A collection of ten articles on African literature selected from papers presented at the 1995 conference of the African Literature Association held in Columbus, Ohio.

Metaphor and the Slave Trade provides compelling evidence of the hidden but unmistakable traces of the transatlantic slave trade that persist in West African discourse. Through an examination of metaphors that describe the trauma, loss, and suffering associated with the commerce in human lives, this book shows how the horrors of slavery are communicated from generation to generation. Laura T. Murphy’s insightful new readings of canonical West African fiction, autobiography, drama, and poetry explore the relationship between memory and metaphor and emphasize how repressed or otherwise marginalized memories can be transmitted through images, tropes, rumors, and fears. By analyzing the unique codes through which West Africans have represented the slave trade, this work foregrounds African literary contributions to Black Atlantic discourse and draws attention to the archive that metaphor unlocks for scholars of all disciplines and fields of study.

The figure of the dictator looms large in representations of postcolonial Africa. Since the late 1970s, writers, film-makers and theorists have sought to represent the realities of dictatorship without endorsing the colonialist cliches portraying Africans as incapable of self-government. Against the heavily-politicized responses provoked by this dilemma, Bishop argues for a form of criticism that places the complexity of the reader's or spectator's experiences at the heart of its investigations. Ranging across literature, film and political theory, this study calls for a reengagement with notions - often seen as unwelcome diversions from political questions - such as referentiality, genre and aesthetics. But rather than pit 'political' approaches against formal and aesthetic procedures, the author presents new insights into the interplay of the political and the aesthetic. Cecile Bishop is a Junior Research Fellow in French at Somerville College, Oxford.

The Handbook of Black Studies is the first resource to bring together research and scholarship in the field of African-American studies in one volume. Editors Molefi Kete Asante and Maulana Karenga, along with a pre-eminent group of contributors, examine various aspects of the field of Black Studies. Organized into three parts, this Handbook explores historical and cultural foundations, philosophical and conceptual bases, and critical and analytical concepts. Key Features: Presents Historical and Cultural Foundations: More than a chronicle of black culture or black people, this volume examines the emergence and maturity of the Black Studies field. Designed to be the principal reference work for the state of the field in African American Studies, this handbook covers the intent, function, and scope of the field with some suggestions about its future directions. Explores Philosophical and Conceptual Bases: Numerous theoretical and methodological adventures are examined, as well as research practices among scholars. A comprehensive, Pan-African approach to the field is provided as the contributions to this volume are not limited to discussing one area of the African world. Addresses Critical and Analytical Concepts: Researchers demonstrating intellectual rigor through unique and interesting projects are contributors to this volume. Black Studies is portrayed in a world context, not an "ethnic" volume, but a resource dealing with an important modern discipline whose practitioners and interests cross many borders. Intended Audience: Perfect resource for any academic library; as well as graduate students and researchers seeking to ascertain the current state of the research in African American Studies

Global Crusoe travels across the twentieth-century globe, from a Native American reservation to a Botswanan village, to explore the huge variety of contemporary incarnations of Daniel Defoe's intrepid character. In her study of the novels, poems, short stories and films that adapt the Crusoe myth, Ann Marie Fallon argues that the twentieth-century Crusoe is not a lone, struggling survivor, but a cosmopolitan figure who serves as a warning against the dangers of individual isolation and colonial oppression. Fallon uses feminist and postcolonial theory to reexamine Defoe's original novel and several contemporary texts, showing how writers take up the traumatic narratives of Crusoe in response to the intensifying transnational and postcolonial experiences of the second half of the twentieth century. Reading texts by authors such as Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Derek Walcott, Elizabeth Bishop, and J.M. Coetzee within their social, historical and political contexts, Fallon shows how contemporary revisions of the novel reveal the tensions inherent in the transnational project as people and ideas move across borders with frequency, if not necessarily with ease. In the novel Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe's discovery of 'Friday's footprint' fills him with such anxiety that he feels the print like an animal and burrows into his shelter. Likewise, modern readers and writers continue to experience a deep anxiety when confronting the narrative issues at the center of Crusoe's story.

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.

This work examines the Portuguese and crioulo literatures of the five African Portuguese-speaking countries: Angola; Cape Verde; Guinea Bissau; Mozambique; and Sao Tome and Principe. It offers an introduction to the cultural and historical context within which literature developed in Lusophone Africa, as well as a discussion of the prose and poetry published by the writers from these five countries since independence. As such, the volume is intended not only as a textbook for the student of the literatures of the five Lusophone countries, but also as a cultural and intellectual foundation for the specialist reader with an interest in the former Portuguese colonial empire.

In Black South African Autobiography After Deleuze: Belonging and Becoming in Self-Testimony, Kgomotso Michael Masemola uses Gilles Deleuze’s theories of immanence and deterritorialization to explore South African autobiography as both the site and the limit of intertextual cultural memory. Detailing the intertextual turn that is commensurate with belonging to the African world and its diasporic reaches through the Black Atlantic, among others, this book covers autobiographies from Peter Abrahams to Es’kia Mphahlele, from Ellen Kuzwayo to Nelson Mandela. It proceeds further to reveal wider dimensions of angst and belonging that attend becoming through transcultural memory. Kgomotso Michael Masemola successfully marshalls Deleuzean theories in a sophisticated re-reading that makes clear the autobiographers’ epistemic access to wor(l)ds beyond South Africa.

African literature, like the continent itself is enormous and diverse. East Africa's literature is different from West Africa's which is quite different from South Africa's which has different influences on it than North Africa's. Africa's literature is based on a widespread heritage of oral literature, some of which has now been recorded. Arabic influence can be detected as well as European, especially French and English. Legends, myths, proverbs, riddles and folktales form the mother load of the oral literature. This book presents an overview of African literature as well as a comprehensive bibliography, primarily of English language sources. Accessed by subject, author and title indexes.

This reference book surveys the richness of postcolonial African literature. The volume begins with an introductory essay on postcolonial criticism and African writing, then presents alphabetically arranged profiles of some 60 writers, including Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Doris Lessing, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Tahbar Ben Jelloun, among others. Each entry includes a brief biography, a discussion of major works and themes that appear in the author's writings, an overview of the critical response to the author's work, and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. These profiles are written by expert contributors and reflect many different perspectives. The volume concludes with a selected general bibliography of the most important critical works on postcolonial African literature.