Bearing Witness

by Griswold, Wendy

• ISBN13: 9780691058290
• ISBN10: 0691058296
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-05-30
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

Greed, frustrated love, traffic jams, infertility, politics, polygamy. These--together with depictions of traditional village life and the impact of colonialism made familiar to Western readers through Chinua Achebe's writing--are the stuff of Nigerian fiction. Bearing Witness examines this varied content and the determined people who, against all odds, write, publish, sell, and read novels in Africa's most populous nation. Drawing on interviews with Nigeria's writers, publishers, booksellers, and readers, surveys, and a careful reading of close to 500 Nigerian novels--from lightweight romances to literary masterpieces--Wendy Griswold explores how global cultural flows and local conflicts meet in the production and reception of fiction. She argues that Nigerian readers and writers form a reading class that unabashedly believes in progress, rationality, and the slow-but-inevitable rise of a reading culture. But they do so within a society that does not support their assumptions and does not trust literature, making them modernists in a country that is simultaneously premodern and postmodern. Without privacy, reliable electricity, political freedom, or even social toleration of bookworms, these Nigerians write and read political satires, formula romances, war stories, complex gender fiction, blood-and-sex crime capers, nostalgic portraits of village life, and profound explorations of how decent people get by amid urban chaos. Bearing Witness is an inventive and moving work of cultural sociology that may be the most comprehensive sociological analysis of a literary system ever written.

Table of Contents

Figures	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
Abbreviations	xiii
Key Dates in Nigerian History	xv
To Understand the Novel in Nigeria	3	(23)
In Nigeria	6	(7)
The Novel	13	(4)
To Understand	17	(9)
The Nigerian Fiction Complex	26	(94)
The Novels	29	(9)
The Writers	38	(22)
The Business	60	(28)
The Readers	88	(32)
Nigerian Novels	120	(149)
Village and City	123	(44)
Women and Men	167	(41)
Pen and Sword	208	(30)
Crime and Politics	238	(31)
Capturing the Past and Inventing the Future	269	(6)
Appendix A. Nigerian novels	275	(13)
Appendix B. Nigerian authors	288	(4)
Appendix C. Coding forms	292	(5)
Notes	297	(26)
Bibliography	323	(10)
Index	333