This timely and expansive biography of Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian writer, Nobel laureate, and social activist, shows how the author's early years influence his life's work and how his writing, in turn, informs his political engagement. Three sections spanning his life, major texts, and place in history, connect Soyinka's legacy with global issues beyond the borders of his own country, and indeed beyond the African continent. Covering his encounters with the widespread rise of kleptocratic rule and international corporate corruption, his reflection on the human condition of the North-South divide, and the consequences of postcolonialism, this comprehensive biography locates Wole Soyinka as a global figure whose life and works have made him a subject of conversation in the public sphere, as well as one of Africa's most successful and popular authors. Looking at the different forms of Soyinka's work--plays, novels, and memoirs, among others--this volume argues that Soyinka used writing to inform, mobilize, and sometimes incite civil action, in a decades-long attempt at literary social engineering.

This timely and expansive biography of Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian writer, Nobel laureate, and social activist, shows how the author's early years influence his life's work and how his writing, in turn, informs his political engagement. Three sections spanning his life, major texts, and place in history, connect Soyinka's legacy with global issues beyond the borders of his own country, and indeed beyond the African continent. Covering his encounters with the widespread rise of kleptocratic rule and international corporate corruption, his reflection on the human condition of the North-South divide, and the consequences of postcolonialism, this comprehensive biography locates Wole Soyinka as a global figure whose life and works have made him a subject of conversation in the public sphere, as well as one of Africa's most successful and popular authors. Looking at the different forms of Soyinka's work--plays, novels, and memoirs, among others--this volume argues that Soyinka used writing to inform, mobilize, and sometimes incite civil action, in a decades-long attempt at literary social engineering.

This book presents a new way of looking at Wole Soyinka's engagement with the classical past. Nigerian author and activist Wole Soyinka was the first Black African author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1986), and his oeuvre has become seminal to postcolonial literature. The frequent references to Greece and Rome that appear across Soyinka's writings, most explicitly in his 1973 play The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, have often received short shrift in scholarship on the author. At best, these references have been understood as elements of Soyinka's prodigiously inclusive humanism. At worst, Soyinka's critics argue that the invocations of a Graeco-Roman past testify to the neocolonial cultural affinities that make Soyinka a problematic figure in postcolonial literary history. Adam Lecznar challenges these readings, arguing that Soyinka's authorial outlook is informed by a hybrid form of classicism in which he aligns the legacy of Greece and Rome with the African cultural heritage to form a narrative of literary and cultural value that looks beyond the ancient Mediterranean. This book turns a spotlight on how Soyinka's appeals to Greece and Rome inform his reflections on Africa's ancient past, Yoruba belief, and the modern significance of tragedy. Lecznar contends that Soyinka's notion of classicism is not solely dependent on the memory of the Graeco-Roman past. Rather, it draws innovatively on a global cultural heritage to advance revolutionary and futural narratives of history and identity.

Milestones in African Literature offers an accessible guide to ten key moments in African literature. It traces literature in Africa through forms and genres, as well as social and political changes. Toyin Falola embraces the richness of African literature, and considers the oral tradition, pre-colonial literature, apartheid, print media and digital literature, postcolonialism, and migration literature. He explores the realities of African people by drawing from and highlighting peoples’ convictions, spirituality, and pasts. The book reveals African literature’s capacity to convey cultural, social, and political messages through storytelling, while depicting the social structures and cultural norms that shape these experiences through the examination of perspectives and literary works of African authors. Milestones in African Literature is the ideal resource for undergraduate and graduate students interested in African literatures. It will also be invaluable for teachers and researchers aiming to strengthen their knowledge.

Social Ethics and Governance in Contemporary African Writing is the first book to bring rigorous literary, philosophical, and artistic discourse together to interrogate the ethics of governance and development in postcolonial Africa. It takes literature seriously as a context for philosophical reflection, vividly engaging the human agency, creativity, and resourcefulness of local Nigerians as political and social actors and shedding new light on the dynamics of human flourishing. Drawing on important secondary scholarship across several humanities disciplines, especially literature, philosophy, and the performing arts, Nimi Wariboko provides compelling and innovative analysis of the challenges and opportunities on governance and development in postcolonial Nigerian state and society. With a detailed introductory chapter and an authoritative analysis contained in six cohesive chapters, all anchored in political and social ethics and close readings of fascinating literary and artistic works-such as A. Igoni Barrett's Blackass and the comedy skits of MC Edo Pikin-this is a landmark contribution to Nigerian cultural studies. Wariboko's practical engagement between literature and philosophy also opens up new ways of seeing literary analysis as ethical methodology, beyond the specific contexts of Nigeria or Africa.

