Abstract:
This article examines a recent, internationally acclaimed popular novel from
Africa, Gaile Parkin’s Baking Cakes in Kigali (2009), to explore the ways the
customary cultural demarcation between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” literature,
between entertainment and critique, can be blurred so as to enable
more efficacious interventions, whether conceptually or pedagogically, into
the complexities of contemporary African societies. The article begins
by interrogating the immensely suggestive paradigm of “entanglement”
(Mbembe and Nuttall) with a view to proposing more adequate images of
sociopolitical complexity via the notion of “folding” (Deleuze and others). It
then offers examples of such modified paradigms by looking at the generic
ambiguity of Parkin’s novel, matched by the complex strategies it brings to
bear on such fraught and intractable issues as FGM. The article suggests that
this fusion of lightweight and serious, popular and conceptually challenging,
is both an index of contemporary sociopolitical complexity in Africa
and the site of the text’s purchase on that very complexity.
