Chick-lit in a time of African cosmopolitanism

Abstract

‘Chick-lit in a time of African cosmopolitanism’ – our title for this special issue is inspired by Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, and a reminder of the pleasures of reading. It is an exciting collection of articles that bring chick-lit to the fore in a transnational African context. What does chick-lit look like from and in Africa today? As an anthropologist and a literary scholar by training, respectively, this was our starting point for hosting a one-day interdisciplinary workshop held on 27 October 2016 in Johannesburg. We first wanted to move the genre beyond its Anglo-American origins and give it landscape, texture, colour and affect, by engaging the growing number of chick-lit writers and novels based in and on the continent of Africa. We next sought to bring South Africa into conversation with larger continental and diasporic textual circuits, while opening up certain thematics in relation to multiple African countries and regional specificities. We are hopeful that the diverse African cases showcased here move beyond a potential to speak back to Western chick-lit in order to re-centre and revive the debate from and on Africa itself. The contributions featured in this collection ask: Can we learn something new about chick-lit more generally by locating ourselves on the African continent and in relation to its multiple diasporic relocations, thus re-imagining its production and consumption from here?

In conceiving of this special issue, we were interested in stitching together a variety of themes that directly came from the articles themselves: chick-literature as a genre that is very much in dynamic formation across Africa; changing notions of femininity and feminism (and as tied to categories of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sex, sexuality and age); consumerism and branding; the impact of new media on the genre and the pleasures of reading (the book and e-formats); the new circuits of mobility afforded to African female protagonists; the (auto)biographical style and substance of chick-lit writers themselves; and finally, broader discourses of African cosmopolitanism in relation to characters, affect and settings.

By way of introducing these themes, we will briefly develop genealogies for three related keywords: chick-lit, Africa and afropolitanism.

Chick-lit

At the height of the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s, the word ‘chick’ was considered an insult, a demeaning diminutive, casting independent young women as delicate, fluffy creatures. ‘Girl’ was perhaps worse, infantilising grown women. By contrast, choice signalled women’s power over their bodies. Defiantly singular, it meant a woman’s right to choose to end a pregnancy or to elect – not submit to – motherhood. A generation later, girl, like chick, has been revived, wielded by women themselves to convey solidarity and signal empowerment. Girlpower. ‘You go, girl’. Chicks rule! Uncoupled from adjectives such as tough, sorority or hot, chick is now an adjective itself: chick-lit, chick-flick, chick culture. Surprisingly cosmopolitan, chick conveys chic. At the same time, the right to choose is no longer singular but endlessly plural: career choices, lifestyle choices, fashion choices etc. (Ferriss and Young, 2006: 87).

‘Chick-lit’ as a genre became popularised in the mid-1990s, and generally deals with issues of modern womanhood in a globalised world. It is distinct from the romance genre in that it contends with more varied topics and usually involves one or more feisty independent female protagonists. Helen Fielding’s widely popular Bridget Jones’s Diary and Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City are the iconic texts in this area. However, this genre has been opening itself up to different characters, settings and affects since then as the next daughters of feminists have become the chick-lit writers of today; they are less restricted and more able to with play with notions of femininity and feminism, and not only in relation to race, class and gender. Categories like sex, sexuality, age and ethnicity have also been added to the chick-lit genre formula. Women are recast as global girls with all the complications that ensue with that label. As Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young (2006) show, ‘choice’ becomes the operative word for writing about the female lead characters that inhabit chick-lit novels in the 21st century. It is a shift to what has been labelled ‘postfeminism’ as a practice, ideology, way of being. As Cris Mazza puts it:

[Postfeminist] writing says women are independent and confident but not lacking their share of human weakness and not necessarily self-empowered; that they are dealing with who they’ve made themselves into rather than blaming the rest of the world; that women can use and abuse another human being as well as anyone; that women can be conflicted about what they want and therefore get nothing; that women can love until they hurt someone, turn their own hurt into love, refuse to love, or even ignore the notion of love completely as they confront the other 90% of life. Postfeminist writing says female characters don’t have to be superhuman in order to be interesting. Just human (2000: 105).

