'Told in Conference Style': Narrative Form and the Conceptualisation of 'Culture' in Woman of the Aeroplanes

Abstract

This article considers the role of narrative form in helping to forward different theoretical conceptualisations of ‘culture’ in Kojo Laing’s Woman of the Aeroplanes (1988). It argues that different narrative features provide aesthetic corollaries for two distinct conceptualisations of culture that circulated in nation-building projects following independence: culture as extractible national resource and culture as unfolding historical process. It argues that Woman of the Aeroplanes both explicitly reflects on these competing conceptualisations of ‘culture’, as part of its thematic content, and formally interrogates them, via respective techniques of chronotopic metaphor and narrative ‘plasticity’. These narrative features help to reveal the ‘inner logics’ of concepts (Ngũgĩ), making form a critical part of conceptual evaluation. The article brings together formalist readings with conceptual debates from the ‘cultural policy era’, to show the theorizing potential of narrative form and to show Laing’s distinctive contributions to this area, despite the frequent exclusion of African literature from formalist discussions.