As the official publication of the Division on Black American Literature and Culture of the Modern Language Association of America, African American review promotes an exchange among writers and scholars in the arts, humanities, and social sciences who hold diverse perspectives of African American literature and culture.

This first volume of ASNEL Papers gathers together a broad range of reflections on, and presentations of, the social and expressive underpinnings of post-colonial literary cultures, concentrating on aspects of orality, social structure and hybridity, the role of women in cultural production, performative and media representations (theatre, film, advertising) and their institutional forms, and the linguistic basis of literature (including questions of multilingualism, pidgins and creoles, and translation). Some of the present studies adopt a diachronic approach, as in essays devoted to European colonial influences on African literatures, the populist colonial roots of Australian drama, and the intersection of exogenous and autochthonous languages in the cultural development and identity formation of Cameroon, Tanzania and the Swahili-speaking regions of Africa. Broadly synchronic perspectives (which nevertheless take cognizance of developmental determinants) range over dominant genres — poetry, short fiction and the novel, children's literature, theatre, film - and cover indigene literatures (Australian Aboriginal, Maori, First Nations) and regional creativity in West, East and South Africa, the Caribbean, India and the South-East Asian diaspora, and the settler colonies of Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Authors treated within broader frameworks include Chinua Achebe, 'Biyi Bandele-Thomas, Bole Butake, Shashi Deshpande, Louis Esson, Lorna Goodison, Patricia Grace, Bland Holt, Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera, Kazuo Ishiguro, Rita Kleinhart, Hanif Kureishi, Werewere Liking, Timothy Mo, V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, and Ruby Slipperjack. There are self-testimonies from the writers Geoff Goodfellow, Darrelyn Gunzburg and Don Mattera, poems by David Dabydeen, Geoff Goodfellow and Olive Senior. Of particular value to this collection are the perspectives offered by African, Caribbean and Eastern European contributors.

The tale of Uche Okafor, alias Uche Barrow.

The focus of the papers selected for this volume ranges from the establishment of regional and national literatures for the young to the presentation and characterization of youth and adolescence in diverse forms and formats of literature. The changing goals of canonized texts for educational as well as inspirational purposes are reflected in the diversity of historical and cultural policies of instruction and emancipation through literary and poetical works; historical and sociological aspects dominate these questions addressed to individual works as well as to whole literatures designed for children. On the other hand, the structural properties of children's literature and the actual reception of representative texts by child readers provide an equally fruitful area of psychological, pedagogical or aesthetic investigation. Here the rewriting of different kinds of literatures for the use of children receives as much attention as the creation of works aiming especially at the youthful readership of a given age and area; in this context of critical evaluations a variety of adaptations and reconceptualizations is presented - from medieval Portuguese historiography to Michel Tournier's changing configurations of his own works for different audiences.