This special issue very much follows from Mazza’s description, while also taking up Angela McRobbie’s (2009) argument concerning post-feminism as involved in the undoing of feminism. Additional contemporary theorists such as Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff (2011) have made a sustained argument suggesting that post-feminism embodies the neoliberal turn in feminism more generally. Neoliberal feminism references a shift towards entrepreneurial and self-optimising choice-making on the part of individual women, yet one which is blind to the ways in which the market economy shapes those very choices and aspirations (see also Rottenberg, 2018). Subject formation is shaped by the ways in which neoliberalism plays itself out in specific circumstances, and for both producers and consumers of chick-lit. Building on her earlier work and responding to criticisms that post-feminism is an outdated analytic concept, Gill (2016: 612) argues in a more recent essay that we have yet to reach a post post-feminist era; instead we are firmly entrenched in a period of circulating multiple feminisms, sometimes in tension with each other, some more fashionable than others, and in relation to the rise in intensified misogyny, all intimately connected to neoliberalism and how we continue to tell feminist stories of feminism. As well, we think it is relevant to look more closely at how ‘girl power’ translates into new kinds of relationships and representations, not only between men and women, but between women themselves, and in spaces of both work and play in a fast-paced and changing world.

This collection of articles, then, is an attempt to fully explore the ‘chick’ in lit from a post-feminist and transnational perspective, including the shifting terrain of this genre, and its concomitant writing and reading pleasures once we locate it in a pan-African setting.

Africa

If post-feminism as culture has ‘gone global’ as it were, our critical feminist conceptualizations and analyses of it must, too (Dosekun, 2015: 973).

If we take seriously Simidele Dosekun’s (2015) suggestion to think about post-feminism transnationally, as a ‘transnational culture’, then we can perhaps bring Africa more fully into our conversation on chick-lit. However, as Dosekun shows, there is still much work to be done, for post-feminism pervades the non-West as much as it does the West in ways that we have yet to fully take into account because of the dominance of tropes of poverty, development and inequality when it comes to gender relations in the Global South. In other words, post-feminism is still largely premised on white neoliberal culture (Dosekun, 2015: 960–961) – a point we very much need to counter through new sets of analytics. She in turn (following Gill) argues for a conception of postfeminism as a ‘sensibility’, not as ‘a culturally specific historical moment’ (Dosekun, 2015: 964), a move that frees post-feminism from its Western foundations, thus opening it up to new readings and interpretations.

Continuing with this line of thought, Dosekun writes:

A conceptual view of post-feminism as transnational culture opens up while also better nuancing critical feminist cultural enquiry. It allows us to ask questions such as if and how and where post-feminist culture is emergent outside the West; with what meanings and effects; addressed to which kinds of subjects; via which transnational connectivities and/or local sites; with, through, and/or contrary to which other transnational and local cultural formations and so on. This is instead of foreclosing such questions as impossible or incoherent, or alternatively prefiguring or delimiting their answers (2015: 969).

To begin the hard work of analysing African chick-lit demands patience without falling into the trap of writing about Africa simply from the West, but rather looking at a diversity of culture(s) from localised perspectives (Dosekun, 2015: 969). It also entails the realisation that ‘consumption is deeply constitutive of new transnational subjectivities’ (Dosekun, 2015: 966). In other words, to attempt to write about African female chick-lit authors, African women as feminists with feminine traits and African locations as non-essentialised already globalised places with transnational links, requires that we stay attuned to the ways the ‘already empowered’ female co-exists alongside the ‘still disempowered’ one (Dosekun, 2015: 967). We need to look in greater depth at what the specific dilemmas of race, sex and social class are for African women in particular African settings. Simultaneously, certain African women are increasingly less weighed down by heterosexual normativities and the confines of marriage and child-rearing, while for others conditions remain very much the same. How do African women navigate these overlapping worlds and place their racialised, classed and sexual selves upfront in this changing genre? As feminist scholars, we must think ‘across multiple intersections, forms and sites of difference’ (Dosekun, 2015: 965), as they are articulated on the ground in specific African settings. It is the ‘closely contextual’ coupled with ‘histories, politics, structures, and cultural logics’ (Dosekun, 2015: 969) that matters when we choose to look and write more carefully about Africa from Africa, and as African women, scholars and readers of chick-lit.

