Social Ethics and Governance in Contemporary African Writing is the first book to bring rigorous literary, philosophical, and artistic discourse together to interrogate the ethics of governance and development in postcolonial Africa. It takes literature seriously as a context for philosophical reflection, vividly engaging the human agency, creativity, and resourcefulness of local Nigerians as political and social actors and shedding new light on the dynamics of human flourishing. Drawing on important secondary scholarship across several humanities disciplines, especially literature, philosophy, and the performing arts, Nimi Wariboko provides compelling and innovative analysis of the challenges and opportunities on governance and development in postcolonial Nigerian state and society. With a detailed introductory chapter and an authoritative analysis contained in six cohesive chapters, all anchored in political and social ethics and close readings of fascinating literary and artistic works-such as A. Igoni Barrett's Blackass and the comedy skits of MC Edo Pikin-this is a landmark contribution to Nigerian cultural studies. Wariboko's practical engagement between literature and philosophy also opens up new ways of seeing literary analysis as ethical methodology, beyond the specific contexts of Nigeria or Africa.

The first study of Anglophone and Italian novels by Somali diasporic authors, offering a new critical framework for multilingual and transnational analysis of Somali literature. Building on the latest scholarship about multilingual contexts, diaspora studies and the rapidly expanding field of Italian postcolonial studies, Marco Medugno examines Somali diasporic literature with a comparative perspective. Considering works written in English and Italian, he argues that Somali diasporic authors share similar themes and aesthetics, thus creating an interliterary community within the diaspora space. By using multilingualism as a starting point, Medugno provides significant insights into how Somali national and individual identities are constructed in diasporic, global contexts through geography, style, form, language and the re-writing of national histories emerging out of colonization and independence. Analysing acclaimed Somali novels such as Nuruddin Farah's Links and Crossbones, Igiaba Scego's Adua and Cristina Ali Farah's Little Mother, he questions any definition of 'local' as 'provincial', instead considering it a site for interrogating global concerns. Literature of the Somali Diaspora is organized around three themes: spatiality, language and resistance help to contextualize authors, forced by the decades-long Somali Civil War, to write outside Somalia and in different languages – including Somali, Italian, English, German, Dutch and Arabic – within global literary circuits. Their work thus creates a literature not confined within national borders but an interliterary global community, a transnational and multilingual space in which they share world aesthetic ideologies, challenge and engage with literary traditions in different languages and show an interplay between diverse cultures.

A powerful biography that presents analysis of a black working-class woman who rose from a tenement slum in intensely racialized British Guiana to become a leading anti-colonialism, workers' rights and women's liberation activist in Britain. Jessica Huntley's Pan-African Life celebrates Huntley's importance as a leading figure in the Windrush-era resistance to the multiple, racialized injustices faced by black settlers, children and communities in Britain. Claudia Tomlinson details how Huntley became the elder stateswoman of radical black activism of her era through participation in decolonization movements and actions such as the Black Parents Movement and the International Bookfair of Radical Black and Third World Books, as well as her foundational role at Bogle L'Ouverture Publications, the leading black-led, pan-African publishing house and its associated radical bookshop. Based on extensive archival research and over 40 interviews with Huntley's closest family members, associates, comrades, authors, artists and friends, this book affords readers an opportunity to take a long-lensed view of the historical roots of the many contemporary racial injustices re-invigorated in recent debates. Tomlinson re-writes the history of a period and a struggle often told through a master discourse that is male, middle-class and privileged. In so doing, she shows how Jessica Huntley's fight for justice and the rights of all black people in Britain provides a useful lens into UK-based, black literary and cultural expression in the 20th century.

In this vibrant and approachable book, award-winning writers of black speculative fiction bring together excerpts from their work and creative reflections on futurisms with original essays. Features an introduction by Suyi Okungbowa. Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction showcases creative-critical essays that negotiate genre bending and black speculative fiction with writerly practice. As Afrodecendant peoples with lived experience from the continent, award-winning authors use their intrinsic voices in critical conversations on Afrofuturism and Afro-centered futurisms. By engaging with difference, they present a new kind of African study that is an evaluative gaze at African history, African spirituality, Afrosurrealism, "becoming," black radical imagination, cultural identity, decolonizing queerness, myths, linguistic cosmologies, and more. Contributing authors – Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga, Cheryl S. Ntumy, Dilman Dila, Eugen Bacon, Nerine Dorman, Nuzo Onoh, Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Stephen Embleton, Suyi Okungbowa, Tobi Ogundiran and Xan van Rooyen – offer boldly hybrid chapters (both creative and scholarly) that interface Afrocentric artefacts and exegesis. Through ethnographic reflections and intense scrutinies of African fiction, these writers contribute open and diverse reflections of Afro-centered futurisms. The authors in Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction feature in major genre and literary awards, including the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, British Fantasy, Locus, Ignyte, Nommo, Philip K. Dick, Shirley Jackson and Otherwise Awards, among others. They are also intrinsic partners in a vital conversation on the rise of black speculative fiction that explores diversity and social (in)justice, charting poignant stories with black hero/ines who remake their worlds in color zones of their own image.

