What African Philosophy Can Learn from Jeanne-Marie Jackson’s The African Novel of Ideas

Abstract

I love the endings of books. They are often the sections that are not numbered as if they were regular chapters. I often start with them, which maybe doesn’t work that well if I’m reading a mystery but can be very useful when reading academic work. These final sections are often ostensibly distillations of what a writer feels like he or she has earned in the book. They can also, though, be provocations, parting shots, armchair reflections, caveats, remainders, loose ends, or even sometimes just some version of “further study is needed.” They can even, at times, tip their hand, giving us the Freudian slip that shows an author’s anxieties about the argument just made. Indeed, sometimes it is where the cracks show or are admitted under the author’s breath. But, as the songwriter Leonard Cohen said, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” What is the crack in Jeanne-Marie Jackson’s new book, The African Novel of Ideas? Well, it is certainly not her core argument. The major thread of this book examines how contemporary African novels have drawn on and exemplified questions that African philosophy has taken up. More than that, reading the novels with an understanding of how philosophers do what they do enables us to see how the novelists manage to avoid overreaches of representation that fiction might be prone to, especially fiction that stands in the shadow of political and colonial brutalities of the colonial period in Africa. It is less a crack that the epilogue makes apparent and more a remainder, what Jackson calls a “fringe” at the edges between two forms of African literature: “outward-facing (that is, seen by the West as representative but in fact not) and