Narrative reproduction: plotting land in Yvonne Owuor's Dust

Abstract

This article argues that the postcolonial African novel identifies land as the centre of social reproduction. Beginning with an analysis of Silvia Federici's Nigerian writing and a further investigation into social reproduction theory from and about Africa, this article develops a reading method which traces the novel form's use of land as the generator of plot. Yvonne Owuor's Dust exemplifies how the novel as a colonial form falls into crisis around an attempt to reach for the narratively reproductive potential of disavowed, arid lands at the borders of the postcolonial nation-state. As the readings in this article demonstrate, Owuor's novel both chimes with the interventions of those theorists who depict social reproduction in Africa as a general theory of feminisation – of people and land alike – and offers an answer to how social reproduction might be rendered in literary formal terms. This article is therefore an investigation into the ‘where’ of social reproduction in the contemporary African novel.