Jeanne-Marie Jackson
I am a Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, where I am also Senior Editor of ELH. In 2021 I was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and I received my PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University in 2012.
My most recent book, "The African Novel of Ideas,” was published in 2021 with Princeton University Press, and in 2023 received Honorable Mention for the African Literature Association's Book of the Year prize. A Russian edition is forthcoming. It tells the story of the relationship between the novel and philosophy at key, under-studied junctures of African intellectual life, from the early 20th century through today. It is a story, specifically, of how the novel negotiates between liberal selfhood and liberal critique, unseating false dichotomies between humanistic and liberationist thought traditions. As it charts philosophy's evolution from a dominant to a marginal presence in African literary discourse across the past hundred years, the book develops novels' treatment of philosophical individualism as a tool for assessing the push-and-pull of social experience and conceptual abstraction.
My first book, "South African Literature’s Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation," was published with Bloomsbury in 2015. It is centrally concerned with how Russia’s nineteenth-century Golden Age of literature and ideas provides a model for the study of South African realist forms and epistemologies both during and after apartheid. It also advances a broader argument for disconnection as the root of far-flung transnational affinities: an "inverted" world literature. Through paired readings of nineteenth-century Russian texts and their South African successors, the book asks how traditions marked by a formative sense of isolation in the world make us ask harder questions about the “global” as a method and analytic category.
I have recently finished a third book, "The Letter of the Law in J.E. Casely Hayford's West Africa," which is under contract with Princeton University Press. A concept-driven account of Casely Hayford's written work in the context of his legal and political career, it positions him as a key figure to modernist-era anticolonial thought and form, as well as African and British imperial legal and literary history.
My critical edition of Casely Hayford's novel "Ethiopia Unbound," co-edited with Adwoa Opoku-Agyemang, was published in 2024 with Michigan State University Press. With Cajetan Iheka, I have also co-edited a volume called "Intellectual Traditions of African Literature 1960-2015" that is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
Other scholarly work is published or forthcoming in Genre; NOVEL; Modernism/modernity; Research in African Literatures; JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory; The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry; Safundi; Studies in the Novel; Comparative Literature Studies; English Studies in Africa; and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, as well as numerous edited collections. Finally, I have contributed essays and literary reviews to a range of public-facing venues including the New York Times; the New Left Review (Sidecar), Public Books, 3:AM Magazine, n+1, Popula, Africa in Words, Bookslut, The Literary Review, Litnet, The Conversation, and Africa Is a Country. Links are available here: https://jeannemariejackson.com/other-writing/
My most recent book, "The African Novel of Ideas,” was published in 2021 with Princeton University Press, and in 2023 received Honorable Mention for the African Literature Association's Book of the Year prize. A Russian edition is forthcoming. It tells the story of the relationship between the novel and philosophy at key, under-studied junctures of African intellectual life, from the early 20th century through today. It is a story, specifically, of how the novel negotiates between liberal selfhood and liberal critique, unseating false dichotomies between humanistic and liberationist thought traditions. As it charts philosophy's evolution from a dominant to a marginal presence in African literary discourse across the past hundred years, the book develops novels' treatment of philosophical individualism as a tool for assessing the push-and-pull of social experience and conceptual abstraction.
My first book, "South African Literature’s Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation," was published with Bloomsbury in 2015. It is centrally concerned with how Russia’s nineteenth-century Golden Age of literature and ideas provides a model for the study of South African realist forms and epistemologies both during and after apartheid. It also advances a broader argument for disconnection as the root of far-flung transnational affinities: an "inverted" world literature. Through paired readings of nineteenth-century Russian texts and their South African successors, the book asks how traditions marked by a formative sense of isolation in the world make us ask harder questions about the “global” as a method and analytic category.
I have recently finished a third book, "The Letter of the Law in J.E. Casely Hayford's West Africa," which is under contract with Princeton University Press. A concept-driven account of Casely Hayford's written work in the context of his legal and political career, it positions him as a key figure to modernist-era anticolonial thought and form, as well as African and British imperial legal and literary history.
