There’s a part of me that just deeply resents the fact that there’re many parts of the world where the fiction that comes from there is read as anthropology rather than as literature. And increasingly that kind of anthropological reading then means that . . . you’re explaining your world rather than inhabiting your world.
(Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaking in Glossing Africa, referring to the practice of briefly defining, footnoting, or otherwise clarifying the usage of an indigenous term in one’s fiction writing)
Bruce Humes 