Afropolitanism

Afropolitanism can be said to be cosmopolitanism with African roots. (Gehrmann, 2016: 61)

Mobility, cosmopolitanism and Africa – when you put these three keywords together, you get the fashionably coined term ‘Afropolitanism’ (Mbembe, 2005; Selasi, 2005; Mbembe, 2007; all cited in Gehrmann, 2016: 61). Let us take one step back, however, to delineate the genealogy of this label before we relate it to how we read (as a methodology perhaps?) African chick-lit. Susanne Gehrmann writes: ‘mobility in a cosmopolitan tradition is the ability to move between and to inhabit different places and cultures. However, nowadays it includes also digital mobility which encompasses a quick circulation of ideas and images via the cyberspace that characterises both the construction and contestation of Afropolitan lifestyles and cultural production’ (2016: 61). It is this mobility as an integral aspect of cosmopolitanism and applied to the African continent that has fashioned the term Afropolitanism. It is at the same time a form of ‘ethics’, following Achille Mbembe, a philosophical concept that can potentially transform identity politics (cited in Gehrmann, 2016: 64). For Gehrmann: ‘Cosmopolitanism in scope, anti-essentialist, open to cultural and intellectual hybridisation, but endowed with a particular consciousness for Africa’s historical wounds, Afropolitanism is praised as an attitude which can contribute to complete the as yet unfinished decolonisation process of Africa’ (2016: 64). It is the yet unfinished project of decolonisation that is important to emphasise here for Africa and which makes it that much more difficult to think with (as compared with the West). Writing on Mbembe as an Afropolitan author, Gehrmann reflects:

For Cameroonian born, French educated Mbembe who has now firmly established himself in South Africa for many years, Afropolitanism does not only transcend the question of diasporan vs. African-based urban cultures as he explicitly includes both, but it also transcends the question of race. White South Africans, Asian diasporic Africans and so forth could be part of Afropolitanism, as long as they identify with and do not essentialize Africa. Consequently, with Mbembe the spatial and cultural mobility which characterizes Afropolitanism can never be understood as unidirectional. If there are culturally important and productive African diasporas across the world, Africa has at the same time always been a destination for migrants who contribute to its genuine diversity today (2016: 65).

Weighing in on this term, Simon Gikandi, a Kenyan literary scholar based at Princeton University, suggests that Afropolitanism ‘can now be read as a description of a new phenomenology of Africanness—a way of being African in the world’ (cited in Gehrmann, 2016: 66). ‘To be Afropolitan’, he suggests, ‘is to be connected to knowable African communities, nations and traditions: but it is also to live a life divided across cultures, languages, and states. It is to embrace and celebrate a state of cultural hybridity—to be of Africa and of other worlds at the same time’ (Gikandi, cited in Gehrmann, 2016: 66). Gehrmann ends her own discussion of Afropolitanism on a cautionary note, suggesting on the one hand its potential productivity for accessing Africa, and on the other its commodification, its branding of Africa in too simplistic terms. We would add a second qualifier – that these theorists of Afropolitanism are weak in terms of looking at the feminist side of identity politics in the making, which in turn would help to problematise what Afropolitanism signifies, suggesting perhaps that it may mean very different things to men and women in their everyday lives. In other words, a feminised and feminist Afropolitanism might look very different on the (African) ground from the male authored conceptual frames offered by Mbembe (2005, 2007, 2010) and Gikandi (2011). Following Taiye Selasi (2005), author of Ghana Must Go (2013), who coined the term Afropolitanism in 2005, we as scholars and critics must have a willingness to ‘complicate Africa’ (Selasi, cited in Gerhmann, 2016: 63) and give voice to those complications. Thus, in relating Afropolitanism to African chick-lit, this means attending to African cosmopolitanisms – the (gendered) persons, places and plots we care to write about are never stuck in one place (i.e. a nondescript ‘Africa’), but rather carry with them many mobilities, multiple versions of Africa.

Lastly, we must bring the growing field of affect theory (Massumi, 1995; Ahmed, 2004; Stewart, 2007), which in some sense still contains traces of its Western Northern centrism, to bear on our literary and anthropological readings of chick-lit. We are enriched by understanding African subjectivities through the affective, that is, the unwritten, the intangible versions of Africa that every individual African carries within him or herself and that are tied, as Kathleen Stewart writes, to ‘the varied, surging capacities to affect and be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies and emergences’ (2007: 1–2). By attributing all African (writers, characters and readers) as equally having a full emotional life (in the pursuit of ‘the promise of happiness’, following Ahmed, 2010), we are also suggesting that affect theory be subject to decolonisation, or as Carolyn Pedwell (2016) describes it, ‘thinking affect transnationally’. This is a position we fully embrace, one where affect is no longer the privileged purview of Western chick-lit.

