Articles Available Online

Namwali Serpell is a rarity: an academic and novelist whose criticism is as vital as her fiction Since we first spoke, in September 2020, she has both taken up a position as Professor of English at Harvard and, with her debut novel The Old Drift (2019), won the prestigious Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction, the first black woman to have done so The award’s last winner, Tade Thompson, has called Serpell’s book ‘the great African novel of the twenty-first century’ In a characteristically radical and generous gesture, having won the award on the day it was announced that no murder charges would be filed against the police officers responsible for killing Breonna Taylor, Serpell donated her prize money to the bail funds of those who have protested that injustice   The Old Drift is a remarkable book, an epic of Zambia, where Serpell was born, which, over its nearly 600 pages, refracts the country’s history – from Cecil Rhodes to Rhodes Must Fall – through the mistakes and misfortunes of the members of three families, some of them real historical figures, others otherworldly, like figures from fairytale or folklore, over six generations The novel crosses genre just as it spans time, taking in magic realism, social realism, satire, science fiction, historical fiction, spy thriller… Reading it, you realise what a sham, what a constraint ‘genre’ is It’s a polyphonous and brimming piece of work; intricately, shiftingly patterned, acute in its sustained variousness It seems, throughout, to shimmer with a meaning you can never quite discern, provoking what Serpell, in her first, academic book, Seven Modes of Uncertainty (2014), describes as a ‘useful dizziness’ – and it does so, despite the immense and real suffering it contains, in a joyful, generous way   Seven Modes of Uncertainty is a rigorous and ingenious academic exploration of a number of modern novels – among them Lolita, Beloved and American Psycho – that use strategies of structural uncertainty (two characters with irreconcilable versions of events, for instance) to challenge their readers’ ethical engagement Reading such books, Serpell demonstrates, provides less an illusory