Sound Figures in Postcolonial African Literature, 1970s to the Present

Newman, Scott Peter

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-hqcq-4w23

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Sound Figures in Postcolonial African Literature, 1970s to the Present

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This dissertation examines the impact of sound on the African literary imagination since the 1970s. I posit the sonority of postcolonial African writing in order to draw out the relatively ignored but remarkably rich stylistic innovations and political interventions oriented around sound. While the orality–textuality debate in African literary studies is largely resolved, this dissertation’s investigation of the human voice alongside non-human sounds offers fresh perspectives on the multiple meanings of phonic matter in literature. I consider how the introduction of new audio technologies, the internationalization of African music, and the social ramification of late twentieth century globalization led a new generation of authors to think about sound’s social, phenomenological, and material signification through writing. My project presents a repertoire of what I call sound figures: textual strategies that embody the extra-linguistic features of the human voice. I draw on sound studies and postcolonial theory to investigate works by Dambudzo Marechera, Sony Labou Tansi, Yvonne Vera, Patrice Nganang and Binyavanga Wainaina. My first chapter compares the grotesque sound figures in Dambudzo Marechera’s novella House of Hunger and Sony Labou Tansi’s dictator novels La vie et demie and Les septs solitudes de Lorsa Lopez. I argue that screams and stutters in these texts render the violence of (post)coloniality. Simultaneously, they prize sonic expressive immediacy and parody the racist notion of black vocal illegibility. Next, I trace the merging of historical acoustics and embodied memory as echoes in Yvonne Vera’s fiction. I adopt a practice of historical acoustemology in my analysis of the novels Nehanda and Butterfly Burning to show how Vera challenges masculinist visions of history. My final two chapters jointly articulate a poetics of the crowd in the work of one Anglophone and one Francophone author. In chapter three, I consider rumor as a sound figure that metonymically represents the crowd in Patrice Nganang’s novel Temps de chien. Drawing on interdisciplinary social theories of rumor, I uncover the narratological influence of rumor on the African novel and its abiding use in sonically rendering plural voices in the novel. In chapter four, I interpret the crowd’s constitution by ordinary sound figures in Binyavanga Wainaina’s memoir One Day I Will Write About This Place. I highlight the polyphonic and multilingual techniques of “ordinariness” that constitute the autobiographical listening subject’s place in the crowd. Through close readings of texts in English and French from Cameroun, Congo-Brazzaville, Kenya, and Zimbabwe alongside auditory material in transnational cultural contexts, I demonstrate how authors have innovated sound figures to refract and rethink the postcolonial condition.

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