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ABSTRACT
This special issue is dedicated to Namwali Serpell's novel The Old Drift (2019), and the introduction makes a case for reading the book as a disruptive novel. While the degree of its disruptiveness is a moot point, the novel displays a formal innovativeness that stems not from doing something entirely new but from recycling old art forms and mixing genres, re-asking old (un)answered questions, embracing open-endedness and engaging with the contradictory. In its handling of multiple narrative voices, the novel opens up, among other issues, possibilities for countering historical origins, unnarrating the nation and disbelonging to it. I first present the triadic logic underlying The Old Drift's formal and thematic choices in eight fragments that sometimes include close readings. I reserve the discussion of the implications of my argument on scholarly debates and African letters for last, choosing to first engage in a critical appraisal of the text. I also articulate my motivation for putting together this special issue under the rubric of disruption and trace the links in the articles contained herein.
1.DEFYING THE LAW OF NONCONTRADICTION
In The Old Drift (2019), the US-based Lusaka-born writer Namwali Serpell, to adapt a phrasing from Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nutall, "write[s] the world from" Zambia "and write[s]" Zambia "into the world" (348). The intergenerational debut novel has been variously hailed by reviewers as a "sprawling epic" (Wrenn), a "genre-blending/meshing" novel (Mohamed), a "genre-defying riotous work" (Iversen), a "genre-busting novel" (Gordon 1190), or a "genre-bending opus" (Lewis). It is a paragon of following the "Law of genre" by not reverting to "genres are not to be mixed" (56) as espoused by the French philosopher of Jewish-Algerian descent Jacques Derrida. Serpell herself, in an interview with Ryan Chapman, has invoked the metaphor of "kachigamba" to describe the patchwork of genres deployed as lenses in the novel. That Serpell alludes in the interview to Patchwork (2012), a novel that also weaves together intergenerational stories and is written by a fellow Zambian female writer, Ellen Banda-Aaku, reflects Serpell's fictional strategy of paying homage to other writers who are strewn as intertextual references throughout her novel.
Serpell's text is intimately bound up with Zambian literature and history but refuses to be just about Zambia. It is, in other words,...