Abstract
This paper questions how African writers in the age of independences referred in their texts to social identities fashioned upon nation, race, ethnicity and class, in order to define, explain and influence collective action in the frame of particular nation-building projects. After reviewing the possibility of talking of a ‘literature of African independences,’ it is sought to establish the convenience of a ‘bottom-up’ approach to the social classifications involved, understanding them as marks on a scale of identities, rather than discrete conceptual fields. Emphasized here is their ‘practical use’ as a privileged analytical index for the broader universe of African nationalism and its internal struggles. Finally, a small comparative sketch of the divergent possibilities of writing about identities on different scales is presented, drawing upon an illustrative corpus of African writers.
Keywords:
African literatures; social classifications; nationalism