This book provides a plethora of insights and perspectives that take up and challenge prevailing points of view about today's Africa. The chapters examine a number of different media and topics: from African theatre to poetry, from accounts of personal history to South Africa's language policy and publishing practices. Their unifying theme is a search for tomorrow's cultural trends in an ever-changing Africa.

Fémi Òsófisan is a major dramatist from Nigeria who experiments with forms and theatrical traditions. This book focuses on his development as a dramatist and his contribution to world drama as a postcolonial African writer whose major preoccupation has been to question the colonial and postcolonial issues of identity in theatre, literature and performance. The volume explores how Òsófisan exploits his Yorùbá heritage in his drama and the performances of his plays by reading new meanings into popular mythology, and by re-writing history to comment on contemporary social and political issues. Òsófisan has often introduced new motifs and narratives to energise dramatic performances in Nigeria and globally, and this text discusses developments in his theatre practices in the context of changing cultural trends.

In this collection of essays written from different critical perspectives, African playwrights demonstrate through their art that they are not only witnesses, but also consciences, of their societies.

Onomastics is an area of scholarly interest that has grown considerably in importance in recent years. Consequently, the 27th International Congress of Onomastic Sciences, held in 2021 in Kraków, Poland, gathered scholars from all over the world, active in all subfields of onomastic enquiry, as well as those exploring the areas bordering on other disciplines of the humanities. It thus became a venue for presenting state-of-the-art research in the study of proper names, proposing novel approaches and opening new vistas for future research. The present work is the third of the three volumes of conference proceedings that are the fruit of the congress. Being the most diverse thematically, it contains contributions on the general and applied aspects of onomastics, onymy in literature and other cultural texts, and chrematonyms. It ends with two reports. The volume comprises 30 individual articles, contributed by 35 scholars. The first section, devoted to general and applied onomastics, features texts concerned with ever-interesting questions relevant to all practitioners of the discipline: the essence of properhood, the meaning of proper names, and onomastic terminology. Scholars whose papers focused on applied onomastics were interested in problems occasioned by the translation of onyms, by their pronunciation in cross-cultural contact, and by the use of exonyms, drawing for exemplification on the Hungarian, German and Czech language material respectively. Literary onomastics in its broad definition constitutes by far the largest part of the volume. Contributors to this section represent diverse literatures, including Scottish, Russian, Polish, Czech and Nigerian. The scope and internal subdivisions of literary onomastics are discussed and the activities of the Italian Society for Literary Onomastics are presented. The name Dracula is analysed in depth, and so is the Old Prussian onym Patollo. Some researchers take a step into the wider realm of culture. Their attention is attracted by the names of spirits in the beliefs adhered to in Southwest China, by the proper names in a medieval Scottish document, by the onyms that personify hunger in Italian wartime epistolography, and by toponyms in video games. The third section deals with chrematonyms as diverse as names of railway locomotives in Britain, logonyms in Slovakia and perfume names in a Slovak online shop. The naming patterns of Chinese restaurants in Czechia are studied too, as well as the names of travel agencies in Germany, Ukraine and Poland. Finally, the reader is presented with two reports. One outlines new tendencies in Nordic socio-onomastics, while the other presents the new paradigm in the publication of “Onoma”, the journal of the ICOS. The book is a must not only for onomasticians, but also for researchers in related disciplines, ranging from history, via human geography or philosophy of language, to social studies. However, professionals active in naming will find it useful as well, since it provides a much-needed supranational perspective and enables cross-cultural comparisons.

Portrayals of Masculinity in Nigerian Plays explores Nigerian people's notions of masculinity as portrayed in twelve Nigerian plays, written by three generations of Nigerian playwrights. This book identifies different thoughts of masculinity within the Nigerian space in which hegemonic masculinity is the predominant.

Classical material was traditionally used to express colonial authority, but it was also appropriated by imperial subjects to become first a means of challenging colonialism and then a rich field for creating cultural identities that blend the old and the new. Nobel prize-winners such as Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney have rewritten classical material in their own cultural idioms while public sculpture in southern Africa draws on Greek and Roman motifs to represent histories of African resistance and liberation. These developments are explored in this collection of essays by international scholars, who debate the relationship between the culture of Greece and Rome and the changes that have followed the end of colonial empires.

This book is concerned with, in the main, the whole question of the transformation of the identities of the different peoples of postcolonial Africa. Even so, it is clear that the issues raised would resonate clearly in similar contexts in other parts of the world. Long Dreams in Short Chapters is a remarkable achievement, a brilliant and magisterial remapping of the African text in its literary, cultural, and political dimensions. Author Wumi Raji's globalist and transnational sensitivities make this book an effortless unpacking of the complexities of the African literary process and it is a landmark contribution to African thought.

"Africa Writing Europe" offers critical readings of the meaning and presence of Europe in a variety of African literary texts. Authors discussed include Leila Aboulela, Tatamkhulu Afrika, Alice Solomon Bowen, Ken Bugul, and Tayeb Salih.