Overview

This book explores how African fiction offers revolutionary models for understanding temporality and reimagining history in our catastrophe-ridden twenty-first century. Examining eight works from diverse African writers – ranging from Achebe’s classic Things Fall Apart, via works by Coetzee and Dangarembga, to contemporary novels by Makumbi, Mengiste, Mujila, Owuor and Serpell – the book demonstrates how these authors eschew linear Eurocentric historicism in favour of bold, immediate confrontations with history in the making and its temporal fabric. Drawing from fiction across Africa, the book proposes a composite theory of ‘proximate historiographies’ encompassing the entangled, plaited, expansive, interpellative, somatic and kinetic temporalities that emerge from these pathbreaking works. Taken together, they reveal Africa as a laboratory of futurity rather than a place outside history. The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of African literature, postcolonial studies and contemporary fiction. It will also appeal to those working in environmental humanities, decolonial theory and innovative approaches to historiography.

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9781041283669

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Reviews

Russell West-Pavlov’s Proximate Histories deals innovatively in the colliding and insurgent temporalities of modern and contemporary African literature. Excitingly, fiction is the mode par excellence that exemplifies and makes available for retrieval these divergent—suppressed yet pressing—temporal models. Works ranging from African classics such as Achebe to major novels of the past decade, agitate and invigorate non-sequential, tangled time-frames, thus providing a radically alternative vision to the time of northern authoritarianism and global climate catastrophe that besets us all. - Elleke Boehmer, University of Oxford; author of Southern Imagining and Ice Shock, both 2025. West-Pavlov reads eight outstanding works of African fiction for the proximate and multiple modes of temporality that collocate or collide in a single protagonist or narrative. Taking us far beyond the constricted zones of industrial and colonial time, we encounter temporal forms that are more fluid, inclusive, creative and life-enhancing. An exciting and necessary read. - Sarah Nuttall, University of the Witwatersrand

Author Information

Russell West-Pavlov is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Tübingen. Major publications include Eastern African Literatures (Oxford, 2018), AfrikAffekt (Narr, 2020), Heterotropic Theatres (Narr, 2025) and the edited volume The Global South and Literature (Cambridge, 2018).

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