Anne DiCosimo
Professor Stone
ENG 529
11 February 2014
Works Cited
Dannenberg, Hilary. "Narrating The Postcolonial Metropolis In Anglophone African Fiction:
Chris Abani's Graceland AndPhaswaneMpe's Welcome To Our Hillbrow." Journal Of Postcolonial Writing 48.1 (2012): 39-50. MLA International Bibliography.Web. 11 Feb. 2014.
Abstract:
Critical discussions of Mpe'sWelcome to Our Hillbrowand Abani'sGraceLandhave focused on the depiction of the urban worlds of Johannesburg and Lagos which constitute the main location of the action. This article, however, shows how each novel in fact constructs a much more complex network of relationships between the African urban focus and other spaces. Unlike colonial discourse, the novels' postcolonial mapping of their different locations does not create a single metropolitan centre around which other spaces are peripheralized. Instead, the African metropolis is located within a complex network of relationships, both to the rural spaces of the specific nation of focus (South Africa and Nigeria respectively) and in turn to larger global cultural and economic systems. As novelistic discourse, both novels create their spatial dynamics by constructing a narrative around the life trajectory of a character moving through those spaces. Despite these key similarities, the novels also reveal crucial differences, most importantly concerning the role and insight of the novel's protagonist into the relationships between the novel's key settings and spaces and their own life trajectory. These differences are also enforced by the novels' different narratorial and compositional strategies, which include second-person narration, in Mpe's work, a culturally radical use of the collective pronoun 'we', and in Abani's a complex textual montage of different discourse forms and time levels.
Harrison, Sarah K. "'Suspended City': Personal, Urban, And National Development In Chris
Abani'sGraceland."Research In African Literatures 43.2 (2012): 95-114. MLA International Bibliography.Web. 11 Feb. 2014.
Abstract
In Graceland (2004), Chris Abani extends a long tradition of Lagos literature by re-imagining the city from the perspective of its poorest population. By invoking and subverting the Bildungsroman genre through his narration of the young slumdweller Elvis's troubled coming of age, he suggestively critiques the instability and inconsistency of the postcolonial nation-state. Specifically, through his formal and thematic elaboration of a "suspension" leitmotif, Abani demonstrates the paralyzing imbrication of the local, national, and global discourses of development that collide at the urban margins. While national models of progress are proven untenable by the discrepant trajectories of development that intersect the city, the promise of cultural transnationalism is equally circumscribed by Elvis's immersion in a global economic system that perpetuates his marginalization. In his fictional representation of Lagos's uneven development, Abani thus responds to calls for more holistic accounts of development than those which emerge from dominant economic analyses.
Nnodim, Rita. "City, Identity And Dystopia: Writing Lagos In Contemporary Nigerian Novels."
Journal Of Postcolonial Writing 44.4 (2008): 321-332. MLA International Bibliography.Web. 11 Feb. 2014.
Abstract
This article aims to explore the poetics and politics of urban spaces and identities in an African metropolis by studying how novels such as Chris Abani’s Graceland (2004), Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come (2005), HelonHabila’s Waiting for an Angel (2002), and OkeyNdibe’s Arrows of Rain (2000) map the geography of the city and portray its people and the myriad of ways they negotiate selves and identities in the spaces they inhabit. The article demonstrates how the novels of the city configure urban identities as woven not only through the rich cultural textualities that people live in but also through emerging subjectivities of crisis that configure responses to contemporary realities experienced as dystopian. Within these dystopian spaces, shaping identities becomes fundamentally political: the article traces how, across the range of the novels studied, disillusionment with received imaginings of postcolonial nationhood and identity engenders a mood of inertia and complacency, but also contains a potential for shaping re-configurations of identity and spaces of critical response to the urban crisis.
Omelsky, Matthew. "Chris AbaniAnd The Politics Of Ambivalence." Research In
African Literatures 42.4 (2011): 84-96. MLA International Bibliography.Web. 11 Feb. 2014.
Abstract
In his 2004 novel GraceLand, Chris Abani unsettles notions of youth "empowerment," or "resistance," creating a restless oscillation between cynicism and idealism. On the one hand, pervasive violence and restricting norms seem to debilitate the novel's characters, leaving little room to negotiate the constraints of their bleak lives in the slums of Lagos. On the other, there is a certain euphoric optimism that pervades the novel—particularly among youth—which is undergirded primarily by idealized non-African spaces. The persistent fluctuation between suffocating violence and utopian thoughts of the "outside" renders the politics of GraceLand fundamentally ambiguous. In lieu of a rigidly determinate portrayal, Abani deploys ambivalence as a discursive vehicle with which to expand the contours of how we come to think and imagine African youth resistance—pressing us to consider the inherent contradictions, complicities and contingencies that perhaps accompany any ascription of agency.
Phillips, Delores B. "'What Do I Have To Do With All This?': Eating, Excreting, And
Belonging In Chris Abani's Graceland."Postcolonial Studies 15.1 (2012): 105-125. MLA International Bibliography.Web. 11 Feb. 2014.
Abstract:
This article analyses the laying of the postcolonial table in Chris Abani's novel, GraceLand, arguing that its deployment of recipes and food images presents a complicated image of Lagos, Nigeria, in which the cultural archive of the recipe collection proves incompatible with the excrementality of everyday life. The article argues that the directives in the recipe collections in the text purport to offer a complete manifestation of Nigerian culture, but only ambivalently perform their given task as they fail to confront the excesses that flood the novel. The article observes the ironic relationship between recipes and specific political and cultural moments in the narrative, interrogating the knowledge formations that the cookbooks will not include—the state of shit that constitutes the unfavourable cultural and political settings in which bodies find themselves.