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Slavery, Death, and the Village: Localizing Imperatives of Nigerian Writing

This article explores the ubiquitous citations of the village and the manifestation of villagers in Nigerian fiction published since about 2000. Through a close reading of Chuma Nwokolo’s Diaries of a Dead African, I argue that Nwokolo’s novel exemplifies the ongoing critical regionalism in Nigerian writing, a practice through which writers expand the geographical imaginaries of Nigerian fiction as well as meditate reflexively upon the circulation of Nigerian fiction within the global book-publishing industry. This critical regionalism responds to the global circulation of the Nigerian novel by drawing upon, revising, and updating the geographical imaginaries of early Nigerian novelists. Elements of the village novel as a genre and ideas of the village as a crucial iteration of African spaces are deployed to signal the interplay between the complex spaces and representational practices of emerging fiction. In sum, this article works toward the legibility of the village within contemporary writing.