Aaron Bady in Post45:
African Writers in a New World is a project to ask some over-simplistic questions, and see what kinds of complicating answers we can get. The sum is neither more nor less than the total of its parts, because we don't want to add them up at all. Why reduce fine literary distinctions to the less subtle certainties of round numbers? Why not embrace the lack of consensus? Most of all, why not ask questions that don't allow for single stories?More here
If nothing else, and if only for me, this project has been a useful exercise in learning to listen. Literary scholarship so often proceeds as if it wants to be empirical, emulating the sciences by making claims, introducing evidence, and advancing and contesting theoretical arguments about our subjects. At some idealized end-point, in the future, we imagine we might reach consensus, or at least we act like we want to. Whether or not this is scholarship, this isn't that: open-ended and irresolvable, this project proceeds under the assumption that Barthes was wrong, that the author isn't dead, and that it's sometimes useful just to shut up and pay attention to what she has to say for herself.