Contributions

The special issue opens with an Interchanges dialogue between Lesley Lokko and Pamila Gupta. Lesley Lokko, in her keynote address for the initial conference in 2016, and adapted into a contribution for this special issue, uses the anecdotal, the analytical and the historical to comment on the chick-lit publishing industry and her positioning as an author within it. Lokko examines her novels as attempts to straddle the divide between different versions of Africa and chick-lit from the 1990s onwards – through her characters, her settings and her own transnational positionings. Combining humour and historical narrative, Lokko discusses how the publishing industry perpetuates racial and gendered problematics where she is asked to limit her black characters to ‘no more than three, please’ so as not to ‘alienate’ her readers. She is also asked to play down her own background as a Ghanaian woman with mixed parentage so that her books are not relegated to the ‘black literature’ shelf in a book store where they will not sell many copies. Lokko reveals how the artificial packaging of the publishing industry reveals the fissures of race and representation in shaping consumption practices and the classification of literary texts. Her understanding of chick-lit and Africa places the genre firmly within the trajectory of African mobilities and cosmopolitan configurations, and the racialised hierarchies of the global publishing industry.

Pamila Gupta’s piece, ‘The substance of style: reading Lesley Lokko’ is nicely paired with Lokko’s in the appropriately entitled Interchanges section. It picks up the themes of Lokko’s opening article by looking at her first novel, Sundowners, and at the personhood of Lokko herself. Styled as a conversation over lunch, Gupta narrates the relationship between the chick-lit author as a product of the publishing industry (slim, stylish and cosmopolitan) and the figure of Lokko as an intellectual. Gupta reads Lokko’s novels as blurring the distinctions between genres: chick-lit, glam lit and historical fiction as Lokko’s transnational settings reflect a deeply politicised sensibility against which her characters interact. Gupta argues that Lokko is able to create a global African female protagonist who is black or white, comfortable in a range of exotic locations within a fast-paced contemporary global world of ‘sex, shopping, and glamour’ and yet still attentive to the politics of identity, race and diaspora, a thematic that very much showcases the productive tension between Lokko the chick-lit writer and Lokko the architect and academic.

‘“In defence of chick-lit”: refashioning feminine subjectivities in Ugandan and South African contemporary women’s writing’ is written by Lynda Gichanda Spencer. She illustrates how the female protagonists portrayed in selected Ugandan and South African chick-lit find themselves in an ambiguous position. She investigates how these characters represent women who have benefitted from feminism but underlying their emancipation is an explicit complicity with patriarchy. She positions chick-lit as the ‘most culturally visible form of postfeminism’ (Harzewski, 2011: 8) as it refuses to offer a clear-cut construct of women’s lives, instead suggesting a messy terrain inherently ambiguous and contradictory. Spencer distinguishes between ‘uprising genres’ in African chick-lit versus the transatlantic phenomenon of Western chick-lit but positions the genre in general as exposing the contradictions, complexities, tensions and ambiguities of women as they continuously push against patriarchal constraints.

In ‘Pleasure as genre: popular fiction, South African chick-lit and Nthikeng Mohlele’s Pleasure’, Ronit Frenkel draws together a discussion of genre and pleasure in relation to popular fiction in the form of South African chick-lit. She uses Mohlele’s recent novel, Pleasure, as a type of fictionalised theory to extend the idea of pleasure into the realm of genre, before discussing two prominent South African chick-lit texts by Fiona Snyckers and Cynthia Jele. Frenkel argues that the idea of pleasure as a type of genre offers us a useful tool to think with in terms of understanding popular fiction as ‘a matter of the textual categorization and mobilization of information about the world’ (Frow, 2007: 1632) that is undergirded by an ephemeral archive of pleasure. She sees pleasure as so ubiquitous and so diverse across the multiple forms that constitute popular women’s fiction that it has become a genre in itself. This is, however, not a genre that limits itself to one particular stylistic form but, as a dynamic social construct, it has become a genre of affect. Pleasure as genre, then, acts as a sort of imperial genre of affect with the various stylistic genres of popular fiction falling within its ambit. As such, popular fiction inhabits multiple genres simultaneously. What ties the various strands of popular fictions together, including chick-lit, is pleasure.

