Nation Writ Small

In The Nation Writ Small, Susan Z. Andrade focuses on the work of Africa’s first post-independence generation of novelists, explaining why male writers came to be seen as the voice of Africa’s new nation-states, and why African women writers’ commentary on national politics was overlooked. Since Africa’s early female novelists tended to write about the family, while male authors often explicitly addressed national politics, it was assumed that the women writers were uninterested in the nation and the public sphere. Challenging that notion, Andrade argues that the female authors engaged national politics through allegory. In their work, the family stands for the nation; it is the nation writ small. Interpreting fiction by women, as well as several feminist male authors, she analyzes novels by Flora Nwapa and Buchi Emecheta (Nigeria); novellas by Ousmane Sembène, Mariama Bâ, and Aminata Sow Fall (Senegal); and bildungsromans by Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe), Nuruddin Farah (Somalia), and Assia Djebar (Algeria). Andrade reveals the influence of Africa’s early women novelists on later generations of female authors, and she highlights the moment when African women began to write about macropolitics explicitly rather than allegorically.

“In her discussion of postindependence fiction (which includes texts published in both English and French), Andrade complicates a dominant story that still widely informs understandings of the development of African fiction.” - Heather Hewett, Women’s Review of Books, “In The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms, 1958–1988, Susan Andrade mounts a strong argument for reading African fiction by women (with honourable mention of male feminist authors) along a matrilineal line A phrase of Christopher Ouma’s – “heirs of a new genealogy” (103) – can be taken to sum up this worthwhile collection’s celebration and critical re-evaluation of the Achebean legacy.” - Annie Gagiano, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, “[The Nation Writ Small] is clearly argued and theoretically ambitious, aiming to place feminist literature (by male and female authors) within the conversation about nationalist politics that dominated the field in the years immediately following independence.” - Eleni Coundouriotis, Research in African Literatures, “The debates in which The Nation Writ Small aims to intercede, therefore, are both internal to African literary studies and germane to the ways in which the field represents itself to the outside world. It is here at the difficult intersection of internal debates and external perception that The Nation Writ Small will be of interest to scholars of a variety of literatures of the Global South.” - Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, “The Nation Writ Small is a brilliant work, feminist and literary scholarship of the highest order. It is a superb reading of the relationship between gender and nationalism in postcolonial African literature and culture, based on Susan Z. Andrade’s deep knowledge of African texts and cultural politics.”—Simon Gikandi, Princeton University

Susan Z. Andrade is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and the co-editor of Atlantic Cross-Currents/Transatlantiques (Africa World Press, 2001).