The untold story of how breaking – one of the most widely practiced dance forms in the world today – began as a distinctly African American expression in the Bronx, New York, during the 1970s. Breaking is the first and most widely practiced hip-hop dance in the world, with around one million participants in this dynamic, multifaceted artform – and, as of 2024, Olympic sport. Yet, despite its global reach and nearly 50-year history, stories of breaking's origins have largely neglected the African Americans who founded it. Dancer and scholar Serouj "Midus" Aprahamian offers, for the first time, a detailed look into the African American beginnings of breaking in the Bronx, New York. The Birth of Breaking challenges numerous myths and misconceptions that have permeated studies of hip-hop's evolution, considering the influence breaking has had on hip-hop culture. Including previously unseen archival material, interviews, and detailed depictions of the dance at its outset, this book brings to life this buried history, with a particular focus on the early development of the dance, the institutional settings where hip-hop was conceived, and the movement's impact on sociocultural conditions in New York City throughout the 1970s. By featuring the overlooked first-hand accounts of over 50 founding b-boys and b-girls alongside movement analysis informed by his embodied knowledge of the dance, Aprahamian reveals how indebted breaking is to African American culture, as well as the disturbing factors behind its historical erasure.

An imaginative, narratological reading of Chinua Achebe's novels, stories, poetry, and essays through a literary and historical framework. Toyin Falola analyzes fictional and historical cartographies of Africa in Achebe's literary works to offer a critical representation of Africa's present and future. In particular, he focuses on the historical valuation of a full range of the writer's works – novels including Things Fall Apart, but also short stories, poems, and essays – as important materials that have contributed to the political events in Nigeria and, by extension, Africa. The raw creativity found in Achebe's stories and his ability to tell the Nigerian story – precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial – have endeared him to many, including readers and those critical of him and his works. Chinua Achebe: Narrating Africa in Fictions and History analyzes all of the writer's works, dwelling on the Nigerian political context upon which many, if not all, of his narratives lie. As a result, it examines methodologies of narration and ideologies that allow his works to resonate with the imagination of Africa.

Transcripts of the Sacred in Nigeria explores how the sacred plays itself out in contemporary Africa. It offers a creative analysis of the logics and dynamics of the sacred (understood as the constellation of im/possibility available to a given community) in religion, politics, epistemology, economic development, and reactionary violence. Using the tools of philosophy, postcolonial criticism, political theory, African studies, religious studies, and cultural studies, Wariboko reveals the intricate connections between the sacred and the existential conditions that characterize disorder, terror, trauma, despair, and hope in the postcolonial Africa. The sacred, Wariboko argues, is not about religion or divinity but the set of possibilities opened to a people or denied them, the sum total of possibilities conceivable given their level of social, technological, and economic development. These possibilities profoundly speak to the present political moment in sub-Saharan Africa.

This book investigates the many ways in which contemporary African fiction has reflected on themes of responsibility and complicity during the postcolonial period. Covering the authors Ayi Kwei Armah, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nuruddin Farah, Michiel Heyns, and J. M. Coetzee, the book places each writer’s novels in their cultural and literary context in order to investigate similarities and differences between fictional approaches to individual complicity in politically unstable situations. In doing so, the study focuses on these texts’ representations of discomforting experiences of being implicated in harm done to others in order to show that it is precisely during times of political crisis that questions of moral responsibility and implicatedness in compromised conduct become more pronounced. The study also challenges longstanding western amnesia concerning responsibility for historical and present-day violence in African countries and juxtaposes this denial of responsibility with the western literary readership’s consumption of narratives of African “suffering.” The study instead proposes new reading habits based on an awareness of readerly complicity and responsibility. Drawing insights from across political philosophy and literary theory, this book will be of interest to researchers of African literature, postcolonial studies, and peace and conflict studies.

Since the publication of The Wretched of the Earth in 1961, Fanon's work has been deeply significant for generations of intellectuals and activists from the 60s to the present day. Alienation and Freedom collects together unpublished works comprising around half of his entire output – which were previously inaccessible or thought to be lost. This book introduces audiences to a new Fanon, a more personal Fanon and one whose literary and psychiatric works, in particular, take centre stage. These writings provide new depth and complexity to our understanding of Fanon's entire oeuvre revealing more of his powerful thinking about identity, race and activism which remain remarkably prescient. Shedding new light on the work of a major 20th-century philosopher, this disruptive and moving work will shape how we look at the world.

This book offers fresh academic insights, reflections, questions, issues, and approaches to development ethics, taking into account, African values and ethics. Development ethics is an area of applied ethics that examines the moral issues involved in global, social, and economic transformation. While it is a relatively new discipline, there have been numerous scholarly publications on it from Western perspectives. However, only a few studies that focused on development ethics from the African perspective. To address this gap, the book seeks to answer critical questions such as "What does development mean to Africans?", "How can we measure development?", "Who gets to decide?", and "What constitutes just development in Africa?" With contributions from African scholars from diverse backgrounds, the book covers various development themes such as Theories and approaches to development ethics in Africa, Environmental Ethics and African Development, Ethics, Politics and African Development, Migration and African development, Gender, Ethics and Socio-economic Development in Africa, Education, Ethics and African development. It is an essential resource for researchers, lecturers, and students interested in political philosophy and African culture studies.