Complicity and Responsibility in Contemporary African Writing

Minna Johanna Niemi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Language and Culture at UiT-The Arctic University of Norway.

• Introduction 1. Challenging Moral Corruption in the Postcolony: Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Hannah Arendt’s Notion of Individual Responsibility 2. Totalitarian Politics and Individual Responsibility in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians 3. Intellectual Commitment and Complicity in South-African Resistance Writing during Apartheid: J. M. Coetzee and André Brink 4. Uprooted Intellectuals: Multidirectional Identifications and Traumatic Distress in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions 5. Seductive Promises of Wealth: Ideological Misrecognition and Avoidance of Responsibility in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, The Book of Not and This Mournable Body 6. Representing Childhood Complicity and Hiding behind the Law in Michiel Heyns’s The Children’s Day 7. War, Guilt and Childhood Fantasies of Aggression in Nuruddin Farah’s Maps 8. Western Readers and African Narratives: Towards Complicitous and Responsible Reading Strategies

Complicity and Responsibility in Contemporary African Writing succeeds in applying accurate and original thinking into the investigation of essay and fictional approaches to individual complicity. Niemi deserves kudos for offering a theoretically firm and nuanced approach to the expanding corpus of complicity studies in African cultural and literary politics. The ideas she draws from political philosophy and literary theory make her book an important source for scholars of African literature, postcolonial studies, and peace and conflict studies.Charles Kipn'eno Rono, Universität Tübingen, Germany.