Intricate Fictions: Cartography and the Contemporary African Novel examines the relationship between narrative and mapping practices in recent African novels. Considering the continent's well-documented history as a site of cartographical projection, I ask how its literary output remaps this space in the years following colonial rule. This project responds to calls for increased attentiveness to space in African literature, employing an interdisciplinary methodology that puts critical cartography into conversation with African literary criticism and globalization studies. I trace a trajectory from post-independence novels writing against colonial depictions of the continent to contemporary novels interested in engaging the instability concomitant with globalization and its attendant diasporas, migrations, and challenges to epistemological categories such as the nation. These novels develop what I term dynamic cartography, a mode of space-writing characterized by fluidity, disjunction, and mobility. This study brings to the fore a corpus of works that embody the spatial tensions of the contemporary era, raising provocative questions about our metageographical and cartographical tendencies. As absolute frameworks of time and space give way, new modes of space-writing continue to blur the boundaries between the map and the novel, offering further avenues of analysis. Ultimately, I pursue these avenues in order to contend that as global space becomes increasingly dynamic, so too do the genres that represent that global space. Contemporary African novels, composed with a profound awareness of geographical transformation, are thus also positioned at the forefront of generic transformation. / English
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TEMPLE/oai:scholarshare.temple.edu:20.500.12613/2674 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Cesare, Nicole L. |
| Contributors | Gauch, Suzanne, 1965-, Lee, Sue-Im, 1969-, Gordon, Lewis R. (Lewis Ricardo), 1962-, Jaji, Tsitsi |
| Publisher | Temple University. Libraries |
| Source Sets | Temple University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation, Text |
| Format | 180 pages |
| Rights | IN COPYRIGHT- This Rights Statement can be used for an Item that is in copyright. Using this statement implies that the organization making this Item available has determined that the Item is in copyright and either is the rights-holder, has obtained permission from the rights-holder(s) to make their Work(s) available, or makes the Item available under an exception or limitation to copyright (including Fair Use) that entitles it to make the Item available., http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
| Relation | http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/2656, Theses and Dissertations |
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