A Companion to African Literatures, First Edition. Edited by Olakunle George. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2021 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. African literature’s relationship to the European canon is both specific and representative: specific in its manifestation in and as key texts within African literary studies, and representative of larger shifts in possibility for imagining Africa’s relation to “the West.” For better or worse, African literature’s constitution around, against, or to the omission of Europe as historical reality and ideological specter is about much more than books; it is also the story of a field’s taking shape around a fraught set of political entanglements. For this reason, the wildly heterodox corpus we call “African writing” has often served as a barometer for the state of cross‐cultural relationality, writ large in colonialism’s aftermath. This chapter thus begins with an overview of the dominant models by which African literature – as a body of texts brought together by critical practice – has engaged with Europe’s legacy on the continent. Though the narrative is necessarily partial, it should suffice to ground an argument as to how African literary studies might best configure itself looking forward. To this end, I then turn back to what is arguably the first English‐language novel by an African writer: the Ghanaian J. E. Casely Hayford’s Ethiopia Unbound (1911). Hayford’s book, I suggest, offers a template for African literature’s restructuring vis‐à‐vis Europe based on truly (even naïvely) lateral principles. Background Chinua Achebe is an obvious place to begin, not because he is indeed the “father of African literature” as has often been suggested, but because the discourse surrounding this controversial appellation in many ways anchors the field in the decades that follow. The publication of Achebe’s classic Things Fall Apart in 1958 – the first in a trilogy of novels that also includes No Longer At Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964) – coincides with a wave of African independence move- ments beginning with Ghana’s declaration of autonomy from Britain in 1957. By focusing on the story of an Igbo village leader named Okonkwo in the late nineteenth century, Achebe 25 African Literature and the European Canon: From Past to Present and Back Again Jeanne‐Marie Jackson c25.indd 399 c25.indd 399 07-07-2020 02:07:55 07-07-2020 02:07:55 UNCORRECTED PROOFS