This dissertation examines the recent historical turn in contemporary African literature against the backdrop of a stagnant ruinous present. I argue that the contemporary African historical novel revives the historical as a productive analytical category with which to grasp, inhabit, and endure our lethargic present. Offering a narrative of history that is iterative and recursive rather than emancipatory and discontinuous, the new historical novel breaks with anticolonial and early postcolonial literary traditions for whom thematizing the distant past served as a recuperative gesture, an effort to (re)construct a common African past that was assaulted or obscured by colonialism. Instead, in their representation of the longue durée of African political history, these recent novels offer what Peter Osborne has termed a “historiography of historical consciousness,” as each text depicts a pivotal moment in an African nation’s history when the struggle for self-determination had been inextricably bound up and structured by an explicit formation of the self as a historical subject. They show how the fight for self-determination has always included the iterative struggle to imagine anew its subject. That is, the revolution’s subject is not a priori to the struggle but emerges co-constitutively. Moreover, these novels de-center the “world-historic individual,” privileging the peripheral (often female) figure in order to reorient the coordinates of our inquiry into the past away from the ruins of revolution and towards the ongoing political desires of the subject who discovered herself in/as the collective and must learn to live in the ruins. In other words, the historical novel, much like revolutionary politics and revisionist postcolonial criticism, seeks to produce a different sense of time. This sense of time, which is at once collective and subjective, chronos and kairos, political and affective represents the mechanism by which historical consciousness is ignited and experienced as such. As a result, the historical novel restores time as a source of possibility so as to not surrender the capacity of the postcolonial subject to grasp the specificity of her own historicity and perhaps once more repair her relationship to the future.