Explores the evolution of Xhosa literature.

Engaging questions of language, identity, and reception to restore South African and diaspora writing to the African literary tradition

The first book-length study on the relationship between African literature and new media. The digital space provides a new avenue to move literature beyond the restrictions of book publishing on the continent. Arguing that writers are putting their work on cyberspace because communities are emerging from this space, and because increasing numbers of Africans use the internet as part of their day-to-day engagement with their societies and the world, Shola Adenekan explores this transformative development in Nigeria and Kenya, both significant countries in African literature and two of the continent's largest digital technology hubs. Queer Kenyans and Nigerians find new avenues for their work online where print publishers are refusing to publish short stories and poems on same-sex desire. Binyavanga Wainaina's rise to critical acclaim arguably started on the literary blog Generator 21. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's literary celebrity partly relies on her prolific use of social media to tell thestory of powerful Nigerian women. With further examples from the development of literature across the continent, this innovative book sheds new light on narratives about digital Africa. It will also be the first major work to provide a trajectory of class consciousness in Kenyan and Nigerian writing. Through this analysis, the book articulates the difference in attitudes towards queerness, sexuality, and hetero-normativity among successive generations of writers.

The postcolonial African culture, as it is discoursed in the academia, is largely influenced by Africa's response to colonialism. To the degree that it is a response, it is to considerably reactive, and lacks forceful moral incentives for social critical consciousness and nation-building. Quite on the contrary, it allows especially African political leaders to luxuriate in the delusions of moral rectitude, imploring, at will, the evil of imperialism as a buffer to their disregard of their people. This book acknowledges the social and psychological devastations of colonialism on the African world. It, however, argues that the totality of African intellectual response to colonialism and Western imperialism is equally, if not more, damaging to the African world. In what ways does the average African leader, indeed, the average African, judge and respond to his world? How does he conceive of his responsibility towards his community and society? The most obvious impact of African response to colonialism is the implicit search for a pristine, innocent paradigm in, for instance, literary, philosophical, social, political and gender studies. This search has its own moral implication in the sense that it makes the taking of responsibility on individual and social level highly difficult. Focusing on the moral impact of responses to colonialism in Africa and the African Diaspora, this book analyzes the various manifestations of delusions of moral innocence that has held the African leadership from the onerous task of bearing responsibility for their countries; it argues that one of the ways to recast the African leaders' responsibility towards Africa is to let go, on the one hand, the gaze of the West, and on the other, of the search for the innocent African experience and cultures. Relying on the insights of thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Wole Soyinka, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Achille Mbembe and Wolgang Welsch, this book suggests new approaches to interpreting African experiences. It discusses select African works of fiction as a paradigm for new interpretations of African experiences.

The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed an expansion of critical approaches to African literature. The Routledge Handbook of African Literature is a one-stop publication bringing together studies of African literary texts that embody an array of newer approaches applied to a wide range of works. This includes frameworks derived from food studies, utopian studies, network theory, eco-criticism, and examinations of the human/animal interface alongside more familiar discussions of postcolonial politics. Every chapter is an original research essay written by a broad spectrum of scholars with expertise in the subject, providing an application of the most recent insights into analysis of particular topics or application of particular critical frameworks to one or more African literary works. The handbook will be a valuable interdisciplinary resource for scholars and students of African literature, African culture, postcolonial literature and literary analysis. Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Reflects what traditional proverbs used in Christian catechetical, liturgical, and ritual contexts reveal about Tanzanian appropriations of and interpretations of Christianity.

Exploring the idea of a ‘Global Africa’, this book examines how African literary and cultural productions have changed due to the social and political influences brought about by increased globalisation. A variety of European theoretical concepts are applied to Africa, demonstrating the universality of the African experience.

The Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures series offers stimulating and accessible introductions to definitive topics and key genres and regions within the rapidly diversifying field of postcolonial literary studies in English. This volume offers an overview of contemporary Eastern African writing in English since the mid-twentieth century. It takes a fresh look at what has been an under-represented regional literary tradition within what continues to be an under-represented continental literary tradition. In particular, it broadens the scope of such an overview, complementing the extant monographs on well-known Eastern African writers such as Ngũgĩ to include a host of more recent, less-publicized novelists, dramatists, and poets. It extends the geographical range of existing studies from the familiar triad of Kenyan, Ugandan, and Tanzanian traditions of writing in English, to include the lesser-known Somali, Ethiopian, or Sudanese, or Mauritian or Madagascan traditions. Rather than simply addressing national traditions or broad thematic bundles, the volume treats works as literatures of a region: that is, as literatures of place and space. Eastern African Literatures stresses the formative role of space, place and geography in fashioning the fabric of social interaction, whether individual or collective, in generating history, in moulding identities, and as a consequence in defining the shape of the future. The 'spatial' perspectives allow the 'proximate' rather than the 'distant' influence of literary art to come into view. Proximate modes of literary communication, arising out of residual but vibrant traditions of oral communication, blend with contemporary media to produce hybrid genres of proximity specific to Eastern African literary production. In this way, the book also makes a contribution to the ongoing theorization of literary and cultural innovation in the cultures of the Global South.