Reading Contemporary African Literature: Critical Perspectives

Description

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. Cover Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Foreword Introduction Section I: General Perspectives 1. 'English Does Not Kill': Writing Lives in the Language of the 'Other' Section II: Fiction 2. A Stylistic Analysis of the Story Element in Ngugi's A Grain of Wheat 3. Mahilet: A Laboratory of Stylistic Experimentation 4. Through the Male Eyes: Gendered Styles in Contemporary Zambian Fiction 5. Politics and Stylistics of Female (Re)Presentation in James Ng'ombe's Sugarcane with Salt 6. Telling Lives: Myth, Metaphor and Metafiction in Zakes Mda's Cion 7. Politics and Poetics of Characterization in M. G. Vassanji's The Book of Secrets 8. The Invisible Twin: Visibility and Identity in Marie-Thérèse Humbert's À l'autre bout de moi 9. Thematic Design and Stylistic Patterns in Cameron Duodu's The Gab Boys 10. 'We Can Redream this World and Make the Dream Real': The Utopian Quest in Ben Okri's Primary Myths 11. Orality and the Emergence of Disrupted Narrative Voices in Charles Samupindi’s Pawns 12. 'Zimbolicious': Shona-English Stylistics in Lyrics and Literature Section III: Poetry and Orature 13. Repression and Beyond: Ideological Commitment and Style in Jack Mapanje's and Steve Chimombo's Poetry 14. Oguaa Aban and Cape Coast Castle: Same Edifice, Different Metaphors in the Poetry of Gaddiel Acquaah and Kwadwo Opuku-Agyemang 15. Self and Nature: The Cean Dialogues 16. Transitions in South African Urban Poetry: The City of Johannesburg in Three Poems of the Apartheid Period 17. Verbal Fluidities and Masculine Anxieties of the Glocal Urban Imaginary in Kenyan Genge Rap Section IV: Drama and Theatre 18. Language Use and Identity Negotiation in Cameroonian Drama 19. Afrikaans and Afrikaner Nationalism in Deon Opperman's Donkerland 20. 'Neither Peace nor War': The Role of Theatre in Re-Imagining the New Eritrea Contributors