ABSTRACT
Most of Aaron Bady’s growing set of interviews with contemporary African writers – conducted and laboriously transcribed over the past several years – could have happened only with the assistance of Skype. While some of these cross-regional and interdisciplinary exchanges have appeared as occasional publications, they also, collectively, constitute two substantial electronic collections curated in 2014–15 by Bady himself, for Yale’s Post45 (https://post45.research.yale.edu) and The New Inquiry (https://thenewinquiry.com). Both collections provocatively suggest new directions in the modern currents and currencies of African writing, continental and diasporic alike, as well as the innovative challenges that emergent media impose; Bady addresses these same concerns in the remarks that follow. He engages with topics ranging from the dubious celebrity conferred by the circuit of literary prizes and competitions to the isolationist risks entailed by vernacular emphases on an authenticity that can threaten political secessionism, generational successionism, or self-defeating cultural solipsisms. Popularly blogging and tweeting under the moniker of zunguzungu, Bady, however, resists any such fragmentary abandon in his interviews, engaging instead the very dissonances and symphonic chorales that animate contemporary African writing and critical global discourse. Seeking to probe the new engagements of the interview as a genre, we have interviewed an interviewer of repute and consequence. Our hope in this undertaking is to take the pulse of the field of African literature in relation to African literary scholarship in particular and its ramifications for the discipline of comparative literature more generally.
