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Introduction: Ghanaian and Indigenous American Literatures in Conversation

Helen Yitah and James Mackay

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1When Roland Barthes declares the death of the author, he states that “writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin” (142). The text is “multi-dimensional,” a cacophony of voices, a moment where other previous writings meet, combine, get playfully reimagined (146). Once we allow for the futility of attempting to uncover original intention, the perfect and unified meaning lent power by the transcendental Author, then no reading can be “correct” and there can only ever be creative, interesting¸ productive misreadings. The reader – or, to bring in a little Foucault, the reader-function – is the site where meaning is created, a nexus of shifting interpretations. Thus the literary text becomes boundless, a space that can be inhabited, reanimated, even reconfigured and remixed completely by each reader.

2Even beginning with such poststructuralist jouissance, however, we cannot deny that cross cultural comparative readings can be difficult, or at worst brutally insensitive. Power differentials between cultures (and readers) will always carry the risk of reconstituting canons, old configurations of West and Other, metropole and margin, model and copy, observer and observed. This is doubly true for the critical challenge we laid down for the contributors to this volume. Ghana is a West African state, post-Westphalian and post-colonial since 1957, with its own imperial past and a multiplicity of languages, religions, literary and artistic traditions. The tribal nations of North America, on the other hand, are Indigenous peoples, citizens (sometimes reluctantly) of a deep and enduring settler state, with varying degrees of formal and legal recognition, often viewed by the dominant culture (and by some of their own citizens) as a singular racial minority rather than as differentiated sovereign nations. It would be difficult to think of cultural matrices more differently positioned in relation to global systems of power, historicity, and representation.

3The common tongue that links the majority of literary and related products in both contexts is English, but it hardly constitutes a neutral medium. Rather, this is a language with deep sediments of violence, erasure, dispossession, enslavement, epistemicide and genocide, not to mention cultural condescension and belittling racism. The colonial library, to borrow V. Y. Mudimbe’s phrase for the systems of representation and analysis that have evolved over the centuries to invent Africa through a European lens, is composed primarily of English-language works. If the novels, plays, and other products examined in this volume indeed share some Barthesian intertexts, then many of those intertexts have been interpolated at the point of a gun. As Chadwick Allen observes, even Indigenous writings from different traditions constitute “distinct literatures emanating from distinct cultures, brought together by the historical accident of having been written in the shared language of those who colonized the communities of their authors” (xiii).

4Yet, for all that we acknowledge the pitfalls, there is a purpose in this choice to create a sustained unusual comparative exercise across multiple articles. Imaginative literature, if it “is” anything, is defined by a condition of being more than. A story is more than just an account of events; a performance is more than a repetition of existing cultural tropes; a song is more than just a schoolroom exercise. It is precisely this condition of surplus—of aesthetic, emotional, and epistemological excess—that allows texts to resonate across disjunctive cultural and historical terrains. The articles following this Introduction explore how such resonances might emerge not despite, but through, the tensions and asymmetries that define our comparative frame. In doing so, they allow for new possibilities in readings of canonical (and some less than canonical) writers, and new connections in the fragmentary and disputed ground of world literature. The principle of this special issue is juxtaposition: each critic has found resonances and reverberations between the seemingly disparate, and each critic aims to explore these without attempting to synthesize or create overly neat equivalences.

5Such criticism is often called “decolonial.” Certainly, this attempt to create new friendships and partnerships between texts might even meet Junot Diaz’s definition of decolonial love: a “kind of love that could liberate them from that horrible legacy of colonial violence” (Moya). But we have deliberately shied away from overly programmatic or ideological instructions in our commissioning and editing, and the result is a special issue that is as much playful and experimental as it is serious and politically committed. These essays follow Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s remark that “the traditional organization of literature along national boundaries is like bathing in a river instead of sailing” (Globalectics, 56). We therefore bid you, and the texts examined in this special issue, welcome to the open sea.

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Bibliography

Allen, Chadwick. Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Literary Studies. U of Minnesota P, 2012.

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath, Fontana Press, 1977.

Moya, Paula M. L. “The Search for Decolonial Love: An Interview with Junot Díaz.” Boston Review, 26 Jun 2012. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/paula-ml-moya-decolonial-love-interview-junot-diaz/

Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa. Globalectics: Theory and Politics of Knowing. Columbia UP, 2012.

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References

Electronic reference

Helen Yitah and James Mackay, Introduction: Ghanaian and Indigenous American Literatures in ConversationEuropean journal of American studies [Online], 20-1 | 2025, Online since 01 April 2025, connection on 24 April 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/23416; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/13qwi

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About the authors

Helen Yitah

Helen Yitah is a professor of African and postcolonial literatures. She is currently Visiting Professor at Yale’s Comparative Literature Department. Her research covers African feminist theory, African women’s literary traditions, and children’s literature. She is a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences.

James Mackay

James Mackay is Associate Professor of Literature and Digital Cultures at European University Cyprus, where he also serves as chair of the Department of Humanities. With JuEunhae Knox, he edited Reading#Instapoetry (2024) as well as the Global Instapoetry special issue of the European Journal of English Studies. His current work investigates humanities-based responses to generative artificial intelligence.

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Copyright

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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