Zambia and the drift of world literature

Abstract

Pascale Casanova’s assertion that a world-literary author “embodies and reactivates [their] whole literary history, carrying this ‘literary time’ with [them] without even being fully conscious of it” resonates with Namwali Serpell’s work. This essay places her acclaimed The Old Drift into dialogue with Andrea Masiye’s Before Dawn—a foundational Anglophone novel published in the 1970s by NECZAM (The National Educational Company of Zambia). I argue that Serpell’s text reactivates a local novelistic history not only through its cosmopolitan utopianism, but also via specific aspects of its narrative form. Rather than exemplifying the de-realization of the novel as a genre on the African continent (and vice versa), The Old Drift arguably functions as a conduit of literary connection and realization. The novel enables an imagination of a world-literary system in which forms capable of being labelled “African” are not merely discursively present or absent, but drifting across unevenly connected segments of global literary circulation.

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ORCID for Ranka Primorac: orcid.org/0000-0003-1127-1175

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