Anglophone African detective fiction 1940-2020 : the state, the citizen, and the sovereign ideal / Matthew J. Christensen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Christensen, Matthew J. (Matthew James), 1970- author.

Series:

African articulations

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Detective and mystery stories--History and criticism.

Detective and mystery stories.

African fiction--History and criticism.

African fiction.

African fiction--20th century.

African fiction--21st century.

Physical Description:

xi, 231 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.

Place of Publication:

Woodbridge, Suffolk [England] : James Currey, 2024.

Summary:

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. -- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

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 afterIndependence

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.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1847013872

9781847013873

OCLC:

1395178042