New Books Network Ainehi Edoro, "Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think" (Columbia UP, 2026)
Mar 29, 2026
Ainehi Edoro, Mellon-Morgridge assistant professor and founding editor of Brittle Paper, discusses how forests in African fiction act as living, agentive spaces. She explores forests as sites of worldbuilding, fragmentation as a creative strategy, and how forest-thinking rewrites literary history to imagine new political and ecological futures.
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Fictional Space Can Think And Drive Plot
- Space in fiction can be agentive and drive narrative rather than just serve as a backdrop.
- Ainehi Edoro uses Achebe's evil forest to show how space defines characters and adjudicates mortality across the novel's social structure.
Rewriting Literary History Through The Forest
- Tracing literary history through the forest recenters indigenous African narrative contributions to the novel form.
- Edoro argues this approach foregrounds aesthetic and formal innovations rather than only anti-colonial representation.
Fragmentation As A Creative Literary Method
- Fragmentation in African storytelling is generative, dismantling solid forms to recombine new meanings.
- Edoro cites Yoruba myth of a shattered arch-divinity and Ben Okri's The Famished Road as models of productive fragmentation.
