The Elite Africa Project would be nowhere without the work of talented scholars, both those who support the project and those who inspire our work. In this series, the Elite Africa Project interviews scholars about their work across different domains of power and what they think a deeper study of Africa’s elites can add to our understanding of the continent. Here is Part 1 of my interview with Professor of English Jeanne-Marie Jackson.

This is the sixth entry in our Scholar Spotlight series. You may also be interested in our previous interviews with Sishuwa Sishuwa, Nwando Achebe, Josias Maririmba, Dickson Eyoh, and Gerald Bareebe.

So do you want to start by introducing yourself and your background?

Sure! I am a professor of English at Johns Hopkins, as you know, but I have a background in Comparative Literature – I wasn’t trained as an undergraduate or graduate student in an English department. I wasn’t trained in African Studies either, which makes me something of an oddity within that field. That said, the African humanities is mainly where I think of myself as sitting, and where my work seems to get the most uptake. Because I was not trained in an area studies program, or even in the study of Africa from an interdisciplinary perspective, my point of entry to thinking about the continent is different. I came to it by way of a few different literary traditions, in multiple languages, and now work across literature, philosophy, and intellectual history. So I'm kind of an odd duck, and I am still a literary comparatist at heart.

I embrace this sense of outsiderness now, although for years I felt like a bit of a weirdo. I have a different set of standards and methodological points of entry to “African literature” than most of my colleagues in that field, who came to it more often through postcolonial studies as a subfield of English. I work from particular places on the African continent to bigger philosophical, intellectual, and historical questions. My approach is very “dot-connecting,” and of course in Comparative Literature that also entails substantial language training as the bare minimum threshold for getting a degree.

I should also maybe say a bit about the background to my background, so to speak. My undergraduate degree was in Russian, with a minor in History, and I also did a lot of college coursework in German as well as Ukrainian. I then pivoted to studying South Africa and Afrikaans at the beginning of graduate school through that Russian connection, because I noticed that South African writers were unusually absorbed by thinking about the Russian 19th century. In every possible way I am kind of a misfit toy, in my major field, but I'm passionate about it nonetheless.

Is there a reason that South African writers were so interested in 19th century Russia?

Yeah, I wrote a whole book about it! That was my first book, which is called South African Literature's Russian Soul. It came out in 2015, and it is all about how the Russian 19th century appealed to South African writers, both during and after apartheid. It really moves from the so-called emergency years – so, the 1980s in South Africa – up through its post-colonial and post-transitional periods. The connection stems from the idea that Russia was always the outsider to Europe, and Russian writers were formatively self-conscious about this fact in the 19th century, when the Russian novel was coming into what we now know as its quintessential, “Golden Age” form – your Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev trifecta. And this means that the Russian understanding of what realist narrative is, fundamentally, in many ways very different from what it was in high European culture – French, German, and to some degree even British literature. Russia didn’t narrate its stability to itself, or the consolidation of its bourgeoisie; it mostly did the opposite. All these things that we think about as being the hallmarks of 19th century intellectual and literary history get turned inside-out there.

Russian intellectuals were obsessed by talking about how sick Russia was, how pathological, and spent a lot of time thinking about how they were ever going to make any kind of coherent social formation work. That spoke very strongly to South African writers in a period when that country felt like it was pretty much coming apart at the seams. There was an echo of tremendous fragmentation.

So on the one hand, how can you possibly talk about South African literature as anything that has any coherent identity? But through apartheid, the tradition was able to find enough of a sense of purpose to sort of bring itself by force into being. Thinking about the Russian 19th century as their prototype was a rare point of shared intellectual interest across South Africa’s major racial divisions.

Okay, so as you know, the Elite Africa Project is trying to look at an area of the world that's often seen as on the margins, acted upon by outside actors, to try and study elites. We have these six different domains that we look at to study how power works on the African continent. So one question we ask everybody, then, is how do you define elites?

Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. And I thought about it a lot before this conversation. Let me just say first that this is such an important project. When Peter Lewis told me about it, I just thought, yes, finally. There's this longstanding assumption in the States, and I think arguably in Anglophone academies more broadly, that you study Africa when you are interested in Africa as a crucible of some sort. Africans have to demonstrate sufficient marginalization, sufficient need, to be worthy of serious study, and I very much understand why – I don't think that a pull toward global justice is an out and out bad thing. The field of African Studies as it exists today has come into a strongly activist sense of itself. And plenty of good work emerges from this orientation, but it also means that there is often a partial or tendentious view of what people in Africa are actually like, and how African politics work. Africa is full of all types, not all of them disempowered.

The term “elite” has been weaponized all over the world to essentially mean “elitist.” It’s certainly being weaponized in the U.S. right now – I mean, you've seen our recent election results. But “elite” in this way becomes an all-purpose insult that you can apply to whomever you think is a force for ill, or impeding change, and then throwing it around can sometimes let people off the hook for seriously trying to understand how power or representation works. The “elite” is not one thing. Even seeing the way that your project has divided the category into multiple subdivisions is refreshing, because some of them don’t sit well together. Many aesthetic elites, for example, would vigorously deny that the term applies to them. Sometimes they're right, and sometimes they're wrong! But this initiative to me is basically saying, “Okay, there's power here. There's power everywhere. You're not going to get around that. We need to figure out as scholars precisely what that means, where, and for whom.”

I think that my own sense of the term elite is that it refers to people who have to answer for their status. That demand of course is often associated with actual political power, official political power, or at least with economic power. And to some degree that makes sense, because most “aesthetic elites,” including writers, are not making tons of money, save for the few with million-dollar advances. Even a relatively commercially successful writer brings home a pittance compared to what Dangote is making, or the Ampofos, or the Motsepes. But you can’t just use income as a threshold. What you can use, I think, is the idea of people being in enough of a position of influence that they feel pressured or compelled – for whatever reason, by whatever force – to justify it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this standard in the context of the Gold Coast, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, because that's where I'm working these days. I start feeling quite contrarian when someone goes after J.E. Casely Hayford or John Mensah Sarbah, these colonial-era lawyer statesmen figures, for being elite or elitist. They certainly were “elite” in their moment, but they have virtually nothing in common with the kind of Fanonian comprador class that came after independence. Casely Hayford for example was funding much of his civic and political work himself, maintaining a busy, very local kind of legal practice in what today is Ghana’s Central Region to be able to even travel to England to advocate for West African self-governance. In fact, he often wasn't able to travel, and never in his life went to the United States in part because he didn't always have the funds.

Nonetheless, the quick summing-up and dismissal of complicated cultural and intellectual figures as “elite” is persistent, and I’m glad you asked me to think of a definition that can account for these very different permutations of what the word has meant.

I wanted to ask also, given that writers fall into our aesthetic domain category, who are some elites in this domain today that are particularly interesting to you or who you think are influencing trends in Africa?

Ha, well, “particularly interesting to me” and “influencing trends on the Continent” are not the same thing. I tend to gravitate towards the small press, more experimental players in the literary scene. I’m excited about the South African writer Masande Ntshanga’s MODEL SEE project, for example. My second book, The African Novel of Ideas, was about novelists who still insist on being overtly philosophical even when it’s very out of fashion, by which I mean that they prominently feature long monologues and dialogues and digressions about points of abstract interest in their prose. What is a person? What is a universal good? What is a proportional punishment? That kind of thing.

Those are not the figures that generally have influence over the literary scene in any broad sense. I think that in terms of who is wielding palpable influence on Continental writing, you’d have to still look at the so-called Afropolitans. Chimamanda Adichie is the most obvious figure, and she's had tons and tons of attention, not just because of her own writing, which has been blockbuster, but because of her Farafina Creative Writing Workshop in Nigeria. And so a lot of writers would clamour for admission and then write about the workshop afterwards. For a while, the other names you heard thrown around as “Afropolitan” were people like Teju Cole, Taiye Selasi, people who often maintain a home on the Continent somewhere and then another home in the U.S. or Europe, people with a lot of mobility. At the same time – and I'm not saying this in a judgmental way, as it has often been cast – they claim or at least suggest that African literature is their context of greatest intelligibility.

And I noticed that you've also edited Ethiopia Unbound. Obviously this has an interesting position as one of the first African novels translated into English. Can you give us some context on what the state of the African novel was at that time, and how that’s changed over time?

