O romance africano anglófono como literatura menor: da transliteração à apropriação na escrita nigeriana

Resumo

Since its inception, Anglophone African literature has offered a wide range of examples of what Deleuze and Guattari once referred to as “deterritorialization of language” (1986/ 1975). On the Nigerian scene, authors such as Chinua Achebe began to write in a deterritorialised form of English in order to act in response to colonial power. In Achebe’s ground-breaking first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), different stylistic devices—introduction of elements of the oral African tradition such as proverbs, myths or folktales, to name but a few—are used in order to transliterate or translate Igbo culture into English producing, as a result, a representative example of Anglophone African minor literature (Bandia 2006, 2008) and “Euro-African intertextuality” (Irele 2001: xiv). In this regard, Achebe, and other authors of what has been called “the first generation of Nigerian writers”, paved the way for the newer generations of authors, such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sefi Atta or Uzodinma Iweala, to continue appropriating and recreating the English language for Nigerian literature.