Routledge Handbook Of African Literature

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 under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781138713864_oachapter4.pdf

This handbook brings together an international team of scholars from different disciplines to reflect on African popular cultural imaginaries. These imaginaries – in the sense of cultural productions, contexts, consumers, producers, platforms, and the material, affective and discursive resources they circulate – are influential in shaping African realities. Collectively, the chapters assembled in this handbook index the genres, methods, mediums, questions and encounters that preoccupy producers, consumers and scholars of African popular cultural forms across a range of geohistorical and temporal contexts. Drawing on forms such as newspaper columns, televised English Premier League football, speculative arts, romance fiction, comedy, cinema, music and digital genres, the contributors explore the possibilities and ambiguities unleashed by the production, circulation, consumption, remediation and critique of these forms. Among the questions explored across these essays are the freedoms and constraints of popular genres; the forms of self-making, pleasure and harm that these imaginaries enable; the negotiations of multiple moral regimes in everyday life; and, inevitably, the fecund terrain of contradictions definitive of many popular forms, which variously enable and undermine world-making. An authoritative scholarly resource on popular culture in Africa, this handbook is an essential read for students and scholars of African culture, society and media.

This handbook provides a critical overview of literature dealing with groups of people or regions that suffer marginalization within Africa. The contributors examine a multiplicity of minority discourses expressed in African literature, including those who are culturally, socially, politically, religiously, economically, and sexually marginalized in literary and artistic creations. Chapters and sections of the book are structured to identify major areas of minority articulation of their condition and strategies deployed against the repression, persecution, oppression, suppression, domination, and tyranny of the majority or dominant group. Bringing together diverse perspectives to give a holistic representation of the African reality, this handbook is an important read for scholars and students of comparative and postcolonial literature and African studies.

This Handbook provides an authoritative and foundational disciplinary overview of African Public Policy and a comprehensive examination of the practicalities of policy analysis, policymaking processes, implementation, and administration in Africa today. The book assembles a multidisciplinary team of distinguished and upcoming Africanist scholars, practitioners, researchers and policy experts working inside and outside Africa to analyse the historical and emerging policy issues in 21st-century Africa. While mostly attentive to comparative public policy in Africa, this book attempts to address some of the following pertinent questions: How can public policy be understood and taught in Africa? How does policymaking occur in unstable political contexts, or in states under pressure? Has the democratisation of governing systems improved policy processes in Africa? How have recent transformations, such as technological proliferation in Africa, impacted public policy processes? What are the underlying challenges and potential policy paths for Africa going forward? The contributions examine an interplay of prevailing institutional, political, structural challenges and opportunities for policy effectiveness to discern striking commonalities and trajectories across different African states. This is a valuable resource for practitioners, politicians, researchers, university students, and academics interested in studying and understanding how African countries are governed.

This book provides a comprehensive and readable overview of the critical debates and controversies around tourism in Africa, and the major factors that are affecting tourism development now and in the future. Drawing upon research emerging from collaborations between a growing number of African academics and practitioners based in the continent and in the African diaspora as well as international colleagues, the Handbook offers key critical insights into the issues, challenges and trends that Africa and African tourism is facing. Part I covers continent-wide issues such as climate change, ICT, heritage and development. The remaining parts are organised along geographic lines, with each chapter covering the development of tourism, current trends and discussion of critical issues such as community participation, gender, backpacking, urban tourism, wildlife tourism and conservation. Combining an overview of key theories, concepts, contemporary issues and debates, this book will be a valuable resource for students, academics and practitioners investigating the role of tourism in Africa.

The Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature introduces world literature readers to the transnational, multivocal writings of immigrant African authors. Covering works produced in Europe, North America, and elsewhere in the world, this book investigates three major aesthetic paradigms in African diasporic literature: the Sankofan wave (late 1960s–early 1990s); the Janusian wave (1990s–2020s); and the Offshoots of the New Arrivants (those born and growing up outside Africa). Written by well-established and emerging scholars of African and diasporic literatures from across the world, the chapters in the book cover the works of well-known and not-so-well-known Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone writers from different theoretical positionalities and critical approaches, pointing out the unique innovative artistic qualities of this major subgenre of African literature. The focus on the “diasporic consciousness” of the writers and their works sets this handbook apart from others that solely emphasize migration, which is more of a process than the community of settled African people involved in the dynamic acts of living reflected in diasporic writings. This book will appeal to researchers and students from across the fields of Literature, Diaspora Studies, African Studies, Migration Studies, and Postcolonial Studies.

Providing a comprehensive and cutting edge examination of this important continent, Routledge Handbook of African Politics surveys the key debates and controversies, dealing with each of the major issues to be found in Africa?s politics today. Structured into 6 broad areas, the handbook features over 30 contributions focused around:The State Identity Conflict Democracy and Electoral Politics Political Economy & Development International Relations Each chapter deals with a specific topic, providing an overview of the main arguments and theories and explaining the empirical evidence that they are based on, drawing on high-profile cases such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Nigeria, Somalia, South Africa, Rwanda and Zimbabwe. The Handbook also contains new contributions on a wide range of topical issues, including terrorism, the growing influence of China, civil war, and transitional justice, making it required reading for non-specialists and experts alike. Featuring both established scholars and emerging researchers, this is a vital resource for all students of African Studies, democratization, conflict resolution and Third World politics.

Bringing together cutting-edge research from a range of disciplines, this handbook argues that despite often being overlooked or treated as marginal, the study of Islam from an African context is integral to the broader Muslim world. Challenging the portrayal of African Muslims as passive recipients of religious impetuses arriving from the outside, this book shows how the continent has been a site for the development of rich Islamic scholarship and religious discourses. Over the course of the book, the contributors reflect on: The history and infrastructure of Islam in Africa Politics and Islamic reform Gender, youth, and everyday life for African Muslims New technologies, media, and popular culture. Written by leading scholars in the field, the contributions examine the connections between Islam and broader sociopolitical developments across the continent, demonstrating the important role of religion in the everyday lives of Africans. This book is an important and timely contribution to a subject that is often diffusely studied, and will be of interest to researchers across religious studies, African studies, politics, and sociology.