A powerful biography that presents analysis of a black working-class woman who rose from a tenement slum in intensely racialized British Guiana to become a leading anti-colonialism, workers' rights and women's liberation activist in Britain. Jessica Huntley's Pan-African Life celebrates Huntley's importance as a leading figure in the Windrush-era resistance to the multiple, racialized injustices faced by black settlers, children and communities in Britain. Claudia Tomlinson details how Huntley became the elder stateswoman of radical black activism of her era through participation in decolonization movements and actions such as the Black Parents Movement and the International Bookfair of Radical Black and Third World Books, as well as her foundational role at Bogle L'Ouverture Publications, the leading black-led, pan-African publishing house and its associated radical bookshop. Based on extensive archival research and over 40 interviews with Huntley's closest family members, associates, comrades, authors, artists and friends, this book affords readers an opportunity to take a long-lensed view of the historical roots of the many contemporary racial injustices re-invigorated in recent debates. Tomlinson re-writes the history of a period and a struggle often told through a master discourse that is male, middle-class and privileged. In so doing, she shows how Jessica Huntley's fight for justice and the rights of all black people in Britain provides a useful lens into UK-based, black literary and cultural expression in the 20th century.

What is theatre? What is performance? What connects them and how are they different? How have they been shaped by events, people, companies, practices and ideas in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? And where are they heading next? The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance offers some answers to these big questions. This third edition has been updated to now include over 160 entries, with all entries brought up to date and new topics added, including Caryl Churchill, Black Lives Matter and Hamilton, among others. This book provides an accessible, informative and engaging introduction to important people and companies, events, concepts and practices that have defined the complementary fields of theatre and performance studies. Three easy-to-use alphabetized sections include entries on topics and people ranging from performance artists Marina Abramović and Pope.L to directors Vsevolod Meyerhold and Robert Wilson, the haka, Taking the Knee and disability, theatre and performance. Each entry includes important historical and contextual information, extensive cross-referencing, detailed analysis and an annotated bibliography. The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance is a perfect reference guide for the keen student and the passionate theatre-goer alike.

The first study of Anglophone and Italian novels by Somali diasporic authors, offering a new critical framework for multilingual and transnational analysis of Somali literature. Building on the latest scholarship about multilingual contexts, diaspora studies and the rapidly expanding field of Italian postcolonial studies, Marco Medugno examines Somali diasporic literature with a comparative perspective. Considering works written in English and Italian, he argues that Somali diasporic authors share similar themes and aesthetics, thus creating an interliterary community within the diaspora space. By using multilingualism as a starting point, Medugno provides significant insights into how Somali national and individual identities are constructed in diasporic, global contexts through geography, style, form, language and the re-writing of national histories emerging out of colonization and independence. Analysing acclaimed Somali novels such as Nuruddin Farah's Links and Crossbones, Igiaba Scego's Adua and Cristina Ali Farah's Little Mother, he questions any definition of 'local' as 'provincial', instead considering it a site for interrogating global concerns. Literature of the Somali Diaspora is organized around three themes: spatiality, language and resistance help to contextualize authors, forced by the decades-long Somali Civil War, to write outside Somalia and in different languages – including Somali, Italian, English, German, Dutch and Arabic – within global literary circuits. Their work thus creates a literature not confined within national borders but an interliterary global community, a transnational and multilingual space in which they share world aesthetic ideologies, challenge and engage with literary traditions in different languages and show an interplay between diverse cultures.

In this vibrant and approachable book, award-winning writers of black speculative fiction bring together excerpts from their work and creative reflections on futurisms with original essays. Features an introduction by Suyi Okungbowa. Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction showcases creative-critical essays that negotiate genre bending and black speculative fiction with writerly practice. As Afrodecendant peoples with lived experience from the continent, award-winning authors use their intrinsic voices in critical conversations on Afrofuturism and Afro-centered futurisms. By engaging with difference, they present a new kind of African study that is an evaluative gaze at African history, African spirituality, Afrosurrealism, "becoming," black radical imagination, cultural identity, decolonizing queerness, myths, linguistic cosmologies, and more. Contributing authors – Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga, Cheryl S. Ntumy, Dilman Dila, Eugen Bacon, Nerine Dorman, Nuzo Onoh, Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Stephen Embleton, Suyi Okungbowa, Tobi Ogundiran and Xan van Rooyen – offer boldly hybrid chapters (both creative and scholarly) that interface Afrocentric artefacts and exegesis. Through ethnographic reflections and intense scrutinies of African fiction, these writers contribute open and diverse reflections of Afro-centered futurisms. The authors in Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction feature in major genre and literary awards, including the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, British Fantasy, Locus, Ignyte, Nommo, Philip K. Dick, Shirley Jackson and Otherwise Awards, among others. They are also intrinsic partners in a vital conversation on the rise of black speculative fiction that explores diversity and social (in)justice, charting poignant stories with black hero/ines who remake their worlds in color zones of their own image.

An imaginative, narratological reading of Chinua Achebe's novels, stories, poetry, and essays through a literary and historical framework. Toyin Falola analyzes fictional and historical cartographies of Africa in Achebe's literary works to offer a critical representation of Africa's present and future. In particular, he focuses on the historical valuation of a full range of the writer's works – novels including Things Fall Apart, but also short stories, poems, and essays – as important materials that have contributed to the political events in Nigeria and, by extension, Africa. The raw creativity found in Achebe's stories and his ability to tell the Nigerian story – precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial – have endeared him to many, including readers and those critical of him and his works. Chinua Achebe: Narrating Africa in Fictions and History analyzes all of the writer's works, dwelling on the Nigerian political context upon which many, if not all, of his narratives lie. As a result, it examines methodologies of narration and ideologies that allow his works to resonate with the imagination of Africa.