Decolonizing Christianities in Contemporary Nigerian Literature

In African literature, Christianity has long been represented as a foreign religion, associated with the history and ongoing legacies of European colonialism and mission. But in recent decades, writers have begun to engage with it in more complex, ambivalent, and at times liberatory ways that are reflective of the religion’s tremendous growth and diverse transformations across the continent.

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.

Author Biography

Adriaan van Klinken is Professor of Religion and African Studies at the University of Leeds and Extraordinary Professor in the Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice, University of the Western Cape. 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.