Reading African complexities today : generic folding in Gaile Parkin’s Baking Cakes in Kigali

摘要

This article examines a recent, internationally acclaimed popular novel fromAfrica, Gaile Parkin’s Baking Cakes in Kigali (2009), to explore the ways thecustomary cultural demarcation between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” literature,between entertainment and critique, can be blurred so as to enablemore efficacious interventions, whether conceptually or pedagogically, intothe complexities of contemporary African societies. The article beginsby interrogating the immensely suggestive paradigm of “entanglement”(Mbembe and Nuttall) with a view to proposing more adequate images ofsociopolitical complexity via the notion of “folding” (Deleuze and others). Itthen offers examples of such modified paradigms by looking at the genericambiguity of Parkin’s novel, matched by the complex strategies it brings tobear on such fraught and intractable issues as FGM. The article suggests thatthis fusion of lightweight and serious, popular and conceptually challenging,is both an index of contemporary sociopolitical complexity in Africaand the site of the text’s purchase on that very complexity.