“We were fishermen”: The postnational reimagination of community in Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen

This article reads Chigozie Obioma’s Booker-finalist debut novel, The Fishermen, in the light of recent debates on postnationalism in contemporary African literature. The central intervention of the article is its examination of critical, self-reflexive ideations of community in the novel and the argument that such notions of community are vital for resisting theoretical models that presuppose “failure” or “crises” as the framework for conceptualizing contemporary national realities in the African context. Borrowing from Achille Mbembe’s theorization of postcolonial “entanglement” to modify Benedict Anderson’s thesis on the close relationship between enlightenment modernity and national community, the article closely reads the novel as the site of a complex inheritance and reimagination of community. Focusing on narrative voice and entangled temporalities, the article examines the varying registers of the central term “fishermen”. The article proposes that these resistant methodological approaches emerging from postcolonial Nigerian literature represent a layered articulation of alternative collective imaginaries.