The renowned newspaper, The New York Times recently released the list of “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” The only continental African and Nigerian that made the list was Ngozi Chimamanda Adichie. Among the numerous books written by Adichie, including Half Yellow a Sun, Purple Hibiscus and many others, New York Times selected Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah, a book that was focused on immigration adventure, an immigrant experience in the United State.
Ainehi Edoro-Glines, a Nigerian academic of Esan descent and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote a piece criticizing the obvious omission of African writers by New York Times. Edoro-Glines wrote:
“On social media, where “100 Best Books of the 21st Century” is splashed on colorful graphics in bold letters, users are not seeing it as the “best of, according to the NYT.” The fact that the poll was limited to books published in the United States gets lost in the fine print. The NYT asking American industry insiders to only consider books published in the US has predictably produced an outrageously Euro-American list. Yet, the NYT asks us to take these books as “the most important, influential books of the era,” not as the preference of a limited and statistically insignificant pool of writers, as far as the global literary space is concerned.
If this list is an attempt at writing the story of the last 25 years of publishing in English, it is a story that falls flat. It does not reflect the diversity and scale of global publishing. It misrepresents the 21st century, one of the most productive and diverse periods in the history of literature. An epoch wherein markets and reading publics have become so interconnected and crowded is reduced to the preferences of American literary celebrities. The story that American books define the century is also the opening act of what, if left uncriticized, could become a replay of the cultural ethnocentrism that plagued 20th-century publishing.
For someone like me, an African reader, literary scholar, and book culture curator, the exclusion of African writers from the list of the most influential books written in English in the last 25 years is an unforgivable oversight, given the glaring evidence otherwise. The meteoric rise of African publishing is one of the most remarkable stories of the last 25 years. If you want to capture how the 21st century has reinvented what it means to read, write, and publish, go to African literature.”
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