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The Legacies of Empire in Nwaubani's I Do Not Come to You by Chance and Mengestu's All Our Names

The Legacies of Empire in Nwaubani's I Do Not Come to You by Chance and Mengestu's All Our Names While the Black Lives Matter movement is widely recognized and supported in Africa, its framing prioritizes experiences of anti‐Blackness in the United States and the Black diaspora. This is partly owing to the movement's genesis as a direct response to domestic forms of anti‐Blackness, including police brutality, disproportionate Black incarceration, and systemic inequalities, but also because, as Jemima Pierre argues, Africa is often perceived as “the site of racial otherness,” making engagements with racialization in Africa appear redundant. This paper considers how two contemporary African writers—Nigerian Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani and Ethiopian American Dinaw Mengestu—comment on anti‐Blackness in Africa. This article views Nwaubani's I Do Not Come to You by Chance and Mengestu's All Our Names as using trickster figures to critique the racially inflected narratives of modernity, Euro‐American imperialism, and neoliberal capital in Africa. In the process, they invite us to join the dots between domestic patterns of anti‐Black violence in the Black diaspora and Euro‐American destruction of African lives through the debilitating systems of slavery, colonialism, the Cold War, and neoliberal capital in Africa. The two novels’ portraits challenge the Black Lives Matter movement's thin engagement with anti‐Blackness in Africa by demonstrating how historic and ongoing dehumanization of Africans serves to normalize similar dehumanization of Afro‐descended people across the globe. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Novel Duke University Press

The Legacies of Empire in Nwaubani's I Do Not Come to You by Chance and Mengestu's All Our Names

Musila, Grace A.; Mitchell, Justin; Marx, John
Novel , Volume 55 (1) – May 1, 2022
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Copyright
Copyright © 2022 by Novel, Inc.
ISSN
0029-5132
eISSN
1945-8509
DOI
10.1215/00295132-9614955
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

While the Black Lives Matter movement is widely recognized and supported in Africa, its framing prioritizes experiences of anti‐Blackness in the United States and the Black diaspora. This is partly owing to the movement's genesis as a direct response to domestic forms of anti‐Blackness, including police brutality, disproportionate Black incarceration, and systemic inequalities, but also because, as Jemima Pierre argues, Africa is often perceived as “the site of racial otherness,” making engagements with racialization in Africa appear redundant. This paper considers how two contemporary African writers—Nigerian Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani and Ethiopian American Dinaw Mengestu—comment on anti‐Blackness in Africa. This article views Nwaubani's I Do Not Come to You by Chance and Mengestu's All Our Names as using trickster figures to critique the racially inflected narratives of modernity, Euro‐American imperialism, and neoliberal capital in Africa. In the process, they invite us to join the dots between domestic patterns of anti‐Black violence in the Black diaspora and Euro‐American destruction of African lives through the debilitating systems of slavery, colonialism, the Cold War, and neoliberal capital in Africa. The two novels’ portraits challenge the Black Lives Matter movement's thin engagement with anti‐Blackness in Africa by demonstrating how historic and ongoing dehumanization of Africans serves to normalize similar dehumanization of Afro‐descended people across the globe.

Journal

Novel – Duke University Press

Published: May 1, 2022

References

  • The World and What It Isn't: Dinaw Mengestu's All Our Names
    Bady, Aaron
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  • Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation Statement about Violent Conflict in Ethiopia
  • Black Lives Matter Stands in Solidarity with #ENDSARS Movement against Police Brutality
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  • Postcolonial Transitions in Africa: Decolonization in West Africa and Present Day South Africa
    Decker, Stephanie
  • Narrative Moment and Self-Anthropologizing Discourse
    Ede, Amatoritsero
  • 8 Years Strong
  • Race, Empire, and the Historians
    Fyfe, Christopher
  • A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatterMovement by Alicia Garza
    Garza, Alicia
  • Herstory
    Garza, Alicia
  • The Nigerian ‘419’ Advance Fee Scams: Prank or Peril?
    Glickman, Harvey
  • Global Humanitarianism, Race, and the Spectacle of the African Corpse in Current Western Representations of the Rwandan Genocide
    Härting, Heike
  • The Extroverted African Novel
    Julien, Eileen Moretti, Franco
  • Beyond Black Lives Matter
    Kelley, Robin D. G.
  • The Politics of Sentimentality and Postsentimentality
    Khor, Lena
  • Not a Click Away: Joseph Kony in the Real World
    Mengestu, Dinaw
  • Contextualising Extractivism in Africa
    Pereira, Charmaine Tsikata, Dzodzi
  • Provincializing Europe: Towards a Post-colonial Reconstruction
    Prasad, Anshuman
  • Nigerian Scam E-Mails and the Charms of Capital
    Smith, Andrew
  • Remembering the Past's Future: Anti-imperialist Nostalgia and Some Versions of the Third World
    Wenzel, Jennifer
  • Novel and History, Plot and Plantation
    Wynter, Sylvia
  • Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, its Overrepresentation—An Argument
    Wynter, Sylvia
  • The World and What It Isn't: Dinaw Mengestu's All Our Names
    Bady, Aaron
  • About
  • Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation Statement about Violent Conflict in Ethiopia
  • Black Lives Matter Stands in Solidarity with #ENDSARS Movement against Police Brutality
  • Strange(r) Encounters: I Do Not Come to You by Chance and the Rhetoric of 419
    Cesare, Nicole
  • Postcolonial Transitions in Africa: Decolonization in West Africa and Present Day South Africa
    Decker, Stephanie
  • Narrative Moment and Self-Anthropologizing Discourse
    Ede, Amatoritsero
  • 8 Years Strong
  • Race, Empire, and the Historians
    Fyfe, Christopher
  • A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatterMovement by Alicia Garza
    Garza, Alicia
  • Herstory
    Garza, Alicia
  • The Nigerian ‘419’ Advance Fee Scams: Prank or Peril?
    Glickman, Harvey
  • Global Humanitarianism, Race, and the Spectacle of the African Corpse in Current Western Representations of the Rwandan Genocide
    Härting, Heike
  • The Extroverted African Novel
    Julien, Eileen Moretti, Franco
  • Beyond Black Lives Matter
    Kelley, Robin D. G.
  • The Politics of Sentimentality and Postsentimentality
    Khor, Lena
  • Not a Click Away: Joseph Kony in the Real World
    Mengestu, Dinaw
  • Contextualising Extractivism in Africa
    Pereira, Charmaine Tsikata, Dzodzi
  • Provincializing Europe: Towards a Post-colonial Reconstruction
    Prasad, Anshuman
  • Nigerian Scam E-Mails and the Charms of Capital
    Smith, Andrew
  • Remembering the Past's Future: Anti-imperialist Nostalgia and Some Versions of the Third World
    Wenzel, Jennifer
  • Novel and History, Plot and Plantation
    Wynter, Sylvia
  • Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, its Overrepresentation—An Argument
    Wynter, Sylvia