Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: Networks, Literary Activism and the Production of World Literature

Abstract

This chapter explores Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s significance in world literature through the frame of publishers’ networks and literary activism, and argues for the ways in which his work has redefined ideas of ‘world literary space’ (Casanova 2004). The chapter opens by reading the networks and structures of value made visible through the Nairobi launch of Petals of Blood ̶ Ngũgĩ’s fourth novel published in Heinemann’s African Writers Series and his last written in English. Leading on from this, it places Ngũgĩ’s critical interventions on world literature in essay collections Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms (1993) and Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (2014) into dialogue with his own Africa-centred publishing relationships and trajectories. Ultimately, the chapter draws attention to Ngũgĩ’s crucial work ̶ visible through his literary production, critical interventions and publishing decisions ̶ in ‘moving the centre’ of world literature away from the West.