Contemporary African Novels as Narratives of the World Risk Society

Abstract

Contemporary African writers depict the uncertainties, risks, threats, existential conditions, and (dis)continuities of late modernity. The migration literature genre most pointedly depicts the characteristics of what Ulrich Beck calls the world risk society. In his book, World Risk Society, the German sociologist Ulrich Beck argues that the successes of globalization and technological progress have undermined the certainties and assurances that early industrial modernity promised. According to him, the “collective patterns of life, progress, and controllability, full employment and exploitation of nature that were typical of this first modernity have now been undermined by five processes: globalization, individualization, gender revolution, underemployment and global risks (as an ecological crisis and the crash of global financial markets)” (2009, 2). These disruptions are not place-bound or limited to the Western world; they are global. This study examines the representation of these disruptions, uncertainties, and risks in five selected African novels. It argues that contemporary African migration literatures are not only aware of the risks and uncertainties of late modernity that Beck discusses but that the endemic ambiguities of this late modernity occupy significant thematic fabrics in these novels, and they fictionally recreate the ongoing social, cultural, political, ecological, and geographical process of risk as they manifest in the world. Within this narrative frame, characters negotiate new ambiguous and complex existential and ontological conditions that once appeared to be specific, knowable, controllable, and calculable in early modernity. The study analyzes Tendai Huchu’s The Maestro, The Magistrate & the Mathematician (Zimbabwe/United Kingdom 2015); Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference (Nigeria/United Kingdom 2012); Olumide Popoola’s When We Speak of Nothing (Nigeria/United Kingdom 2017); Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday (Nigeria 2015); and Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers (Cameroon/United States 2016).