Reading for the road : routes through African literatures

Abstract

The central concern of this thesis is formal representations of the road in African literature. The thesis is cast within the field of infrastructuralism, a branch of literary study proposed by Michael Rubenstein, Bruce Robbins and Sophia Beal (2018), applying the new formalist theories of Caroline Levine (2015) while conducting an approach related to Isabel Hofmeyr, Sarah Nuttall and Charne Lavery’s theory of ‘Reading for Water’ (2022). These frame the road as both a material and conceptual construct. An exploration of the African road precedes a detailed unpacking of the materiality of the infrastructure. Subsequently, the road is traced through three African novels in investigations I have termed ‘intersections’, referring to the meeting point of roads as a departure for analysis. I focus on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood (1977), tracing the road through the newly independent Kenya. The promises of independence are aligned with the affordances of the material road as a measure of its fulfilment. In Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) I examine different experiences and directionality of the road, analysing this against the political conditions that led to the oppressive apartheid regime. The construction of the road is investigated in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991). I study the road as a magical, shifting form, setting its construction alongside Nigeria’s independence. In these intersections, different theoretical approaches are used to analyse the material infrastructure as a method of surfacing discourse surrounding the social and political conditions presented in the literary space.