A companion to African literatures /
edited by Olakunle George.
- 1 online resource
- Blackwell companions to literature and culture .
- Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture. .
Includes bibliographical references and index.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Notes on Contributors ix
Preface xv
Part I East and Central Africa 1
1 East and Central Africa: An Introduction 3 Grace A. Musila
2 Rereading East African Literature Through a Human Rights Lens: The Example of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not, Child 19 Katwiwa Mule
3 Of Authenticity and Engagement in Francophone African Cultural Production 29 Brian Valente-Quinn
4 Literature and Hybridity in Mauritius and Réunion 45 Anjali Prabhu
5 The Representation of Nation and National Identity in Modern Amharic Literature 61 Tewodros Gebre
6 Swahili Literature (Fasihi ya Kiswahili) 79 Evan Maina Mwangi
Part II North Africa 101
7 North Africa: An Introduction 103 Mohamed-Salah Omri
8 Nation and Identity in Modern Arabic Literature in Egypt 117 Ahmed Idrissi Alami
9 Hyphens & Hymens: francoarab Literature of the Maghreb 133 yasser elhariry
10 Translation and North African Letters 151 Tahia Abdel Nasser
11 Cross-Pollination and Interweavings between the Maghreb and Sub-Saharan Africa Through Art, Cinema, and Music 165 Hélène Tissières
12 France and North Africa: A Cinematic Retrospective of Centuries of Entangled Relations 181 Fazia Aïtel
Part III Southern Africa 195
13 Southern Africa: An Introduction 197 Stefan Helgesson
14 Anglophone Literature of South Africa 213 Peter Blair
15 The Machinery of Life-Writing Under Zimbabwe’s Third Chimurenga 235 Josiah Nyanda
16 The Afrikaans Cultural Expressions of the Powerless and Subjugated 251 Hein Willemse
17 Lusophone Southern African Literature (Angola, Mozambique) 267 Luís Madureira
18 A Socio-Critical Survey of Black South African English Poetry, 1900–2000 283 Thengani H. Ngwenya
Part IV West Africa 303
19 West Africa: An Introduction 305 Olakunle George
20 West African Literature in English 319 Neil ten Kortenaar
21 Migration, Literary Imagination, and Mirages in the Francophone Text: Paths to Anthropological Mutilation 333 Cilas Kemedjio
22 Reading Yorùbá Literature 351 Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́
Part V Redoublings and Reconstellations 365
23 Post-Hybrid Conjunctive Consciousness in the Literature of the New African Diaspora 367 Lokangaka Losambe
24 Outing Africa: On Sexualities, Gender, and Transgender in African Literatures 381 Chantal Zabus
25 African Literature and the European Canon: From Past to Present and Back Again 399 Jeanne-Marie Jackson
26 War, Human Rights, and Historical Representation: Torture as Synecdoche 411 Eleni Coundouriotis
27 African Literature’s Other Media: Art Film, Nollywood 425 Noah Tsika
28 Navigating Digital Worlds: African Literary Forms in the Digital Age 439 Stephanie Bosch Santana
Index 455
"This book is designed to serve as research resource for scholars, teachers, and students of African literature and related fields like world literature, comparative literary studies, and postcolonial studies. A Companion to African Literatures contains twenty-eight historically grounded and theoretically informed essays written by experts in the diverse subfields in the study of African literatures. The intended audience includes specialists, teachers, and students of modern African literature, as well as non-specialists in ancillary fields. In contemporary literary studies, notions of "world literature" and "globalism" have become central and influential. Here, the notion of world literature is to be understood as a set of theoretical perspectives and protocols of interpretation, rather than simply a corpus of literary works. In the turn to broad transnational perspectives, there is always a risk of de-emphasizing the specific backgrounds, thematic concerns, and significant transformations that characterize African literatures. This volume addresses the need for richly contextualized accounts of the diversity of literary production on the African continent. Taken as discrete individual chapters or as a whole, the volume will be useful to specialists and non-specialists in their research; it will likewise be useful to teachers who seek rigorous and lucid essays that can be assigned in college courses. With regard to genres and forms, A Companion to African Literatures covers novels, poetry, dramatic literature, nonfiction, and film. The focus is mainly on modern African literatures from around the nineteenth century. Even though literatures in Amharic, Arabic and Swahili date much farther back, in order to make the volume manageable the focus is on the historical span that extends from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first"--