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African Literature and US Empire - Katherine Hallemeier

African Literature and US Empire

Postcolonial Optimism in Nigerian and South African Writing
Buch | Softcover
208 Seiten
2026
Edinburgh University Press (Verlag)
978-1-3995-1617-4 (ISBN)
CHF 34,90 inkl. MwSt
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Demonstrates how African literature grapples with the enforced optimism of US empire that circulates in postcolonial nations
Postcolonialism has long been associated with post-nationalism. Yet, the persistence of nation-oriented literatures from within the African postcolony and its diasporas registers how dreams of national becoming endure. In this fascinating new study, Hallemeier brings together African literary studies, affect studies and US empire studies, to challenge chronologies that chart a growing disillusionment with the postcolonial nation and national development across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Nigerian and South African writings in African Literature and US Empire, while often attuned to the trans- and extra- national, repeatedly scrutinise why visions of national exceptionalism, signified by a ‘pan-African’ Nigeria and ‘new’ South Africa, remain stubbornly affecting, despite decades of disillusionment with national governments beholden to a neocolonial global order. In these fictions, optimistic forms of nationalism cannot be reduced to easily critiqued state-sanctioned discourses of renewal and development. They are also circulated through experiences of embodied need, quotidian aspiration and transnational, pan-African relationship.

Katherine Hallemeier is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Geneva. She is the author of J.M. Coetzee and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism (2013). Her research on contemporary anglophone African fiction has appeared in journals such as Comparative Literature, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, and ariel.

Acknowledgments Introduction: Postcolonial Optimism

PART I: NIGERIAN LITERATURE AND PAN-AFRICAN OPTIMISM

1. Pan-African American Dreams of the First Republic

2. The United States of ‘Emelika' and Literature of the Second Republic

3. The Pursuit of Happiness After the Third Republic

PART II: COMPOUNDING OPTIMISM IN SOUTH AFRICAN FICTION

4. A Tiny Ripple of Hope Between Two Worlds

5. The American Dreams in The Heart of Redness

6. The Last Best Hope of White Wahala

Coda: The Dream of the Postcolonial Future

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Erscheint lt. Verlag 1.1.2026
Verlagsort Edinburgh
Sprache englisch
Maße 156 x 234 mm
Themenwelt Geschichte Teilgebiete der Geschichte Wirtschaftsgeschichte
Geisteswissenschaften Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft Anglistik / Amerikanistik
Geisteswissenschaften Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
Sozialwissenschaften Politik / Verwaltung
ISBN-10 1-3995-1617-5 / 1399516175
ISBN-13 978-1-3995-1617-4 / 9781399516174
Zustand Neuware
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