
Decolonizing Christianities in Contemporary Nigerian Literature
Adriaan van Klinken
Decolonizing Christianities in Contemporary Nigerian Literature
Adriaan van Klinken
“This is a textured intellectual contribution to our understanding of Christianity through a decolonial framework. By drawing on works by eminent Nigerian literary writers, it presents a rich compendium of the lived and imagined experiences of Christian adherents during the decolonization era. The book is a serious attempt that foregrounds literary and religious scholarship, offering a new understanding of Christian traditions in the larger context of Nigeria’s religious body politic. There is no better time to have such a book than now.”
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Adriaan van Klinken addresses this literary shift in the context of Nigeria, a major center of literary production and Christian growth on the continent. Through close dialogue with works by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Okey Ndibe, Chinelo Okparanta, and others, van Klinken probes the lived and imagined experiences of Catholicism, Evangelicalism, and Pentecostalism across Nigeria in the wake of decolonization. Taking Nigerian literary writers seriously as social and religious thinkers, van Klinken puts their novels into conversation with the works of major African theologians, philosophers, and social theorists. By foregrounding the creative theologizing that fiction writing participates in, this book demonstrates how these literary texts—beyond merely representing and critiquing sociopolitical realities—also take part in envisioning the alternative worldmaking potential of Christian traditions in the Nigerian context.
“This is a textured intellectual contribution to our understanding of Christianity through a decolonial framework. By drawing on works by eminent Nigerian literary writers, it presents a rich compendium of the lived and imagined experiences of Christian adherents during the decolonization era. The book is a serious attempt that foregrounds literary and religious scholarship, offering a new understanding of Christian traditions in the larger context of Nigeria’s religious body politic. There is no better time to have such a book than now.”
“This is a superb book. It enfleshes Christianity in Nigeria by ‘inter-reading’ contemporary novels with the work of theologians and critical theorists from the African continent. Van Klinken reveals how public intellectuals provide a thoughtful and nuanced engagement with the prominence of Christianity in their country. In engaging prose, he offers students of religion and literature a fresh way of studying their subjects.”
“In this brilliant book, literature functions as a source for theological reflection, fodder for social ethical debates, and transcripts of theopoetics. With careful reasoning, multidisciplinary methodology, and ethical sensitivity, Adriaan van Klinken brings Nigerian twenty-first-century literature into the theological academy. Any scholar serious about discerning or grasping the full breadth of Nigerian theology or social ethics must read this book.”
Adriaan van Klinken is Professor of Religion and African Studies at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Kenyan, Christian, Queer: Religion, LGBT Activism, and Arts of Resistance in Africa and Transforming Masculinities in African Christianity: Gender Controversies in Times of AIDS, the former also published by Penn State University Press.
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