The Audrey Richards annual lecture in African studies

Fri 9 March 2012

King's College

The basic premise of this lecture is that what has come to be known as the crisis of postcolonial society in Africa is not simply about the collapse of the infrastructure of modernity, nor the extroverted nature of African knowledge, but the historical process by which intellectuals were formed on the continent. I will argue that the most influential intellectual class in Africa was produced on the margins of the colonial system of power, and that their most important mode of expression was “creative writing.” I will focus on how the written narrative became the mode through which modern African identities could be imagined, African life ordered, and a new social order narrated both within and outside colonialism. My lecture will focus on a group of “organic” intellectuals, newly literature conscripts to modernity, whose work was crucial in establishing African histories and identities.

Cost: free