Rebecca Fasselt’s ‘Crossing genre boundaries: H. J. Golakai’s Afropolitan chick-lit mysteries’ explores Golakai’s two detective novels The Lazarus Effect (2011) and The Score (2015) that lie at the intersection of chick-lit and crime fiction. Golakai’s character Vee is a black cosmopolitan detective who defies gender and racial stereotypes as a hard-hitting but oddly vulnerable protagonist who is caught between two men. The combination of these genres allows Golakai to inventively recast the chick-lit mystery from the perspective of an Afropolitan chick detective who undercuts what Fasselt terms the ‘future-directed happiness’ script. She argues that the novels defy the frequently assumed apolitical character of chick-lit texts and also allow for a reimagining of Afropolitanism outside of its consumerist form.

Danai S. Mupotsa’s article, ‘Feeling backwards: temporal ambivalence in An African City’, uses the Ghanaian web-series An African City to explore the ambivalence between the optimism characteristic of most chick-lit and the depressive tone that she sees as underlying the idea of progress inherent in this genre. She discusses An African City with its first season in 2014 as ‘Africa’s own Sex and the City’, which was praised for challenging the image of a backward Africa, while also being criticised for offering an unrealistic account of life for urban African women. The series is set around the lives of five women, one of whom plays the leading role as narrator. As with Sex and the City’s figuring of New York, the ‘African city’ serves as another character rather than a mere backdrop for the action to unfold. Mupotsa argues that the various characters perform an ongoing ambivalence towards progress, always stuck in a look backward. It is not simply that the quest for romance fails as part of the drama, but that the drama of failure itself folds onto both the African city and African women as figures that remain eternally stuck in their relation to the temporalities that accrue around modernity.

In the last article included in this special issue, entitled ‘Emerging Afro-Parisian “chick-lit” by Lauren Ekué and Léonora Miano’, Susanne Gehrmann examines the novels Icône urbaine [Urban Icon] (2005) by French-Togolese writer and fashion journalist Lauren Ekué and Blues pour Elise [Blues for Elise] (2010) by French-Cameroonian/Afropean writer Léonora Miano. Gehrmann offers a close reading of both texts, which focus on urban working women, their love lives and consumerist tendencies. While these novels fulfil a number of criteria of mainstream chick-lit, they also exhibit a serious concern around structural power relations – race and gender in particular. Gerhmann focuses on how these texts rewrite or reinvent the Anglo-American chick-lit genre from the transnational perspective of the African diaspora in France and with regards to the peculiarities of black Paris as a space. Miano’s Blues pour Elise and Ekué’s Icône urbaine are both located, she argues, between commercial chick-lit and politically engaged Afro-diasporic literature.

Conclusion

We are very proud to have this collection of articles featured in Feminist Theory, as we are taking up the ‘three hopes’ outlined by Celia Roberts and Raewyn Connell in their introduction to a 2016 Feminist Theory special issue entitled ‘Feminist Theory and the Global South’. They write:

In editing this special issue, we had three hopes. One was to provide a venue for feminist work that the global North ought to know about. The second was to help connect intellectual workers in different parts of the global South—which ironically, often happens via conferences and journals in the North. The third [hope] was to support the re-thinking, and ultimately remaking, of feminism’s relationship to the global economy of knowledge (Roberts and Connell, 2016: 139).

We hope that this special issue of Feminist Theory dedicated to chick-lit in Africa is one small (feminist) step in the direction of complicating our three introductory keywords: chick-lit, Africa and Afropolitanism. In our capacity as editors and authors, we would like to think that we have taken the debate one step even further by hosting the workshop itself in the Global South. The articles featured here all reflect a complex African context and a deeply politicised version of chick-lit as a genre that is caught up in multiple diasporas and affects of African cosmopolitanism in relation to the global publishing industry. The novels discussed emerge from diverse contexts, from Ghana to South Africa, Uganda to Liberia, Paris to London, but all focus on the dilemmas faced by African women in a modern African world. While African chick-lit is the main theme of this collection, it is a boundary-crossing genre in the context of African mobilities and popular fictions which each of these articles addresses in different ways. We are less interested in asking the question of whether or not this sampling of new and recent chick-lit texts is responding to pre-existing literary genres; rather we want to leave open the possibility for what Lokko suggests in her wonderful contribution – that current and aspiring African writers are confidently directing and experimenting with new genres of their own.

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