Literary Criticism

WINNER: 2015 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award

An overview of the Swahili novel, its place in a globalized world and a reflection on the status and dynamism of Kafka's concept of 'minor literature'.

For more than fifty years a dynamic modern literature has been developing in the Kiswahili language. The political weight that Kiswahili carries as the emerging national and pan-national language of many East African countries places this literature, much of it in the form of novels, at the centre of heated literary debates on the social function of literature in the context of rapid global social change.
Garnier provides new insights into the Swahili novel form with all its vibrancy and capacity for experimentation. Its obsession with social issues relates to larger, all-pervasive political debates running through East Africa: in its press, its streets, its public and private places. The novels both record and provoke these debates. Based on the study of more than 175 Swahili novels by almost 100 authors, Garnier brings to light a body of work much neglected by African literary critics, but which looks outwards to the wider world.

Xavier Garnier teaches African Literature at the Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle and is former director of the Centre d'Etudes des Nouveaux Espaces Littéraires, Université Paris 13.

A critical examination of the engaging voice and multiple stories of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on war, feminism, art, ideology, hair, complex human identities and the challenges of multicultural existence.



Easily the leading and most engaging voice of her era and generation, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has bridged gaps and introduced new motifs and narrative styles which have energized contemporary African fiction since her first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003). With Half of a Yellow Sun (2007) and The Thing Around Your Neck - Short Stories (2009), she established herself as a preeminent story-teller. Americanah (2013), with ingeniouscraftsmanship addresses the sensitive themes of passionate love, independence, freedom and moral responsibility with extravagant and versatile narrative innovations.

Through her writings, she has made herself relevant topeople of all ages - across racial and linguistic boundaries. Her talks, blogs, musings on social media, essays and commentaries, workshop-mentoring for budding young writers, lecture circuit discourses, all enrich her imaginativecreativity as they expand and define her mission as a writer. "We Should All be Feminists" she proclaimed in an essay, giving feminism a "tweak and twist" and suggesting new outlooks in literary theory.

Her contributionsto African, Diasporic and World literatures deserve serious analyses, commentaries and interpretations, and this Companion to her work critically examines her creative outputs from her art and ideology, from feminism to war, to matters of myth and perception, and the challenges of multicultural existence and complex human identities.

Ernest N. Emenyonu is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint, USA.

Examines the South African HIV/AIDS epidemic through creative texts and the impact of these representations in determining which issues receive attention and how public understanding of the virus is shaped.

South Africa is one of the countries in the world most affected by HIV/AIDS, and yet, until recently, the epidemic was barely visible in South African literature. Much can be gained from approaching the South African epidemic through creative texts such as novels, photographs, films, cartoons and murals because they produce and circulate meanings of HIV/AIDS and its various facets such as its 'origin', 'transmission routes' and 'physical manifestations'. Other aspects explored are the denial of HIV/AIDS, its stigmatisation, discriminatory practices, modes of disclosure, access to anti-retroviral medication, as well as the role of alternative treatment.

Creative texts, which are open to different and possibly contradictory readings, can serve as a starting point to increase the cultural visibility of the virus and to challenge dominant ideas about the epidemic. The cultural constructions of HIV/AIDS should be carefully examined because the meanings are pervasive and have very 'real' consequences: they play a powerful role both in determining which issues receive attention and in shaping public understanding of the virus.

Ellen Grünkemeier is a lecturer and researcher in the English Department at Leibniz University of Hanover, Germany. Her publications include two co-edited volumes on postcolonial literatures and cultures, Listening to Africa. Anglophone African Literatures and Cultures (2012), and Postcolonial Studies across the Disciplines (ASNEL Papers 19, forthcoming).

International scholars explore one of the most important postcolonial novels of African literature.

Joint winner of Best Non-Fiction Biography, Humanities and Social Sciences Awards 2020

Sol Plaatje's Mhudi is the first full-length novel in English to have been written by a black South African and is widely regarded as one of Africa's most important literary works. Drawing upon both oral and literary traditions, Plaatje uses the form of the historical novel, and romance genre, to explore the 19th-century dispossession of his people, to provide a novel black perspective on their history. It is a book that speaks to present-day concerns, to do with land, language, history and decolonisation. Today the novel has iconic status, not only in South Africa, but worldwide - it has been translated into a number of languages - and its impact on other writers has been profound. The novelist Bessie Head described it as "more than a classic; there is just no other book on earth like it. All the stature and grandeur of the author are in it."
A century after its writing in London in 1920 [it was published in South Africa in 1930, for reasons explained in the book], and at a time of intellectual ferment, with debates on decolonisation to the fore, in popular culture as much as in the academy, this book celebrates Mhudi's place in African literature, reviews its critical reception, and offers fresh perspectives. The contributors discuss Mhudis genesis, writing and publication; its reception by literary critics from the 1930s to thepresent; Mhudi as a feminist novel; Mhudis use of oral tradition; issues of translation; Mhudi in the context of African literature and history, and the decolonisation of the curriculum. An authoritative listing of all editions of Mhudi, translations as well as in English completes the book.

