ABSTRACT
This chapter has a two-part structure. The first part presents the argument for the validity, necessity/importance, and artistry of contemporary African authors’ choice of English as medium for works of creative fiction and takes issue with certain theoretical-critical positions vis-à-vis such texts, whereas the second section, in the chronological order of their publication, illustrates how these particular novels manifest the three authors’ implicit participation in an ongoing debate concerning the assumed tasks of the continent’s creative writers and their use of English, addressing the worth of their works. Whereas the first part engages with some examples of theoretical and literary-critical material on a more general level, the next part of the chapter discusses in turn – both by means of the three authors’ own statements, scholars’ comments on their novels and on similar or related texts, and analysed citations from the chosen novels – Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come (2004), Aminatta Forna’s Ancestor Stones (2006), and Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (2019). The chapter concludes by assessing what these novels have achieved and suggesting a need for postcolonial theory and World Anglophone Studies to adapt to what creative writers are doing in the various ways they address the postcolonial present in Africa and beyond.
