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Accepted Paper:
“An Enlarged Sense of Community”: Reading Friendship in Doreen Baingana’s Tropical Fish and Sofia Samatar’s Tender
Nomonde Ntsepo
(Rhodes University)
This paper considers how Doreen Baingana and Sofia Samatar expand the traditional cartography of what we consider friendship from human to non-human subjects, and offers glimpses of what it might look like to inhabit the earth with an ethic of friendship in African and Afrodiasporic literature.
Paper long abstract:
In the age of the Anthropocene, rethinking humanity’s relationship to the natural world is an urgent task. At its core, this paper considers African and Afrodiasporic literary representations of friendship with the more-than-human world. To do this, I read Doreen Baingana’s Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe and Sofia Samatar’s Tender alongside one another. Although working with different genres, both Baingana and Samatar gesture towards an enlarged understanding of friendship, one that includes unlikely connections with human and non-human subjects, and affective ties with the natural world. I suggest that Baingana and Samatar expand the traditional cartography of what we consider friendship from human to non-human subjects, and offer glimpses of what it might look like to inhabit the earth with an ethic of friendship.