SABATA MOKAE is a novelist and lecturer in creative writing at Sol Plaatje University, Kimberley, and the author of The Story of Sol T. Plaatje (2010).

BRIAN WILLAN is Senior Research Fellow at Rhodes University, Extraordinary Professor at Sol Plaatje and North West Universities. He is the author of Sol Plaatje: a life of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje,1876-1932 (2018), and co-editor (with Janet Remmington and Bheki Peterson) of Sol Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa: Past and Present (2016).

Africa: Jacana

AFRICAN LITERATURE TODAY was established at a time of uncertainty and reconstruction but for 50 years it has played a leading role in nurturing imaginative creativity and its criticism on the African continent and beyond.

Contemporary African creative writers have confidently taken strides which resonate all over the world. The daring diversities, stylistic innovations and enchanting audacities which characterize their works across many different genres resonate with readers beyond African geographic and linguistic boundaries. Writers in Africa and the diaspora seem to be speaking with collective and individual voices that compel world attention and admiration. And they arebeing read in numerous world languages.
This volume's contributors recognize the foundations laid by the pioneer African writers as they point vigorously to contemporary writers who have moved African imaginative creativityforward with utmost integrity, and to the critics who continue to respond with unyielding tenacity.
The founding Editor of ALT, Professor Eldred Durosimi Jones, recalls in an interview in this volume, the role ALT played in the evolution and stimulation of a wave of African literary studies and criticism in mid-20th century: "The 1960s saw a good deal of activity among scholars teaching African Literature throughout Africa and the world, and this ledto a series of conferences in African Literature in Dakar, Nairobi, and Freetown.around the idea of communication between the various English Departments which took an interest in African Literature. We decided on a bulletin, which was just a kind of newsletter between departments saying what was going on....it was that bulletin that showed the potential of this kind of communication... after that we started African Literature Today as a journal inviting articles on the works of African writers."
Contributors to the series demonstrate the impact of the growth in studies and criticism of African Literature in the 50 years since its founding.

Series Editor: Ernest N. Emenyonu is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint, USA.
Reviews Editor: Obi Nwakanma

Investigates what literary strategies African writers adopt to convey the impact of climate transformation and environmental change.

This special issue examines the ways fiction and poetry engage with environmental consciousness, and how African literary criticism addresses the implications of global environmental transformations. Does environmentalist literature offer new possibilities for critical thinking about the future? What constitutes environmentalist fiction and poetry? What kind of texts, themes and topics does climate writing include? Does any text in which the environment features become available to environmentalist criticism? In their engagement with the diverse genres, themes and frameworks through which contemporary African writers address topics including urbanisation, cross-species communication, nature and climate change, contributors to this special issue help to define African environmental writing. They look at the literary strategies adopted by creative writers to convey the impact of environmental transformationin narratives that are historically informed by a century of colonialism, nationalist political activism, urbanisation and postcolonial migration. How does environmental literature intervene in these histories? Can creative writers, with their powerfully post-human and cross-species imaginations, carry out the ethical work demanded by contemporary climate science? From Tanure Ojaide's and Helon Habila's attention to environmental decimation in the Niger Delta through to Nnedi Okorafor's and Kofi Anyidoho's imaginative cross-species encounters, the special issue asks how literature mediates the specificities of climate change in an era of global capitalism and technological transformation, and what the limits of creative writing and literary criticism are as tools for discussing environmental issues.

This volume also includes a Literary Supplement.

Guest Editors: Cajetan Iheka (Associate Professor of English, Yale University) and Stephanie Newell (Professor of English, Yale University)
Series Editor: Ernest N. Emenyonu (Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint)
Reviews Editor:Obi Nwakanma (Fellow, Department of English University of Central Florida)

Unusable pasts; scandalous lives; political betrayal, confession and collaboration: reading narrative non-fiction across South Africa's unfinished transition.

