Abstract

This essay provides an overview of critical trends in the study of time in twentieth-century African and Diasporic African fiction. The pervasive tendency in Western historiography to treat Africa as occupying a space outside the narrative of historical progress and development has produced a critical counter-reaction which celebrates the unique cultural rhythms and incommensurable experiences of African temporality. According to this influential critical model, most notably expressed by Bonnie J. Barthold in her 1981 study, Black Time, the project of African fiction is to attack the telos-driven linearity of Western time, and to explore culturally indigenous temporal models of cyclicality, myth, and ritual which are fundamentally incomprehensible to the Western worldview. This critical model has been surprisingly inattentive, however, to competing tendencies in Diasporic African fiction which have insisted upon the pitfalls of temporal difference. Beginning with a survey of the ways in which theories of a uniquely African temporality have been both inherited and interrogated by contemporary critics, I turn to criticism of Ayi Kwei Armah's 1968 novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, as a case study of a text that is particularly disserved by the prevailing critical paradigm.

DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00531.x