Rewriting the Nation: Historiographic Metafiction in Twenty-First Century Nigerian Novels

This dissertation examines historiographic metafiction as a mode of national rewriting in twenty-first century Nigerian novels, developing an original theory of how Nigerian authors use the formal self-consciousness of postmodern historical fiction to interrogate official national histories, construct alternative archives of memory, and perform what the dissertation terms literary counter-citizenship. Historiographic metafiction, fiction that simultaneously represents historical experience and reflects on its own processes of historical representation, has been theorised primarily in European and American literary contexts, but its emergence as a dominant mode in recent Nigerian fiction, including novels by Teju Cole, Chris Abani, Sefi Atta, and younger authors, calls for a theoretically rigorous and Nigeria-specific account. The dissertation develops an original theoretical framework drawing on postmodern historical fiction theory, postcolonial theories of historical counter-narrative, Nigerian historiography, and theories of literary citizenship and political imagination. The framework is applied across close readings of eight Nigerian novels published between 2000 and 2023, examining how each text's specific metafictional strategies, including unreliable narrators, embedded documents, and explicit commentary on historical sources, serve its particular project of historical rewriting. The dissertation argues that twenty-first century Nigerian historiographic metafiction collectively constitutes a practice of literary counter-citizenship in which fiction asserts its right to produce historical knowledge in competition with official state and academic historiography. Original contributions include the theory of literary counter-citizenship, close readings of all eight novels, and a theory of Nigerian metafictional historiography. Keywords: historiographic metafiction, Nigerian novel, national history, counter-narrative, postcolonial fiction.