Over the last decades, South Africa has seen an outpouring of life writing and narrative non-fiction. Authors like Panashe Chigumadzi, Jacob Dlamini, Mark Gevisser, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Antjie Krog, Sisonke Msimang, Njabulo Ndebele, Jonny Steinberg and Ivan Vladislavic; have produced a compelling and often controversial body of work, exploring the country's ongoing political and social transition with great ambition, texture and risk.
Experiments with Truth is the first book-length account of non-fiction in South African literature. It reads the country's transition as refracted through an array of documentary modes that are simultaneously refashioned and blurred into each other: long-form analytic journalism and reportage; experiments in oral history, microhistory and archival reconstruction; life-writing, memoir and the essay. It traces the strange and ethically complex process by which real people, places and events are shuffled, patterned and plotted in long-form prose narrative. While holding in mind the imperatives of testimony and witness so important to the struggle for liberation and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the case studies here are increasingly drawn to a post-TRC aesthetic: works that engage with difficult, inappropriate or unusable elements of the past, and the unfinished project of social reconstruction in SouthAfrica. The author examines non-fictions that are speculative, formally innovative and sometimes experimental, rather than informational or narrowly journalistic; that explore difficult subjects like collaboration, complicity, confession - and have embedded within them their own reflections on the problems of narrating within a scene of unresolved difference. In this way, southern African materials are placed in a global context, and in dialogue with otherimportant non-fictional traditions that have emerged at moments of social rupture and transition.

Hedley Twidle is a writer, teacher and researcher based in the English Department at the University of Cape Town. He specialises in twentieth-century, southern African and world literatures, as well as creative non-fiction and the environmental humanities. His essay collection, Firepool: Experiences in an Abnormal World, was published in 2017.

Winner of the 2021 ALA Book of the Year Award - Scholarship

The author uses the image of blood under the skin as a way of understanding cultural and literary forms in contemporary South Africa. Chapters deal with the bloodied histories of apartheid and blood as trope for talking about change.

In this book the author argues that a younger generation of South Africans is developing important and innovative ways of understanding South African pasts, and that challenge the narratives that have over the last decades been informed by notions of forgiveness and reconciliation. The author uses the image of history-rich blood to explore these approaches to intergenerational memory. Blood under the skin is a carrier of embodied and gendered histories andusing this image, the chapters revisit older archives, as well as analyse contemporary South African cultural and literary forms.
The emphasis on blood challenges the privileged status skin has had as explanatory category inthinking about identity, and instead emphasises intergenerational transfer and continuity. The argument is that a younger generation is disputing and debating the terms through which to understand contemporary South Africa, as well as for interpreting the legacies of the past that remain under the visible layer of skin. The chapters each concern blood: Mandela's prison cell as laboratory for producing bloodless freedom; the kinship relations created and resisted in accounts of Eugene de Kock in prison; Ruth First's concern with information leaks in her accounts of her time in prison; the first human-to-human heart transplant and its relation to racialised attempts to salvage whiteidentity; the #Fallist moment; Abantu book festival; and activist scholarship and creative art works that use blood as trope for thinking about change and continuity.

Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Swaziland): Wits University Press

Re-examines this unresolved murder in Kenya and the underlying role of rumour, the media and inter-state relations on how the death has been reported and investigated.

Julie Ann Ward was a British tourist and wildlife photographer who went missing in Kenya's Maasai Mara Game Reserve in 1988 and was eventually found to have been murdered. Her death and the protracted search for her killers, stillat large, were hotly contested in the media. Many theories emerged as to how and why she died, generating three trials, several "true crime" books, and much speculation and rumour.

At the core of Musila's study are thefollowing questions: why would this young woman's death be the subject of such strong contestations of ideas and multiple truths? And what does this reveal about cultural productions of truth and knowledge in Kenya and Britain, particularly in the light of the responses to her disappearance of the Kenyan police, the British Foreign Office, and the British High Commission in Nairobi.

Building on existing scholarship on African history, narrative, gender and postcolonial studies, the author reveals how the Julie Ward murder and its attendant discourses offer insights into the journeys of ideas, and how these traverse the porous boundaries of the relationship between Kenya and Britain, and, by extension, Africa and the Global North.

Grace A. Musila is a lecturer in the English Department of Stellenbosch University, South Africa

Winner of the 2020 ALA Book of the Year Award - Scholarship

Examines the ways in which space and spatial structures have been constituted, contested and re-imagined in Francophone and Anglophone West African literature since the early 1950s.

From the "imaginative geographies" of conquest identified by Edward Said to the very real and material institution of territorial borders, regions and geographical amalgamations, the control, administration and integration of space are known to have played a central and essential role in the creation of contemporary "Africa". Space continues to be a site of conflict, from separatist struggles to the distribution of resources to the continued absorption ofAfrican territories into the uneven geographies of global capitalism.
In this book, Madhu Krishnan examines the ways in which the anxieties and conflicts engendered by these phenomena are registered in a broad set of literarytexts from British and French West Africa. By placing these novels in dialogue with a range of archival material such as territorial planning documents, legislative papers, records of liberation movements and development projects, this book reveals the submerged articulations between spatial planning and literary expression, generating new readings of canonical West African texts as well as analyses of otherwise under-researched material.