My critical edition of Casely Hayford's novel "Ethiopia Unbound," co-edited with Adwoa Opoku-Agyemang, was published in 2024 with Michigan State University Press. With Cajetan Iheka, I have also co-edited a volume called "Intellectual Traditions of African Literature 1960-2015" that is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
Other scholarly work is published or forthcoming in Genre; NOVEL; Modernism/modernity; Research in African Literatures; JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory; The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry; Safundi; Studies in the Novel; Comparative Literature Studies; English Studies in Africa; and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, as well as numerous edited collections. Finally, I have contributed essays and literary reviews to a range of public-facing venues including the New York Times; the New Left Review (Sidecar), Public Books, 3:AM Magazine, n+1, Popula, Africa in Words, Bookslut, The Literary Review, Litnet, The Conversation, and Africa Is a Country. Links are available here: https://jeannemariejackson.com/other-writing/
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Books by Jeanne-Marie Jackson
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691186443/the-african-novel-of-ideas
Uncorrected proofs of the introduction only are attached here.
Official book description:
The African Novel of Ideas focuses on the role of the philosophical novel and the place of philosophy more broadly in the intellectual life of the African continent, from the early twentieth century through to today. Examining works originating from the Gold Coast, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, and tracing how such writers as J. E. Casely Hayford, Imraan Coovadia, Tendai Huchu, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, and Stanlake Samkange reconcile deep contemplation with their social situations, Jeanne-Marie Jackson offers a new way of reading and understanding African literature.
Jackson begins with Fante anticolonial worldliness in prenationalist Ghana, moves through efforts to systematize Shona philosophy in 1970s Zimbabwe, looks at the Ugandan novel Kintu as a treatise on pluralistic rationality, and arrives at the treatment of “philosophical suicide” by current southern African writers. As Jackson charts philosophy’s evolution from a dominant to marginal presence in African literary discourse across the past hundred years, she assesses the push and pull of subjective experience and abstract thought.
The first major transnational exploration of African literature in conversation with philosophy, The African Novel of Ideas redefines the place of the African experience within literary history.
South African Literature’s Russian Soul is available through the Bloomsbury website (http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/south-african-literatures-russian-soul-9781472593009/) and on Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/South-African-Literatures-Russian-Soul/dp/1472592999/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1426707434&sr=8-1&keywords=jeanne-marie+jackson).
The introductory chapter is included here with permission from Bloomsbury Academic.
Papers by Jeanne-Marie Jackson
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691186443/the-african-novel-of-ideas
Uncorrected proofs of the introduction only are attached here.
Official book description:
The African Novel of Ideas focuses on the role of the philosophical novel and the place of philosophy more broadly in the intellectual life of the African continent, from the early twentieth century through to today. Examining works originating from the Gold Coast, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, and tracing how such writers as J. E. Casely Hayford, Imraan Coovadia, Tendai Huchu, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, and Stanlake Samkange reconcile deep contemplation with their social situations, Jeanne-Marie Jackson offers a new way of reading and understanding African literature.
Jackson begins with Fante anticolonial worldliness in prenationalist Ghana, moves through efforts to systematize Shona philosophy in 1970s Zimbabwe, looks at the Ugandan novel Kintu as a treatise on pluralistic rationality, and arrives at the treatment of “philosophical suicide” by current southern African writers. As Jackson charts philosophy’s evolution from a dominant to marginal presence in African literary discourse across the past hundred years, she assesses the push and pull of subjective experience and abstract thought.
The first major transnational exploration of African literature in conversation with philosophy, The African Novel of Ideas redefines the place of the African experience within literary history.
South African Literature’s Russian Soul is available through the Bloomsbury website (http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/south-african-literatures-russian-soul-9781472593009/) and on Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/South-African-Literatures-Russian-Soul/dp/1472592999/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1426707434&sr=8-1&keywords=jeanne-marie+jackson).
The introductory chapter is included here with permission from Bloomsbury Academic.