Heterogeneous Cultural Repertoires in the Global South: Intersections between the Yoruba Oral Matrix and the Contemporary Nigerian Novel

Abstract

In this article, we propose a critical-analytical reading of the contemporary African Nigerian novel regarding its forms of interrelation with cultural repertoires of Yoruba tradition and orality. Considering theoretical-epistemological perspectives found in Brugioni’s Comparative African Literatures (2019), Moretti’s Conjectures on World Literature (2000), and Leite’s texts (1998, 2010, 2012), we assume that contemporary African cultures result from abrupt transformations, from involuntary (and some of them violent) blends, responsible, among other things, for the modification of languages, traditions, as well as for the introduction, in their territories, of cultural forms, such as the novel, which also end up being transformed, since writers, when appropriating them, feed them with local content (Moretti, 2000). From this context, dialoguing with debates around translation processes (Brugioni, 2019) and the intersection between oral repertoires and literary writing (Leite, 1998, 2010, 2012), we take as our corpus of analysis the work Stay with me (2018), by the Nigerian Ayòbámi Adébáyò, in order to analyze the ways in which these repertoires shape written narrative composition. We speak of comparative studies here, therefore, based on the relationship between the Yoruba oral matrix and the contemporary Nigerian novel, aiming to understand how writers located in the Global South have constituted their aesthetic-literary projects, in many cases, extrapolating categories such as nation or ideals of cultural vernacularism.