A Theoretical Investigation of World Literature from the African Periphery: Nigeria and the Global Literary Market

The relationship between Nigerian literature and the global literary market represents one of the most important case studies for understanding how peripheral literatures navigate, resist, and sometimes transform the centre-dominated structures of world literary circulation. This study conducted an original theoretical investigation of the dynamics through which Nigerian literature enters and circulates in the global literary market, developing a theoretical model that advances beyond Casanova's World Republic of Letters and Moretti's evolutionary model of world literature. A political economy of literature methodology was employed, drawing on structured interviews with 32 Nigerian authors, publishers, literary agents, and prize administrators, alongside documentary analysis of publisher contracts, prize statistics, and literary translation data for the period 2015 to 2023. The theoretical analysis engaged critically with Casanova, Moretti, Damrosch, and Cooppan, identifying their inability to account for the specifically African dimensions of literary peripherality, including the role of African language choice, the politics of the diaspora author, and the economic structures of Anglophone publishing. Original theoretical contributions include the Diaspora Amplification Effect, theorising how Nigerian diaspora authors disproportionately access global literary markets compared to Nigeria-based authors, creating a structural distortion in how Nigerian literature is internationally understood. The Pidginised Cosmopolitanism Concept theorises how Pidgin and code-switching in Nigerian novels function as claims to global literary status that simultaneously assert African linguistic particularity. The study's findings are recommended for integration into postgraduate Comparative Literature programmes at universities in Lagos, Ibadan, and Enugu.

Keywords: world literature market, Nigerian literature, literary periphery, original theory, Casanova