The Extroverted African Novel and Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century

This essay revisits Eileen Julien's seminal essay, 'The Extroverted African Novel' (2006), by way of twenty-first-century fiction by Nigerian writers. Since 2006, new Nigerian publishers have been publishing ambitious literary fiction that is arguably neither 'extroverted' nor 'introverted' but 'multifocal'. The essay sketches the trajectory of literary publishing in Nigeria in light of questions about the forms of local immediacy afforded by different genres and media. It considers how the multifocal fictions of Sefi Atta, Teju Cole, Emmanuel Iduma and Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, among others, figure literary publishing in Nigeria. Their novels suggest that these writers' real investment in various readerships on the continent, as well as beyond it, goes hand in hand with their experience of literary singularity in the medium of print. In sum, locally published fiction can court multiple kinds of publics, and it may be more accurate to conceive of 'extroversion' as dependent on a text's reception than as fixed in its form.