The best scholarship shifts paradigms by making visible domains that have existed in a cone of shadow; it discards the old frameworks that have blunted the acuity of our imagination and prevented us from seeing outside them. Susan Andrade's The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms, 1958–1988 falls within this category, and the story she tells is that of the creation of constraining narrative frames that have limited the reception of African novels written by women. A transformative intervention in African literary historiography, this trailblazing study simultaneously attends to the political dimension of novels, which Andrade illuminates in the tension between feminist and nationalist perspectives, as well as to formal aspects of the texts that emerge in her meticulously crafted and astutely argued close readings. The corpus of works she discusses (novels and novellas by Buchi Emecheta, Mariama Bâ, Ousmane Sembène, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nuruddin Farah, and Assia Djebar) has...
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