Sincere Intimacy, Genre and Heterotopology of a Confessional Public

ABSTRACT

This article makes the case for confessional genre as a contemporary African literary form afforded by the intersection of politics, affect and mediatory conventions. I argue that contemporary Nigerian youths, through intimate and sincere revelatory writing practices, model heterotopic structures as correctives to normative orders, and that such Foucauldian spaces, contentiously expressed as space-within-a-space, are realised in, and materialise as, digital literary anthologies. Rethinking the literary anthology as heterotopia discloses seeming incompatible valences in confessional praxis and genre as constituting the kernel of a resistive commune. I tease out such valences by drawing on existing conceptions of publics and heterotopia and reading Thursday’s Children (Adeosun & Bello 2019), a digital anthology of personal essays, as confessional public. The article thinks through genre’s capture by technological regimes, capital and multiple economies of circulation to render confessional public’s techniques of mobilisation. These incompatibilities comprise the anthology’s materiality as negotiating a fusion of aesthetics, feelings-based subjectivity, intimacy and vulnerability. Troubling the ethics of a captured genre renders the paradoxical manoeuvres in writerly practices that hold up shared affective codes of belonging as baselines for agonistic literacies. The article theorises confessional writing as registers of predicaments and emotions whose constitutive contradictions bond writers and their audience to create feelings of intimacy and public.

KEYWORDS:

• confessional
• intimate public
• new sincerity
• heterotopia
• personal essay

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented as a lecture at the National Association of Students of English and Literary Studies Prize for Literature Symposium, University of Ibadan, January 2020. Thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback. A special thanks goes to Adanna L. Ogbonna-Oluikpe who read earlier drafts of this article and offered valuable suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No conflict of interest was declared by the author.

Notes

1 Ekeh’s scholarship on the matter of publics in Africa, for which he identifies two types – primordial and civic publics – paints such realms as responsive to the configurational energies of colonialism. The distinction between both calcifies in how much they are estranged from what he considers the ‘moral imperatives of private spaces’ as zones of ‘primordial groupings, sentiments and activities’ or immersed in the pockets of civil affiliations supported by colonial orders (Ekeh 1975, 92). The dialectics between both publics as spaces of kinship or sentimental ties and constitutional orders hold value for thinking the morphology and relationality of counter-publics as bookended enclaves in African spaces.

2 By one assessment, internet penetration in Nigeria as of 2021 stood at 50 per cent (104.4 million internet users), with 33 million social media users accounting for the 13 per cent of social media penetration. While in 2022 internet and social media figures rose to 109.2 million (51.0 per cent) and 32.90 million (15.4 per cent) respectively, these figures were still significantly minuscule relative to the country’s population, pegged at 214.1 million. The numbers reveal that those engaging in these practices are few – a reminder of the issue with access to African literature.

3 The unitary space or public as I refer to it in this article estranges from the counter- or heterotopic public by being a space dominated by the imperatives of civic and state structures. That is, the space of the tactics of control and technologies of conformity in service of, and as directed by, the state. I think of this in relation to Ekeh’s civic publics, which affirm the regulatory energies of colonial orders in maintaining public life received as operational in the postcolonial state. The use of the term here also leans towards David Marshall’s (2016, 7) reference to it as the sphere describing the nation state.

4 Non-fiction functions as a super-ordinate category of writing with defined non-fictive and biographical content. Creative non-fiction is its literary type, as opposed to hagiography and so on. The distinction implied recommends a personal essay as a type of creative non-fiction. Where such distinction between creative non-fiction and personal essay overlaps, attention is paid to the general praxis. If the personal essay is explicitly discussed, my reference is to the form as a specific type of creative non-fiction.

5 My own participatory experience of the growth of Nigerian contemporary writing online (between 2015 and 2019, when several Nigerian literary platforms and initiatives blossomed) drew my attention to trauma-porn criticism as it was levelled against the appearance of Nigerian non-fiction that dealt with traumatic experiences on Western platforms such as Catapult in 2018/2019, which Oris Aigbokhaevbolo (2019) argues range from witchcraft and sexual abuse to ‘death, gay persecution, culture shock, violence, more deaths […] trauma, trauma, trauma’.

6 I am drawn to Gilles Lipovetsky (2005) not only because much postcolonial literature is interpolated by ideologies of anxiety, whether we conceive of them as structures of representation in the Althusserian sense of language and other discursive practices as material expressions of ideologies or in the Jamesonian ideologemes as literalised codes of predicaments and perspectives. I also make this referential connection because of the logic of consumption that digital postcolonial writing imposes on itself via its specificity of production. If I have suggested confessional writing as related to the meta- and hypermodern, it is because I consider it as both metamodernist in its aesthetics and hypermodern in its founding and circulatory imperative, a consequence of the cultural moments it works in and mood it exudes, none of which can be simplistically delineated from the other.

7 Taken from an email correspondence between the editors and Africa in Dialogue, March 2019.

8 Part of the interactive platforms where the anthology as an organised discourse and social space actualised its summoning imperative is WhatsApp. Here, my co-editor and I gathered with contributors to interact and interview. This is significant: it illuminates the mutable nature of this public. Additionally emphasised is how the anthology is by far the public’s most stable representation, symbol and converging point, which is central to theorising the digital anthology as the material figure of an otherwise fluid, intimate public.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Damilare Bello

Damilare Bello is a PhD student in English at Duke University.