"African Books for Western Eyes"

Also of interest to us, I think, is this piece by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, which appeared in last week's Sunday Times: African Books for Western Eyes. It intersects (among other things) with the critique of Persepolis by Nancy K. Miller that I shared with y'all a few weeks ago. In "The Entangled Self: Genre Bondage in the Age of the Memoir," PMLA 122, 2 (2008): 537-548, Miller observes that "Memoirs from sites of danger provide a safe space for readers to ponder the nightmare of contemporary global relations, even as the pages display the extreme difficulty of living in times of traumatic history. The story of the other citizen, preferably female--the exotic, foreign self in translation  (like us after all)--is also a valuable template in the marketplace of contemporary autobiographical production and consumption."