Taking Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s maxim to “decolonize the mind” as a point of departure, we will convene a special session to present new work by emerging scholars aiming to destabilize the punitive dichotomy between “modernity” and “indigeneity” in African literature. Our special session addresses African authors who play with the formal boundaries of realism in dynamic ways. This panel is timely because it coincides with the increasing recognition of the aesthetic and cultural impacts of transnationalism and migration and underlines the significant effort by literary scholars in utilizing global modernism as an appropriate yardstick to measure African literatures in the twenty-first century. While early postcolonial theorists like Frantz Fanon argued that styles like surrealism or modernism were inherently European, since the earliest days of African literature experimentations beyond realism have been integral to African writing practices. Furthermore, as Fredric Jameson notes, realism itself is far from a neutral or indigenous form. Consequently, the dated view of African literatures governed by binaries of Eurocentric modernists and Indigenous traditionalists, underdeveloped townships and innovated city hubs, backward village folks versus trendy urban settlers have begun to give way to a much more nuanced and complicated picture of “combined and uneven development” in the African scene.

In the past two decades, distinguished scholars such as Simon Gikandi, Yogita Goyal, Cajetan Iheka, Neil Lazarus, Ato Quayson, and Chika Okeke-Agulu have employed insights from postcolonial studies to scrutinize “irrealism” and “realism” as problematics in African studies. Currently, the number of studies published corresponds to growing interest in bringing studies of alternate realisms (from the modernist to the magical) in sync with African literary scholarship. Examples include Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses’s Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism: Anglophone Literature, 1950 to the Present (2019); Monica Popescu’s At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War (2020); Simon Gikandi's "Realism, Romance, and the Problem of African Literary History" (2012), and Sarali Gintsburg and Kenneth Usongo's Magical Realism in Africa (2024).

We envision the proposed session as a continuing conversation with the above scholars on the role of irrealism in African writing. We will provide a stimulating forum for discussing ongoing innovations in African literary form. Our panel will follow a chronological approach, beginning in the 1960s with Ifrah Javaid’s paper, “Other-Worldly Encounters in Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure.” Examining the complexities and perplexities of the colonial encounter through its protagonist’s philosophical journey from the Qur’anic school to the French school, Kane’s turn away from realism allows him to foreground the tensions of colonial-historical representation. Javaid argues that when Kane adopts a supernatural or "divine-voice" after the death of his novel’s protagonist, it is this fantastical focal shift that reveals the traumatic splitting of the self under colonization. Javaid will explore the use of the “divine-voice” in the novel, asking if there exists within representations of the other-worldly something that strikes a truer chord than realist storytelling.

Moving into contemporary experiments in African fiction, Anmol Sahni’s “Historiographic Metafiction and Irrealist Experimentations: Writing Back to Uganda in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu” argues that Makumbi’s historiographic metafiction unsettles realism by representing the political contingencies of gender, sexuality and nationalism. For Sahni, Kintu is a metafictional novel wherein the family is metonymically portrayed as the “nation writ small” (Susan Andrade). By situating Kintu within global modernisms and anticolonial literary traditions, Sahni’s paper contributes to broader conversations about irrealist African writing and its role in addressing colonial and postcolonial conditions within the Global South.

Our panel ends with the growing importance of Afro-surrealism and Afrofuturism, in a paper delivered by Oluwafunmilayo Akinpelu. In “Balogun Ojetade’s Moses: How Afrofuturism puts Neo-Victorianism in ‘Proper’ Historical Context,” Akinpelu writes against the systematic erasures of African experience. Akinpelu argues that Ojetade’s Afrofuturism pulls heavily from African cosmology to retell well-trod stories about Harriet Tubman and the American South. This contemporary turn to speculative fiction shows the growing ways that African authors test realism’s limits.

In keeping with the presidential theme of “Family Resemblances,” this is a panel that traverses countries and decades in order to elucidate some of the critical experiments African authors have made with realism and literary form. Weaving from Senegal to Uganda, Nigeria to the United States, these papers all challenge binary conceptions of African literature that understand social realism as political, and irrealism/modernism as apolitical. Our panel brings together panelists from various universities and with different backgrounds, in the hope that these encounters will spark further questions about postcolonial studies, global modernism, and African literatures.