Reading Contemporary African Literature

Reading Contemporary African Literature brings together scholarship on, critical debates about, and examples of reading African literature in all genres – poetry, fiction, and drama including popular culture. The anthology offers studies of African literature from interdisciplinary perspectives that employ sociological, historical, and ethnographic besides literary analysis of the literatures. It has assembled critical and researched essays on a range of topics, theoretical and empirical, by renowned critics and theorists of African literature that evaluate and provide examples of reading African literature that should be of interest to academics, researchers, and students of African literature, culture, and history amongst other subjects. Some of the essays examine authors that have received little or no attention to date in books on recent African literature. These essays provide new insights and scholarship that should broaden and deepen our understanding and appreciation of African literature.

Reading Contemporary African American Literature focuses on the subject of contemporary African American popular fiction by women. Bragg’s study addresses why such work should be the subject of scholarly examination, describes the events and attitudes which account for the critical neglect of this body of work, and models a critical approach to such narratives that demonstrates the distinctive ways in which this literature captures the complexities of post-civil rights era black experiences. In making her arguments regarding the value of popular writing, Bragg argues that black women’s popular fiction foregrounds gender in ways that are frequently missing from other modes of narrative production. They exhibit a responsiveness and timeliness to the shifting social terrain which is reflected in the rapidly shifting styles and themes which characterize popular fiction. In doing so, they extend the historical function of African American literature by continuing to engage the black body as a symbol of political meaning in the social context of the United States. In popular literature Beauty Bragg locates a space from which black women engage a variety of public discourses.

In the past decade, contemporary African art has been featured in major exhibtions in museums, galleries, international biennials, and other forums. African cinema has established itself on the stage of world cinema, culminating in the Ouagadougou Film Festival. While African art and visual culture have become an integral part of the art history and cultural studies curricula in universities worldwide, critical readings and interpretations have remained difficult to obtain. This pioneering anthology collects twenty key essays in which major critical thinkers, scholars, and artists explore contemporary African visual culture, locating it within current cultural debates and within the context of the continent's history. The sections of the book are Theory and Cultural Transaction, History, Location and Practice, and Negotiated Identities. Copublished with the Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA), London

The Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures series (general editor: Elleke Boehmer) 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 study of West African literatures interweaves the analysis of fiction, drama, and poetry with an exploration of the broader political, cultural, and intellectual contexts within which West African writers work. Anglophone literatures form the central focus of the book, with comparative comments on vernacular literature, francophone writing and oral literatures, and detailed discussion of selected francophone texts in translation (e.g., Senghor, Tadjo, Beyala, Bâ, Sembene). Movingfrom a discussion of nationalist and anti-colonial writing in the period before independence, towards the more experimental writings of contemporary authors such as Véronique Tadjo (Ivory Coast), Syl Cheney-Coker (Sierra Leone), and Kojo Laing (Ghana), the book constantly relates texts to the social andpolitical history of West Africa. Canonical, internationally well-known writers such as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka are positioned in relation to the literary cultures and debates which surrounded them when they first produced their seminal texts; the discussions and disagreements which have grown up around their work in subsequent decades are also considered. The work of new and lesser-known writers is also considered, including Niyi Osundare (Nigeria) and Kofi Anyidoho (Ghana). In order toconvey a sense of the rich and complex societies that are clustered beneath the umbrella-term 'postcolonial', emphasis is placed on West Africa's diverse oral and popular cultures, and the ways in which local intellectuals and readers have responded to the most prominent authors through theaesthetic frameworks generated by these forms.

Honouring strong new voices from around the world, the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize is a global award, open to unpublished as well as published writers, with a truly international judging panel. This global anthology presents the winner of the 2014 Short Story Prize, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s “Let’s Tell This Story Properly,” alongside some of the most promising and original stories entered for the prize during the past three years by emerging writers across the literary landscape of the world. Gathered from over ten thousand entries, the selected stories are provocative, rich in flair and ambition, and push the boundaries of fiction into fresh territory.

The influence of colonialism and race on the development of African literature has been the subject of a number of studies. The effect of patriarchy and gender, however, and indeed the contributions of African women, have up until now been largely ignored by the critics. "Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender" is the first extensive account of African literature from a feminist perspective. In this first radical and exciting work Florence Stratton outlines the features of an emerging female tradition in African fiction. A chapter is dedicated to each to the works of four women writers: Grace Ogot, Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta and Mariama Ba. In addition she provides challenging new readings of canonical male authors such as Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiongo'o and Wole Soyinka. "Contemporary African" "Literature and the Politics of Gender" thus provides the first truly comprehensive definition of the current literary tradition in Africa.

A collection of 20 stories written between 1980-1991 which deal with themes relevant to various regions of Africa.