Ainehi Edoro-Glines

Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think

Forests appear everywhere in African storytelling—in hunter epics, folklore, divination fragments, and the rich archive of 20th and 21st-century novels. Yet, their significance has been overlooked in the study of modern African fiction. Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think argues that the formal evolution of the African novel can be observed by tracing the shift from the forest as a figure of order and violence in early 20th-century writing to a figure of utopian futures in 21st-century speculative fiction. Images like Chinua Achebe’s evil forest in Things Fall Apart, which evoke a kind of spatialized violence used to make the ultimate decision over who lives or must die, are the focus of the book. The forests in my book are poetic images used to configure fictional worlds around the question of power. By examining the form of forests, we uncover the deep foundations of power, order, and violence that give shape to fictional worlds. In Forest Imaginaries, I show how forest images, drawn from indigenous African literary archives, are adapted to the novel to visualize and critique the spatial dynamics of imperial power, the juridical foundations of colonial occupation, and the supremacy of the human in the light of a planetary ecological crisis.

Ainehi Edoro-Glines is a Nigerian academic of Esan descent. She is jointly appointed in the English and African Cultural Studies departments where she teaches and researches on African literature and digital culture. She graduated summa cum laude in English from Morgan State University before completing a PhD at Duke University where she launched Brittle Paper, a website that has now become a leading online platform on African writing and literary culture. She is working on her first book titled “Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think.” Her journal article, “Unruly Archives: Literary Form and the Social Media Imaginary,” was published in English Literary History in 2022. She has a forthcoming article in PMLA on the poetics of Instagram. In 2018, she made Okay Africa’s Top 100 Women list in honor of her work in media and publishing. Her writing and commentaries have been featured on The Guardian, BBC World News, Africa is a Country, and, most recently, on Lithub.