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This book explores how African fiction offers revolutionary models for understanding temporality and reimagining history in our catastrophe-ridden twenty-first century. Examining eight works from diverse African writers – ranging from Achebe’s classic Things Fall Apart, via works by Coetzee and Dangarembga, to contemporary novels by Makumbi, Mengiste, Mujila, Owuor and Serpell – the book demonstrates how these authors eschew linear Eurocentric historicism in favour of bold, immediate confrontations with history in the making and its temporal fabric. Drawing from fiction across Africa, the book proposes a composite theory of ‘proximate historiographies’ encompassing the entangled, plaited, expansive, interpellative, somatic and kinetic temporalities that emerge from these pathbreaking works. Taken together, they reveal Africa as a laboratory of futurity rather than a place outside history. The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of African literature, postcolonial studies and contemporary fiction. It will also appeal to those working in environmental humanities, decolonial theory and innovative approaches to historiography. Read more ASIN B0GLGGQTJV XRay Not Enabled ISBN13 978-1040902745 Edition 1st Language English File size 952 KB Page Flip Enabled Publisher Routledge Word Wise Not Enabled Print length 162 pages Accessibility Learn more Screen Reader Supported Publication date May 22, 2026 Enhanced typesetting Enabled