While influential accounts grasp African realism as the child of decolonisation in West Africa, we trace its longue durée from formative events and institutions such as colonial and Christian publishing networks in Benin, Cape Verde, and South Africa; through the development of the idea of the African realist novel by intellectuals such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Henry Owuor-Anyumba, and Taban Lo Liyong at African universities and literary conferences, such as the 1962 Makerere Conference and 1963 Fourah Bay conference; to contemporary permutations such as the historical novel. If the purpose of the African realist novel is to give shape to regional history, we find the irreal aesthetics of Bessie Head’s Maru (1971) and Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard no more or less “real” than the ideal-typical realism of Mahfouz’s Cairo trilogy (1956–1957). We conclude that “realism” and its various antinomies (modernism, naturalism, irrealism, etc.) must ultimately be “reconstellate[d]” in terms of “each text’s relation to history itself” (Nicholas Brown 2–3).

In this chapter, I explore the intersection of spatiality and postcolonial literary writing through a focus on African literatures, broadly speaking, and the practices of worlding therein. Both as a market category and as a subset of what is variously termed ’world literature’ or ’postcolonial literature’, African literary writing offers a rich case study of the ways in which literature functions not merely as a passive repository of space or site of spatial representation, but as a driver of the constitution and performance of space itself. In this manner, the literary functions not as discrete or autonomous but through its entanglements with broader material, social, and ideological circuits. To do so, this chapter begins with an overview of postcolonial spatiality before moving to questions of aesthetics, form, publicness, and circulation to consider the diverse and sometimes divergent ways in which the performance of spatiality in African literary writing operates across uneven and asymmetrically loaded networks of production and distribution. The chapter ultimately argues that differential performances of spatiality in various bodies of African writing demonstrate the ways in which practices of worlding remain mediated by the material, structural, and systemic constitution of literature.