MadhuKrishnan is a Senior Lecturer in 20th/21st Century Postcolonial Writing in the Department of English at the University of Bristol. She is author of Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications(2014) and Contingent Canons: African Literature and the Politics of Location (2018)

WINNER OF THE ASAUK FAGE & OLIVER PRIZE 2016

The author meticulously contextualises the experiences of Achebe and his peers as students at Government College Umuahia and argues for a re-assessment of this influential group of Nigerian writers in relation to the literary culture fostered by the school and its tutors.

This is the first in-depth scholarly study of the literary awakening of the young intellectuals who became known as Nigeria's "first-generation" writers in the post-colonial period. Terri Ochiagha's research focuses on Chinua Achebe, Elechi Amadi, Chike Momah, Christopher Okigbo and Chukwuemeka Ike, and also discusses the experiences of Gabriel Okara, Ken Saro-Wiwa and I.C. Aniebo, in the context of their education in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s at Government College, Umuahia. The author provides fresh perspectives on Postcolonial and World literary processes, colonial education in British Africa, literary representations of colonialism and Chinua Achebe's seminal position in African literature. She demonstrates how each of the writers used this very particular education to shape their own visions of the world in which they operated and examines the implications that this had for African literature as a whole.

Supplementary material is available online of some of the original sources. See: http://boybrew.co/9781847011091_2

Terri Ochiagha holds one of the prestigious British Academy Newton International Fellowships (2014-16) hosted by the School of English, University of Sussex. She was previously a Senior Associate Member of St Antony's College, University of Oxford.

A close analysis of Farah's novels is used to track the contradictions implicit in the notion of the modern, disengaged self and how transformations of the novel in literary history attempt to negotiate this founding contradiction.

The Somali novelist, Nuruddin Farah, is one of the most important African writers today. The central question that this book investigates is the relationship between modern identity and the novel as a genre. Nuruddin Farah's novels are shown by Moolla to encompass the history of the novel: from the 'proto-realism' of the acclaimed From a Crooked Rib to the modernism of A Naked Needle and the postmodernism of, most notably, Maps, returning almost full circle with his most recent novel Crossbones.
Moolla examines his writing within the framework of Somali society and culture, Islamic traditions and political contexts, all of which are central themesin his work. She also addresses Farah's engagement with women's lives - his female characters and identities being at the heart of, rather than peripheral, to his stories - something that has distinguished him from many other male African writers.
The book finally suggests that through his literary negotiation of the central contradiction of modern identity, Farah comes close to constituting a subject who no longer is transcendentally 'homeless', butfinds a home 'everywhere' - a fitting project for a writer who has been in exile for the greater part of his life.

F. Fiona Moolla is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa as well as a freelance writer and published author of short stories.

South Africa and Zimbabwe (pb only): Blue Weaver

Enchanted Calvinism's surprising central proposition is that Ghanaian Presbyterian communities have become more enchanted -- i.e., attuned to spiritual explanations of and remedies for suffering -- as they have become moreintegrated into capitalist modes of production.

Enchanted Calvinism's central proposition is that Ghanaian Presbyterian communities, both past and present, have become more enchanted -- more attuned to spiritual explanations of and remedies for suffering -- as they havebecome integrated into capitalist modes of production. The author draws on a Weberian concept of religious enchantment to analyze the phenomena of spiritual affliction and spiritual healing within the Presbyterian Church of Ghana,particularly under the conditions of labor migration: first, in the early twentieth century during the cocoa boom in Ghana and, second, at the turn of the twenty-first century in their migration from Ghana to North America.
Relying on extensive archival research, oral interviews, and participant-observation conducted in North America, Europe, and West Africa, this study demonstrates that the more these Ghanaian Calvinists became dependent on capitalist modes of production, the more enchanted their lives and, subsequently, their church became, although in different ways within these two migrations. One striking pattern that has emerged among Ghanaian Presbyterian labor migrants in North America, for example, is a radical shift in gendered healing practices, where women have become prominent healers while a significant number of men have become spirit-possessed.

Adam Mohr is Senior Writing Fellow in Anthropology in the Critical Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania.

Explores the instrumentalization of various aspects of popular culture in Africa.

