SOURCE: Huggan, Graham. “African Literature and the Anthropological Exotic.” In The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, pp. 34-57. London, England: Routledge, 2001.

In the following essay, Huggan presents a critical examination of the processes by which value is attached to postcolonial works, specifically exploring the link between ethnographic interpretations of African literature and the role Africa itself has played in being a source of marketable cultural uniqueness for Western audiences.

This chapter begins with the deceptively simple question: what is African literature? The question immediately begs another: African literature from which region? ‘African literature’, after all, already conveys a fiction of homogeneity that smacks of ‘sanctioned ignorance’ (Spivak 1993a: 279); as if the vast literary and cultural diversity of one of the world's largest continents could be arrogantly reduced to a single classificatory term. And another: African literature in which language? For African literature—as a body of texts written...