The Cultural Work of Animal Narrators in the Contemporary Sub-Saharan African Novel

ABSTRACT: Over the early decades of the twenty-first century there has been a marked rise of works of African fiction recounted by first-person animal narrators—prompted by such historical vectors as the accelerating onrush of climate change (with the mass extinctions it promises to bring), the instrumentalization of animals and their reduction to the status of commodities under neoliberal capitalism, the rise of animal studies as an academic field with its promotion of an awareness of speciesism, and the continuing effort to culturally decolonize residual imperialist discourses that suppressed indigenous African modes of knowledge. This essay argues these animalnarrated works of fiction explore a wide range of thematic focuses but share a number of distinct commonalities as well: attention to the natural world or breakdown of the conceptual dichotomy between man-made and natural worlds, a desire to provide alternative perspectives on human society, a calling into question of humanity's age-old idealization of itself, and a revaluation of nonhuman animals.