This anthology provides insightful data on and discussions of a wide array of popular cultural manifestations and theoretical perspectives, covering such issues as kinship, religion, conflict resolution, music, cinema, drama, andliterary texts. The issues cohere around the understanding that culture is situational and political. Going beyond merely challenging popular stereotypes and representations of Africans and African-related practices in various outlets, the book reveals how popular cultural practices are instruments that have been manipulated for personal and collective survival.
The book is distinctive in its codification and explication of aspects of popular practices that are based on data from countries in Africa, Europe, and the Americas that showcase cultural negotiations either with reference to how notions, values, norms, and images of Africans have been packaged and exploited over theyears or how popular cultures are used as tools of resistance and agitation by the various focal groups that are discussed. The topics are presented and illustrated in ways easily accessible to readers of all backgrounds.

Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Augustine Agwuele is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Anthropology, Texas State University, San Marcos.

Contributors: Arinpe Adejumo, Augustine Agwuele, Antoinette Tidjani Alou, Maurice N. Amutabi, Tokunbo A. Ayoola, Nicholas M. Creary, Toyin Falola, Celeste A. Fisher, Denise Amy-Rose Forbes-Erickson, Hetty ter Haar, Debra L. Klein, Emmanuel M. Mbah, Sarah Steinbock-Pratt, and Asonzeh Ukah

New essays examining the intellectual allegiances of Coetzee, arguably the most decorated and critically acclaimed writer of fiction in English today and a deeply intellectual and philosophical writer.



Arguably the most decorated and critically acclaimed writer of today, J. M. Coetzee is a deeply intellectual writer. Yet while just about everyone who comes to Coetzee's writing is aware that the visible superstructure of his works is moved from below by a vast substructure of ideas, we are still far from grasping Coetzee's intellectual allegiances as a whole. This book sets out to examine these allegiances in ways not attempted before, by bringing leadingfigures in the philosophy of literary fiction and ethics together with leading Coetzee scholars. The book is organized into three parts: the first part evaluates Coetzee with respect to notions of truth and justification. At issue is how the reader is to understand the ground on which Coetzee builds his ethical commitments. The second part considers the problem of language, in which ethics is rooted and on which it depends. The chapters of the third partposition Coetzee's writing with respect to notions of social and moral solidarity, where, in regard to literature as such or experience as such, philosophy and literature together exercise an unrivaled right to be heard.

Contributors: Elisa Aaltola, Derek Attridge, David Attwell, Maria Boletsi, Carrol Clarkson, Simon During, Patrick Hayes, Alexander Honold, Anton Leist, Tim Mehigan, Christian Moser, Robert B. Pippin, Robert Stockhammer, Markus Winkler, Martin Woessner.

Tim Mehigan is Deputy Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. Christian Moser is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Bonn.

African pasts examines African literatures in English since the end of colonialism, investigating how they represents African history through the twin matrices of memory and trauma. Inextricably tied up with the historical conditions of Africa’s colonisation, charting the emergence of its independence, and scrutinising Africa’s contemporary neo-colonial and postcolonial states as a legacy of the colonial past, African literatures are continually preoccupied with exploring modes of representation to ‘work through’ their different traumatic colonial pasts.

Among other issues, this book deals with literature in the era of apartheid, the post-apartheid aftermath, metafictional experiments in African fiction, gender representation in reaction to the trauma of colonialism and ‘imprisonment narratives’. African pasts covers a wide range of African literatures and a cross-section of genres – fiction, poetry, prison-narratives, postcolonial theory – and embraces such well-known writers as Soyinka, Coetzee, Ngugi and Achebe, and more recent writers such as Nuruddin Farah, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Achmat Dangor, Etienne van Heerden, Zakes Mda, Gillian Slovo and Calixthe Beyala.

Chinua Achebe has long been regarded as Africa’s foremost writer. In this major new study, Jago Morrison offers a comprehensive reassessment of his work as an author, broadcaster, editor and political thinker.

With new, historically contextualised readings of all of his major works, this is the first study to view Achebe’s oeuvre in its entirety, from Things Fall Apart and the early novels, through the revolutionary Ahiara Declaration – previously attributed to Emeka Ojukwu – to the revealing final works The Education of a British Educated Child and There Was a Country. Contesting previous interpretations which align Achebe too easily with this or that nationalist programme, the book reveals Achebe as a much more troubled figure than critics have habitually assumed.

Authoritative and wide-ranging, this book will be essential reading for scholars and students of Achebe’s work in the twenty-first century.

The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English Since 1945 challenges the conventional belief that the English-language literary traditions of East Africa are restricted to the former British colonies of Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. Instead, these traditions stretch far into such neighboring countries as Somalia and Ethiopia.

Simon Gikandi and Evan Mwangi assemble a truly inclusive list of major writers and trends. They begin with a chronology of key historical events and an overview of the emergence and transformation of literary culture in the region. Then they provide an alphabetical list of major writers and brief descriptions of their concerns and achievements.

