ASAUK 2018

In the late 1980s, the University of Zambia librarian Norah Mumba lost her husband to a long illness. Her experience of bereavement and the dispossession it entailed is narrated in the 1992 memoir A Song in the Night. The paper discusses the emancipatory potential inherent in the text’s construction of gendered subjectivity, religion and time, and links them to a much better-known text from east Africa, Yvonne Owuor’s 2013 novel Dust – not by way of tracing a line of quasi-positivist influence or a thematic similarity, but as a very preliminary textual anchoring of a notion of African postmodernism, based on the theorising of Frederic Jameson and the Warwick Literary Collective.