Critical Race Theory, Blackness, and the African Novel: Rethinking Race in Nigerian and Pan-African Literary Studies

This dissertation introduces and critically adapts the frameworks of critical race theory for application to Nigerian and Pan-African literary studies, arguing that race and anti-Black racism are more central to the literary experience and formal concerns of Nigerian fiction than existing postcolonial literary scholarship has recognised, while also demonstrating the limitations of direct transplantation of American CRT frameworks to the African literary context. The relationship between race, Blackness, and African literature has been complicated by the historical association of racial discourse with European colonialism and by the subsequent African nationalist preference for cultural over racial frameworks of identity. This dissertation argues that this preference, while understandable, has created blind spots in the literary critical analysis of how race operates both in the social worlds represented by Nigerian fiction and in the international literary reception of African authors. The dissertation develops an original Africa-centred critical race framework drawing on the Negritude tradition, Achille Mbembe's theorisation of Blackness, Afrocentrist and pan-African thought, and the specific racialised experiences of Nigerians in the diaspora as represented in recent fiction. The framework is applied to readings of selected Nigerian novels that explicitly engage with race including Teju Cole's Open City, Sefi Atta's A Bit of Difference, and Chimamanda Adichie's Americanah, alongside earlier texts including Soyinka's Season of Anomy and J.P. Clark's poetry. Original contributions include the Africa-centred CRT framework, new readings of all major texts, and a theory of Nigerian literary racial consciousness. Keywords: critical race theory, Blackness, Nigerian literature, Pan-African studies, race and literature.