Some of the writers discussed include the Kenyan novelists Grace Ogot and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Ugandan poet and essayist Taban Lo Liyong, Ethiopian playwright and poet Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin, Tanzanian novelist and diplomat Peter Palangyo, Ethiopian novelist Berhane Mariam Sahle-Sellassie, and the novelist M. G. Vassanji, who portrays the Indian diaspora in Africa, Europe, and North America.

Separate entries within this list describe thematic concerns, such as colonialism, decolonization, the black aesthetic, and the language question; the growth of genres like autobiography and popular literature; important movements like cultural nationalism and feminism; and the impact of major forces such as AIDS/HIV, Christian missions, and urbanization.

Comprehensive and richly detailed, this guide offers a fresh perspective on the role of East Africa in the development of African and world literature in English and a new understanding of the historical, cultural, and geopolitical boundaries of the region.

Columbia's guides to postwar African literature paint a unique portrait of the continent's rich and diverse literary traditions. This volume examines the rapid rise and growth of modern literature in the three postcolonial nations of Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Zambia. It tracks the multiple political and economic pressures that have shaped Central African writing since the end of World War II and reveals its authors' heroic efforts to keep their literary traditions alive in the face of extreme poverty and AIDS.

Adrian Roscoe begins with a list of key political events. Since writers were composing within both colonial and postcolonial contexts, he pays particular attention to the nature of British colonialism, especially theories regarding its provenance and motivation. Roscoe discusses such historical figures as David Livingstone, Cecil Rhodes, and Sir Harry Johnston, as well as modern power players, including Robert Mugabe, Kenneth Kaunda, and Kamuzu Banda. He also addresses efforts to create a literary-historical record from an African perspective, an account that challenges white historiographies in which the colonized was neither agent nor informer.

A comprehensive alphabetical guide profiles both established and emerging authors and further illustrates issues raised in the introduction. Roscoe then concludes with a detailed bibliography recommending additional reading and sources. At the close of World War II the people of Central Africa found themselves mired in imperial fatigue and broken promises of freedom. This fueled a desire for liberation and a major surge in literary production, and in this illuminating guide Roscoe details the campaigns for social justice and political integrity, for education and economic empowerment, and for gender equity, participatory democracy, rural development, and environmental care that characterized this exciting period of development.

Composed by a premier scholar of African literature, this volume is a comprehensive guide to the literary traditions of Gambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana, and Nigeria, five distinct countries bound by their experience with colonialism. Oyekan Owomoyela begins with an overview of the authors, texts, and historical events that have shaped the development of postwar Anglophone literatures in this region, exploring shifts in theme and the role of foreign sponsorship and illuminating recent debates regarding the language, identity, gender, and social commitments of various authors and their works. His introduction concludes with a bibliography of key critical texts.

The second half of the volume is an alphabetical tour of writers, publications, concepts, genres, movements, and institutions, with suggested readings for further research. Entries focus primarily on fiction but also touch on drama and poetry. Featured authors include Chris Abani, Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Cyprian Ekwensi, Uzodinma Chukuka Iweala, Helen Oyeyemi, and Wole Soyinka. Topics range from the European origins of African literature and the West African diaspora to the development of an "African personality," the establishment of a regional publishing industry, and the global literary marketplace. Owomoyela also discusses such influences as the postwar emergence of Onitsha Market Literature, the Mbari Club, and the importance of the Noma Award.

Owomoyela's portrait points to the major impact of West African literature on the evolution of both African and world literatures in English. Sure to become the definitive text for research in the field, The Columbia Guide to West African Literature in English Since 1945 is a vital resource for newcomers as well as for advanced scholars seeking a deeper understanding of the region's rich literary heritage.

From the outset, South Africa's history has been marked by division and conflict along racial and ethnic lines. From 1948 until 1994, this division was formalized in the National Party's policy of apartheid. Because apartheid intruded on every aspect of private and public life, South African literature was preoccupied with the politics of race and social engineering.

Since the release from prison of Nelson Mandela in 1990, South Africa has been a new nation-in-the-making, inspired by a nonracial idealism yet beset by poverty and violence. South African writers have responded in various ways to Njabulo Ndebele's call to "rediscover the ordinary." The result has been a kaleidoscope of texts in which evolving cultural forms and modes of identity are rearticulated and explored.

