Fatoumata Seck

Writing Revolution brings into focus revolution literature as a subgenre within modern African literature and outlines its constitutive logics, aesthetic practices, and ideological underpinnings. This subgenre, I argue, not only represents revolutionary movements in Africa through literary productions and print cultures but also serves as a creative space for these movements’ political imagination, their enactment, and their remembrance and reinterpretation over time.

Situated within the protracted formation of modern African literature and the unfolding of decolonization on the African continent, this subgenre challenges the conventional periodization of the field, which is characterized as a linear progression from colonial to postcolonial literature. Writing Revolution eschews the linguistic divide among Anglophone, Francophone, Lusophone, and African language literatures by applying a comparative frame to examine poetry, patriotic songs, manifestos, periodicals, freedom fighter memoirs, plays, and historical novels in Afrophone and Europhone languages that challenge conventional interpretations and foster new dialogues.

While revolution literature as a subgenre is anchored in the poetics of national-liberation struggles, it reaches beyond the nation-state and maps the transnational geographies, alliances, and political imaginaries forged in the crucible of decolonization and the Cold War. The texts under study circulated through transnational publishing hubs and official and underground print cultures of the mid-twentieth century. Writing Revolution therefore makes visible the challenges and opportunities involved in researching such texts, while also attending to their precarious status as archives that enfold literary form, political imaginaries, networks, and historical moments that may soon be lost to time, as those who preserve and remember them are gradually disappearing.