UC Riverside

“Like a Mask Dancing: Visuospatial Geographies in Nigerian and Afro-Diasporic Literature” employs African masquerade dance as an analytic category for investigating questions of space, subjectivity, epistemology, and related geographies of meaning in contemporary Nigerian and Afro-Diasporic literature. This project critiques the aesthetics of immobilization prominent in the representation of African peoples’ knowledge ecologies, histories, spaces, cultures and identities as static, archaic and primitive, by asking one central question: how can a shift in our approach to analyzing literary spatiality illuminate the dynamic aesthetic, textual, material, historical and political concerns of writers within this literary archive?

The study develops Chinua Achebe’s configuration of the Igbo proverb and worldview: “The world is like a mask dancing; to see it well one cannot stand in one place” into a critical reading method that decenters Western theoretical discourse on spatiality and privileges spatial networks rooted in African indigenous life worlds and cultural imaginaries. I argue that this proverb points to a relational aesthetics of movement that construct places and subjectivity in motion and via motion in ways analogous to the performance of dancing masquerades in African performance settings. Expanding on the ways that this episteme intertwines ideas of movement, spatial traversal, rhythm, embodiment, fluidity, call-and response, and perspective change, I formulate a reading methodology – visuospatiality – that traces the fusion of visual and spatial signifiers as a creative idiom.

Using this theoretical schema, I map how indigenous African thought and worldviews inform the production of literary spatiality in narrative texts such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters, Teju Cole’s Open City, and Chimamanda Adiche’s The Thing Around Your Neck. Through analysis animated by language, environment, and the body, “Like a Mask Dancing” draws insights from performance practices, philosophy, visual art, and literature propose critical mask poetics as a formal principle for theorizing questions of space, history, migration, and identity within Nigerian and Afro-diasporic cultural imaginaries and to make the case for centering African epistemologies as the theoretical basis for reading African literature.