An invaluable guide for general readers as well as scholars of African literary history, this comprehensive text celebrates the multiple traditions and exciting future of the South African voice. Although the South African Constitution of 1994 recognizes no fewer than eleven official languages, English has remained the country's literary lingua franca. This book offers a narrative overview of South African literary production in English from 1945 to the postapartheid present. An introduction identifies the most interesting and noteworthy writing from the period. Alphabetical entries provide accurate and objective information on genres and writers. An appendix lists essential authors published before 1945.

Reading the life narratives and literary texts of South Asians writing in and about East Africa, Gaurav Desai builds a surprising, alternative history of Africa's experience with slavery, migration, colonialism, nationalism, and globalization. Consulting Afrasian texts that are literary and nonfictional, political and private, he broadens the scope of African and South Asian scholarship and inspires a more nuanced understanding of the Indian Ocean's fertile routes of exchange.

Desai shows how the Indian Ocean engendered a number of syncretic identities and shaped the medieval trade routes of the Islamicate empire, the early independence movements galvanized in part by Gandhi's southern African experiences, the invention of new ethnic nationalisms, and the rise of plural, multiethnic African nations. Calling attention to lives and literatures long neglected by traditional scholars, Desai introduces rich, interdisciplinary ways of thinking not only about this specific region but also about the very nature of ethnic history and identity. Traveling from the twelfth century to today, he concludes with a look at contemporary Asian populations in East Africa and their struggle to decide how best to participate in the development and modernization of their postcolonial nations without sacrificing their political autonomy.

Winner, 2021 African Literature Association First Book Award

Should a writer work in a former colonial language or in a vernacular? The language question was one of the great, intractable problems that haunted postcolonial literatures in the twentieth century, but it has since acquired a reputation as a dead end for narrow nationalism. This book returns to the language question from a fresh perspective. Instead of asking whether language matters, The Tongue-Tied Imagination explores how the language question itself came to matter.

Focusing on the case of Senegal, Warner investigates the intersection of French and Wolof. Drawing on extensive archival research and an under-studied corpus of novels, poetry, and films in both languages, as well as educational projects and popular periodicals, the book traces the emergence of a politics of language from colonization through independence to the era of neoliberal development. Warner reads the francophone works of well-known authors such as Léopold Senghor, Ousmane Sembène, Mariama Bâ, and Boubacar Boris Diop alongside the more overlooked Wolof-language works with which they are in dialogue.

Refusing to see the turn to vernacular languages only as a form of nativism, The Tongue-Tied Imagination argues that the language question opens up a fundamental struggle over the nature and limits of literature itself. Warner reveals how language debates tend to pull in two directions: first, they weave vernacular traditions into the normative patterns of world literature; but second, they create space to imagine how literary culture might be configured otherwise. Drawing on these insights, Warner brilliantly rethinks the terms of world literature and charts a renewed practice of literary comparison.

Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics situates Toni Morrison as a writer who writes about writing as much as about racialized, engendered, and sexualized African American, and therefore American, experience. In foregrounding the ethics of fiction writing, the book resists any triumphalist reading of Morrison’s achievement in order to allow the meditative, unsettled, and unsettling questions that arise throughout her long labor at the nexus of language and politics, where her fiction interrogates representation itself.

Moving between close reading and critical theory, Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics reveals the ways in which Morrison’s primary engagement with language has been a search for how and what language is made to communicate, and for how and what speaks in and from generation to generation. There is no easy escape from such legacy, no escape into a pure language free of the burdens of racialized agendas. Rather, there is the example of Morrison’s commitment to writerly, which is to say readerly, wakefulness.

At a time when sustained study devoted to single authors has become rare, this book will be an invaluable resource for readers, scholars, and teachers of Morrison’s work.

This study offers a literary history of the war novel in Africa. Coundouriotis argues that this genre, aimed more specifically at African readers than the continent’s better-known bildungsroman tradition, nevertheless makes an important intervention in global understandings of human rights.

The African war novel lies at the convergence of two sensibilities it encounters in European traditions: the naturalist aesthetic and the discourse of humanitarianism, whether in the form of sentimentalism or of human rights law. Both these sensibilities are present in culturally hybrid forms in the African war novel, reflecting its syncretism as a narrative practice engaged with the colonial and postcolonial history of the continent.

The war novel, Coundouriotis argues, stakes claims to collective rights that contrast with the individualism of the bildungsroman tradition. The genre is a form of people’s history that participates in a political struggle for the rights of the dispossessed.

