Nuevas configuraciones espaciales en las novelas africanas subsaharianas de la (pos) independencia

Abstract

This article proposes a reappraisal of the post-independence Sub-Saharan African novel as a (non)fictional work. These novels carry political, social, economic, and cultural dimensions that are accompanied by corresponding spatial correlates. Unlike colonial literatures, novels from the African independence era are undergoing transformations and shifts regarding their field of enunciation, physical setting, and global context. Approaching these novels also enables engagement with a field of study that is distant both physically and culturally. The colonization of ideas — and especially the persistence of the same perspectives about the continent — compels cultural studies and geography to explore new sources of information. Accordingly, novels are considered here as study objects, as interlocutors, and as a form of fieldwork. Within them, various authors write “against the grain,” contesting meanings and subjectivities to evade the pedagogical vulgates (sets of ideas, stock phrases, and commonplaces) that s