Reading African complexities today : generic folding in Gaile Parkin’s Baking Cakes in Kigali

dc.contributor.authorWest-Pavlov, Russell B.
dc.date.accessioned2015-02-12T11:07:12Z
dc.date.available2015-02-12T11:07:12Z
dc.date.issued2015
dc.description.abstractThis 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.en_ZA
dc.description.embargo2016-01-30en_ZA
dc.description.librarianhj2015en_ZA
dc.description.urihttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublication/?journalCode=reseafrilite&en_ZA
dc.identifier.citationWest-Pavlov, RB 2015, 'Reading African complexities today : generic folding in Gaile Parkin’s Baking Cakes in Kigali', Research in African Literatures, vol. 46, no. 1, pp. 142-159.en_ZA
dc.identifier.issn0034-5210 (print)
dc.identifier.issn1527-2044 (online)
dc.identifier.other10.2979/reseafrilite.46.1.142
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/2263/43653
dc.language.isoenen_ZA
dc.publisherIndiana University Pressen_ZA
dc.rightsIndiana University Pressen_ZA
dc.subjectGaile Parkinen_ZA
dc.subjectBaking Cakes in Kigali (2009)en_ZA
dc.subjectSociopolitical complexityen_ZA
dc.subjectAfrican complexitiesen_ZA
dc.subjectAfrican novelen_ZA
dc.titleReading African complexities today : generic folding in Gaile Parkin’s Baking Cakes in Kigalien_ZA
dc.typePostprint Articleen_ZA

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