Proximate historiographies in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17159/tl.v58i1.8284Keywords:
historicism, historical novel, metahistoriographical fiction, proximity, Ugandan historical novelAbstract
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s novel Kintu (2014) places alongside forms of historical fiction familiar to European readers, a form of historical causality that obeys a different logic, namely, one governed by the long-term efficacity of a curse uttered in pre-colonial Buganda. The novel can be read as a historiographical experiment. It sets in a relationship of ‘proximity’ linear historical narration as understood within the framework of European historicism and the genre of the historical novel theorised by Lukács, and notions of magical ‘verbal-incantatory’ and ‘somatic’ history that elude the logic of hegemonic European historicism but nonetheless cohabit the same fictional space. Makumbi’s novel thus sketches an ‘entanglement’ of various historical temporalities that are articulated upon one another within the capacious realm of fiction, thereby reinforcing a cosmic ontology and axiology of reciprocity and fluid duality whose infringement in fact triggers the curse at the origin of the narrative.
Downloads
References
Achebe, Chinua. “‘Chi’ in Igbo Cosmology.” African Philosophy: An Anthology, edited by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze. Wiley-Blackwell, 1998, pp. 67–72.
Anderson, Greg. The Realness of Things Past: Ancient Greece and Ontological History. Oxford U P, 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaa460.
Austin, John L. How to do Things with Words. Clarendon, 1962.
Blundell, Geoffrey. Nqabayo’s Nomansland: San Rock Art and the Somatic Past. U of Uppsala/African and Comparative Archaeology, 2004.
Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Trans. Siân Reynolds. Vol. 2. Harper Collins, 1972.
Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. Routledge, 1997.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.
Bwa Mwesigire, Bwesigye. “Beyond the Afropolitan Postnation: The Contemporaneity of Jennifer Makumbi’s Kintu.” Research in African Literatures vol. 49, no. 1, 2018, pp. 103–16. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/reseafrilite.49.1.07.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton U P, 2000.
Culler, Jonathan. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Routledge, 2001.
Evers, Stuart. “Shadows of the Past.” The Spectator. 10 March 2018. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/shadows-of-the-past.
Finnegan, Ruth. Oral Literature in Africa. Oxford U P, 1970.
Fontein, Joost. “Graves, ruins, and belonging: towards an anthropology of proximity.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS) vol. 17, no. 4, 2001, pp. 706–27.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. U of Chicago P, 2016.
Gilbert, Erik & Jonathon T. Reynolds. Africa in World History: From Prehistory to the Present. Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2008.
Hegel, Georg W. F. The Philosophy of History. Trans. J. Sibree. Dover, 1956.
Iheka, Cajetan. Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature. Cambridge U P, 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7202/1073881ar.
Isegawa, Moses. Abyssinian Chronicles. Picador, 2000.
Jameson, Fredric. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text no. 15, 1986, pp. 65–88. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/466493.
Jauß, Hans R. Literaturgeschichte als Provokation. Suhrkamp, 1970.
Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Trans. Keith Tribe. MIT P, 1985.
Lipenga, Ken. “The (un)making of a man: fathers and sons in the African novel.” Journal of Humanities vol. 25, no. 2, 2017, 26–44.
Mahjoub, Jamal. In the Hour of Signs. Heinemann, 1996.
Makumbi, Jennifer N. Kintu. Oneworld, 2018.
Makumbi, Jennifer N. The First Woman. Oneworld, 2020.
Makumbi, Jennifer N. & Alexia Underwood. “So Many Ways of Knowing: An Interview with Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Author of ‘Kintu’.” Los Angeles Review of Books. 31 Aug. 2017. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/so-many-ways-of-knowing-an-interview-with-jennifer-nansubuga-makumbi-author-of-kintu/.
Makumbi, Jennifer N. & Russell West-Pavlov. Email correspondence. 20 Apr. 2020.
Makumbi-Morris, Jennifer N. “Kintu.” PhD thesis in Creative Writing. Lancaster University, 2012.
Mbembe, Achille. “Africa: Continent of the Future.” Swissfuture: Magazin für Zukunftsmonitoring vol. 40 no. 3, 2013, pp. 11–3.
Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. U of California P, 2001.
Morris, David R. N. M. “Dreikopsland and ‘the Rain’s Magic Power’: History and Landscape in a New Interpretation of a Northern Cape Rock Engraving Site.” MA thesis. University of the Western Cape, 2002.
Nabutanyi, Edgar F. “Contestations through same-sex desire in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu.” Routledge Handbook of African Literature, edited by Moradewun Adejunmobi & Carli Coetzee. Routledge, 2019, pp. 369–82. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315229546-25.
Naipaul, Vidiadhar S. A Bend in the River. Vintage, 2000.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Trans. Robert Richardson & Anne O’Byrne. Stanford U P, 2000.
Neale, Caroline. Writing ‘Independent’ History: African Historiography, 1960–1980. Greenwood, 1985.
Nuttall, Sarah. Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-Apartheid. Wits U P, 2004.
Nyamnjoh, Francis B. “Incompleteness: Frontier Africa and the Currency of Conviviality.” Journal of Asian and African Studies vol. 52, no. 3, 2015, pp. 253–70.
Ogot, Bethwell A. Building on the Indigenous: Selected Essays 1981–1998. Anyange, 1999.
Olúpò̩nà, Jacob. City of 201 Gods: Ilé-Ifè̩ in Time, Space, and the Imagination. U of California P, 2011.
Palangyo, Peter K. Dying in the Sun. Heinemann, 1968.
Peek, Philip M., ed. Twins in African and Diaspora Cultures: Double Trouble, Twice Blessed. Indiana U P, 2011. https://doi.org/10.3202/caa.reviews.2017.112.
Prashad, Vijay. The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. Verso, 2014.
Reid, Richard J. A History of Modern Uganda. Cambridge U P, 2017.
Reid, Richard J. Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda: Economy, Society and Warfare in the Nineteenth Century. James Currey, 2002.
Renne, Elisha P. & Misty L. Bastian. “Reviewing Twinship in Africa.” Ethnology vol. 40, no. 1, 2001, pp. 1–11.
Ryman, Geoff. “Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi. 100 African Writers of SFF—Part Two: Writers in the U.K.” Strange Horizons. 2 March 2017. http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/100african/jennifer-nansubuga-makumbi/.
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. Paradigm, 2014. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18617/liinc.v11i1.799.
Searle, John R. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge U P 1969.
Swift, Graham. Waterland. Picador, 1984.
Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. Routledge, 1993.
Werner, Michael & Bénédicte Zimmermann. “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity.” History and Theory vol. 45, no. 1, 2006, pp. 30–50.
West-Pavlov, Russell. Eastern African Literatures: Towards an Aesthetics of Proximity. Oxford U P, 2018.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Tydskrif vir Letterkunde
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6465-6584
.png){kind=spacer}