African Affairs, 88,
352: 435-445.
Luhmann, Nilas. 2001. ‘Notes on the Project “Poetry and Social Theory”’, Theory, Culture
and Society, Vol. 18, No. 1: 15-27.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o. 2012. Globaletics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Quayson, Ato. 2003. Calibrations: Reading for the Social. Minneapolis, MN: The University
of Minnesota Press.
www.tandfonline.com/cjca