In pursuing these exigences, the panel considers whether what counts as realism may vary under different conditions, in relation to in other aesthetic categories, and due to different ways of reading. In mobilizing the term realism in this manner, we follow Jed Esty and Colleen Lye, who observe that the category of realism “marks a shared investment in theorizing the referential function of the text even as it inspires extraordinarily flexible and active ways of reconceiving and transcoding social referents” (“Peripheral Realisms Now” 278). However, where Esty and Lye invoke the global topology of centers and peripheries to explain realism, the papers on this panel work to theorize realism from other direction, starting with particular African literatures (in three languages and from three distinct regions). The panel asks: What does the history of realism and its antinomies look like when written from Africa? And, what are the possible advantages of realism in comparing different texts and thinking across different African language, national, and regional literatures?

Aaron Bartels-Swindells advances a new account of the rise of the Anglophone novel in South Africa. Bartels-Swindells situates his paper in a critical tradition associated with Auerbach, Lukács, and Bakhtin, which examines how the novel is related to other, earlier prose forms. He focuses on the realist novel because, in South Africa, it was the dominant narrative mode of the twentieth century. Bartels-Swindells proposes that the explanation for how and why this happened must encompass Sol T. Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa (1916), which, he argues, unsettles the boundary between two genres connected to realism by critics, journalism and fiction. This generic disturbance causes Native Life to sit at the junction between the liberalism of the British nineteenth-century novel and the development of the South Africa anti-apartheid novel; it thus represents a key moment in the history of imperial and so-called peripheral realism.

Brahim El Guabli also accounts for the rise of the novel, which Western literary history often conflates with the rise of realism. El Guabli’s paper focuses on the Imazighen, the Indigenous people of Tamazgha (the broader North Africa), and their language, Tamazight. In postcolonial Morocco, Algeria, and Libya, the intensive Arabization process resulted in the marginalization of everything Amazigh. However, in the 1960s, an increase in the number of educated Imazighen precipitated cultural revitalization. El Guabli foregrounds the role of literature in the ensuing Amazigh struggle to regain consciousness and achieve recognition. He argues that the production of ungal (novel) in Tamazight was not just a formal and literary project, but rather also a way to assert the Amazigh worldview and mark a shift from minority to indigeneity. Tracing the development of novelistic genres (and parallel aesthetic categories) in Tamazight, his paper recounts the genesis of an entire literary field in the last fifty years.

Susan Andrade’s paper addresses the challenge of using realism as an aesthetic category of analysis. Elaborating on an article published in the Modern Language Quarterly (2013) mentioned above, Andrade illustrates that the literary history of canonical African literature, Anglophone and Francophone, valued modernism over realism in absolute terms, regardless of what individual texts actually looked like. This has meant that contemporary novels that are undoubtedly realist have no sense of predecessor texts. All realism itself—or, (as some critics call it) all mimesis—is tied to reading strategies advanced by Homi Bhabha several decades ago. This wrongheaded argument puts theory before fiction, and above all has no space for theories of realism as advanced by as diverse critics as Auerbach, Lukács, or Schwarz. The novels themselves, whether by Dangarembga and Adichie in the contemporary period, or Achebe and Oyono from the decolonizing moment, are, she argues, examples of realism.

Together, these papers unsettle common understandings of realism by offering new readings of African realist texts and new histories and concepts of African realism.

Each of the four papers will be fifteen-to-eighteen minutes long, leaving at least fifteen minutes of unstructured discussion time.