Matthew J. Christensen

Anglophone African Detective Fiction 1940-2020 (eBook, ePUB)

The State, the Citizen, and the Sovereign Ideal

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Providing a survey of Anglophone African detective fiction, from the late 1940s to the present day, this study traces its history both as a literary form and a mode of critical exploration of the fraught sovereignties of the African state and its citizens.

Since the late 1940s, African writers including Cyprian Ekwensi, Arthur Maimane, Adaora Lily Ulasi, Hilary Ng'weno, Unity Dow, Parker Bilal, and Angela Makholwa have published over 200 murder mysteries, police procedurals, spy thrillers, and other fictional narratives of investigation and discovery in English-language newspapers, magazines, and novels. Distributed widely across the continent's diverse cultural and political geographies, these texts share aesthetic characteristics and thematic preoccupations that reflect transnational networks of production, circulation, and influence.
Anglophone African Detective Fiction, 1940-2020 surveys this literary history and examines how African writers have repeatedly harnessed the detective story to interrogate postcolonial realities of selfhood and the state. It argues that African writers have turned the detective story into a highly productive, while at the same time suspense-filled and entertaining, mode of social and political critique, first of colonialism and the independence era and latterly of neoliberal governance. Offering an overview of paradigmatic texts, from Ghana to Kenya and Sudan to South Africa, the book traces the contours of the history of Anglophone African detective fiction that is at once a cultural history of a uniquely African assessment of the ongoing problematics of sovereignty and decolonization.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
• Seitenzahl: 244
• Erscheinungstermin: 19. März 2024
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781805432432
• Artikelnr.: 69549042

Autorenporträt

Matthew J. Christensen

Inhaltsangabe

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction Part 1: Africanizing
Detective Fiction's Un/Sovereign Subjects 1. Dispossession, Rescue, and the
Sovereign Self in the Colonial-Era Detective Story 2. Sovereign States:
Police Investigators, Secret Agents, and Sleuthing Citizens after
Independence 3. Decolonization Arrested Part 2: Neoliberal Noir 4.
Neoliberal Noir 5. Seriality, Stasis, and the Neoliberal State 6. Managed
Risk and the Deadly Allure of Transparency Conclusion: Detective Fiction
and the Future Imperfect An Anglophone African Detective Fiction
Bibliography, 1940-2023 Bibliography Index