African Modernisms, African Modernities (April 7-10 2011)
In 1958, Chinua Achebe opened his most famous novel with an epigraph from an Irish modernist poem that has been taken as one of the quintessential articulations of modernity: "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer, / Things fall apart, the center cannot hold." This moment is suggestive of the intersection between modernism and modernity in African literature, a conjuncture that can be partially viewed in terms of how African writers respond to Western literary tradition. Attempts by African writers to participate in what Simon Gikandi has called "the culture of modernity" have consistently raised questions about where the modern is centered and how it travels.