Literary Criticism : African

A critique of modern development may be traced in the postcolonial and anti-colonial literature about North Africa. Works by Fanon, Camus, Djebar, Mahfouz, El Saadawi, Said, and others, offer a window upon contemporary modernization and related issues of identity, independence, and social justice. more...

Price: $108.00

This is the first comprehensive book-length study of gender politics in Ngugi wa Thiong's fiction. Brendon Nicholls argues that the mechanisms of gender subordination are strategically crucial to Ngugi's ideological project, but that his fiction also creates transgressive spaces for women.Nicholls proposes a strategy of 'performative reading' that offers an ethical basis for analyzing cultural difference and critiquing cultural practices, while avoiding both cultural imperialism and cultural relativism. more...

Price: $99.95

This original work redefines and broadens our understanding of the drama of the English-speaking African diaspora. Looking closely at the work of Amiri Baraka, Nobel prize-winners Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott, and Ntozake Shange, the author contends that the refashioning of the collective cultural self in black drama originates from the complex intersection of three discourses: Eurocentric, Afrocentric, and Post-Afrocentric. From blackface minstrelsy to the Trinidad Carnival, from the Black Aesthetic to the South African Black Consciousness theatres and the scholarly debate on the (non)existence of African drama, Olaniyan cogently maps the terrains of a cultural struggle and underscores a peculiar situation in which the inferiorization of black performance forms is most often a shorthand for subordinating black culture and corporeality. Drawing on insights from contemporary theory and cultural studies, and offering detailed readings of the above writers, Olaniyan shows how they occupy the interface between the Afrocentric and a liberating Post-Afrocentric space where black theatrical-cultural difference could be envisioned as a site of multiple articulations: race, class, gender, genre, and language.  more...

Price: $50.00

Some 600 alphabetically arranged entries chronicle the growing field of African literature in a work written expressly for students. more...

Price: $85.00

Looks at both the Anglophone literature of South Africa and the lusophone literature of Angola and Mozambique. This study suggests that the prevalence of 'colonial' languages such as English and Portuguese in 'anticolonial' or 'postcolonial' African Literature is primarily an effect of the print network. more...

Price: $128.00