Black Orpheus and Transition stand as towering landmarks in Africa’s cultural and intellectual history between 1957 and 1978, serving as incubators for the continent's postcolonial literary and artistic awakening. Founded in 1957 by Ulli Beier in Nigeria, Black Orpheus was a platform for artistic experimentation and dialogue, initially inspired by the Paris-based Présence Africaine but quickly evolving into its own distinctive voice. Beier’s initiatives, such as the Mbari Clubs in Ibadan and Oshogbo, complemented the magazine’s mission, offering creative spaces that nurtured some of Africa’s most notable artists and writers. By 1961, Transition, founded in Uganda by Rajat Neogy, emerged as a dynamic forum for cultural redefinition and incisive political commentary. Both publications became indispensable for grappling with the intellectual and cultural challenges of decolonization, exploring themes ranging from African aesthetics to the politics of independence.

Despite their profound influence, neither magazine enjoyed smooth trajectories. Black Orpheus weathered internal upheavals, with a second editorial generation—led by Abiola Irele and J.P. Clark—taking the reins and redefining its vision. Meanwhile, Transition faced outright suppression when Neogy was imprisoned for sedition in Uganda. Relocating to Ghana under the stewardship of Wole Soyinka, the magazine continued to thrive, but both journals struggled to adapt to Africa’s rapidly evolving post-independence realities. Their pages reflected a rich tapestry of debates: pan-Africanism versus tribalism, artistic primitivism versus modernism, and indigenous languages versus Western literary conventions. Ultimately, these magazines were more than periodicals—they were crucibles of creativity and intellectual exchange that catalyzed a generation of thinkers and writers. While their eventual closures were due to economic and logistical challenges, their legacy as formative platforms for Africa’s modern cultural identity remains unparalleled.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1986.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s follow-up to her popular yet controversial book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin that features critical information supporting the brutally honest portrayal of institutional slavery. Due to an overwhelming response, it was published one year after the original novel. A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a detailed explanation of the practices and imagery portrayed in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The previous novel was harshly criticized by Southerners who felt Stowe’s descriptions were unfounded. In an effort to defend her work and beliefs, the author delivered a thorough account of her research. Certain editions were published with the full title A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon Which the Story Is Founded, Together with Corroborative Statements Verifying the Truth of the Work. Harriet Beecher Stowe was a staunch and proactive abolitionist. She used her voice to highlight social and moral injustice despite public scrutiny. A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, reenforced her commitment to the truth and the pursuit of freedom. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin is both modern and readable.

Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book.

With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Explores medieval Irish interest in Classical mythology and historiography and how it could be situated it within the framework of Christian salvation history.


From allusions to the Olympians in seventh-century glosses to twelfth and thirteenth-century vernacular adaptations of the epics of Vergil, Lucan, and Statius, Irish authors creatively re-imagined Greco-Roman mythology throughout the Middle Ages. They developed many strategies for situating the Classical deities within medieval Christian historiography, but rarely did they downplay or eliminate them. Some of these strategies, as this study reveals, reflected wider medieval European trends in Classical reception and mythography, whilst others were strikingly original and paralleled the ways in which Irish authors imagined the supernatural beings of their own pre-Christian past.

This book examines why Irish authors were interested in the history and mythology of the ancient Mediterranean, and how Classical polytheism influenced their ideas about their own pagan past. It explores the ways in which depictions of Irish Otherworldly characters both shaped and were shaped by the gods and supernatural figures of the Classical adaptations. Based on close readings of texts such as the Irish version of Lucan, In Cath Catharda, this book argues that Classical scholarship in medieval Ireland was closely tied to medieval ideas about salvation history. Ultimately, it concludes that medieval Irish authors and audiences applied the same interpretive tools used for biblical exegesis to characters and events from Greco-Roman mythology, history, and literature, and to the supernatural inhabitants of pre-Christian Ireland alike.

It is commonly believed that Stalinism ended a vibrant period in Soviet avant-garde art and literature. The triumph of socialist realism, in this view, curtailed experimentation with aesthetic form and replaced it with a call for clarity, accessibility, and ideological conformity. But Stalin’s formula “national in form, socialist in content” gave artists an opening for officially sanctioned formal innovation—as long as it drew on the national cultures of the Soviet Union.

Nariman Skakov offers a new way to understand Soviet modernism, showing how writers and artists looked to the East to renew avant-garde experimentalism under Stalin. He traces how figures such as Victor Shklovsky, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Dziga Vertov, and Sergei Eisenstein responded to the Soviet state’s ideological demands by engaging with the traditions of the new socialist republics in Central Asia. The concept of national form gave these artists a sanctuary for aesthetic innovation, yet this experimentation relied on exoticization of the “strangeness” of the Soviet East and a fascination with ethnic others.

Recasting Soviet aesthetics from the vantage point of Central Asia, Skakov rethinks orientalism and its relationship to socialism. Challenging conventional narratives of the fate of the Soviet avant-garde, Reorientalism provides a deeply original decentering of modernism.