Yeah, I mean, the African novel at that time wasn't anything with an identity of its own. And so when Ethiopia Unbound came out in 1911, it was the first African novel published in English that wasn't in serial form. There had been some “proto novels” or extended romances in the Gold Coast Press, in the Sierra Leonean press as well, but not a novel published as a novel, independently by a literary press.

This means that when Ethiopia Unbound comes out with Frank Cass, in London, it's being read alongside not other African novels, but other kinds of long-form work – namely what I’ve been calling legal-humanistic treatises. These were ambitious works of researched but stylized non-fiction, including works written by Casely Hayford himself. He was already known for a book called Gold Coast Native Institutions, from 1903, which was as significant for the development of customary law in West Africa as it was for its philosophical and cultural reflection. John Mensah Sarbah had also published a couple of books on Fante political traditions and legal norms. So you have a lot of stuff like that – big national histories. Carl Christian Reindorf, working within the Basel Mission, had published the first major national history already in Ga, History of the Gold Coast and Asante in 1895.

So, one of the big questions around Ethiopia Unbound is, well, why bother to write a novel? Casely Hayford certainly didn't need to. Professionally, there was no clear advantage. There was no real financial payoff. My answer is that it was a combination of a deeper sense of what cultural prestige meant, and of looking to the role that the novel had played in shoring up the identities of both the British Empire and of various counter-imperial and cosmopolitan projects. He was reading George Elliot, he was reading W.E.B. DuBois, he was reading the self-styled “Japanese” writer Lafcadio Hearn aka Koizumi Yakumo. He wanted it all! But he also recognized that a lot of things he was grappling with, for example, the difference between monotheistic Christianity and Akan belief systems, needed an unusual novel – frankly, a really weird one – to be able to do justice to the sheer range of influences he was managing. He wasn't writing a realist text. Now, you can read Ethiopia Unbound either as an important work of modernist or post-Victorian fiction, or you can read it, as an originary work of a specifically African, synthetic tradition. I love that it does triple duty in that way, because it can be taught in all different kinds of classes. And it complicates any number of big ideas, big stories about literature's development that students coming from different disciplinary backgrounds might have.

How have depictions of Africa in literature changed over the decades? And why do you think those changes occurred?

The first big point is very much consonant with the goal of the Elite Africa Project. African writers, and this is necessarily a vast generalization, are no longer as widely preoccupied as they once had to be with Africa’s marginal status. This isn’t to say that Africa hasn’t been tremendously ill-served by neoliberal economics, or that there isn’t still cause to think about neocolonialism. But the topic of Africa throwing off the yoke of the West has been so well-rehearsed, to the point that writers who are deeply read in African literature may often feel that there’s not much to add there, and that it’s more interesting to think about what’s new. And what’s new is a greater sense of ease.

You can think, even, of the titles of classic African literary works, the kinds of works that get taught in your standard intro to African literature classroom: Nervous Conditions, No Longer at Ease, etc. African literature of the independence and immediately post-independence periods is a literature of angst! And I think that’s no longer true.

One way that I try to think about this, and have occasionally tried to teach it, is through pairings of inaugural works of African fiction with more recent stuff from precisely the same locales. So for Zimbabwe you have Shimmer Chinodya’s Harvest of Thorns, you have Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, you have Charles Mungoshi’s Waiting for the Rain. These are all about the conflict between tradition and modernity, about being caught between Western protestant mission schools and a Shona traditional context. But recent Zimbabwean writing is incredibly agile, incredibly syncretic. I think about Tendai Huchu’s The Hairdresser of Harare, how it navigates between Shona norms, now enshrined within ZANU-PF as a corrupt ruling party, and decidedly “contemporary” conceptions of queer identity. Or I think about Farai Mudzwinga, whose Avenues By Train is very interested in Shona cosmology but not in a way that sees a conflict between the country and the city.

So there’s just a sense of this big exhale. I think that for a lot of African writers, the world is their canvas, even if they are ultimately concerned with local developments.

Check back NEXT WEEK for PART 2 of my interview with Jeanne-Marie Jackson.

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Banner image: Main Library, Govan Mbeki Street, Port Elizabeth, South Africa. 15 September 2012. Photo credit: Kay-africa, CC BY-SA 3.0.

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