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<p>“Spaces of Order” argues that the African novel should be studied as a revolutionary
form characterized by aesthetic innovations that are not comprehensible in terms of
the novel’s European archive of forms. It does this by mapping an African spatial
order that undermines the spatial problematic at the formal and ideological core of
the novel—the split between a private, subjective interior, and an abstract, impersonal
outside. The project opens with an examination of spatial fragmentation as figured
in the “endless forest” of Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard (1952). The second
chapter studies Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) as a fictional world built
around a peculiar category of space, the “evil forest,” which constitutes an African
principle of order and modality of power. Chapter three returns to Tutuola via Ben
Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) and shows how the dispersal of fragmentary spaces
of exclusion and terror within the colonial African city helps us conceive of political
imaginaries outside the nation and other forms of liberal political communities. The
fourth chapter shows Nnedi Okorafor—in her 2014 science-fiction novel Lagoon—rewriting
Things Fall Apart as an alien-encounter narrative in which Africa is center-stage
of a planetary, multi-species drama. Spaces of Order is a study of the African novel
as a new logic of world making altogether.</p>
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