This book focuses on the first works produced by three talented West Africans who felt an urge to express themselves in print. These creative individuals were pioneers in a literary movement that gathered force and swept across Africa with remarkable speed in the latter half of the twentieth century, producing distinctive national literatures in new nation states that were in the process of freeing themselves from the legacy of colonial rule. Writers such as these helped to shape and reinforce that movement toward self-definition by creating works that were indisputably African
This long-awaited anthology covers new thoughts and theories on the eminent and controversial writer, Bessie Head. Ever since her death in 1986, at the early age of forty-nine, Head has continued to capture our political, historical, and social imagination. This anthology contains current research and opinions being discussed worldwide, including new scholarship emerging from four continents, Africa, Asia, Europe, and America.
The Zimbabwean writer, Dambudzo Marechera, was regarded by some as mad and by others as a genius. Today, ten years after his death, his international reputation continues to grow not only as one of the most innovative writers Africa has produced but as an important voice in twentieth-century literature. This new book is the first collection of critical essays devoted entirely to Marechera. Flora Veit-Wild and Anthony Chennells have brought together the work of scholars from Zimbabwe, South Africa, Italy, Nigeria, Germany and England to show the complextiy and variety of responses which Marechera's writing evokes.
Inspired by Mariama Bâ's life and creative work, this volume celebrates her life and art. She is the winner of the first Noma Award for Publishing in Africa. Bâ's creative work is sparse, given her relatively short life, but compact, vivid, and dense. A long and complete bibliography of the vibrant critical reception of Bâ’s writings, put together by Renée Larrier, bears testimony to their status, depth, and canonical dimensions. There is practically no school curriculum in the United States that does not feature Bâ's texts either in the original French version or in the English translation.
Eros Muse examines the love affair between the poet and her muse. Personifying the muse as her ultimate, possessive lover, the poet explores what it means to be a writer. The essays are more pragmatic in tone and approach and explore the dual role of mother and writer. Yet the poems are more flirtatious, a dance of language and process, a prance, a trot, a sweeping waltz in which the poet and language shimmy across the room.
During the early 19th century some African American men and women who broke their chains also gave the abolitionist movement its strongest verbal weapons in the form of detailed autobiographies that exposed the slave system. Perceptive, dramatic and often starkly horrifying, these narratives dared to challenge their author's former owners who sang the praises of human bondage. Having examined the slave narratives, recent scholars have judged them historically accurate and reliable, and the most significant form of early African American literature.
Twenty-one articles deal with the historical background to Garvey and Garveyism, women in the movement and the importance of gender, the influence of Garvey on Jamaican culture and the peoples of the Caribbean.
“Gift of Incense chronicles a unique twentieth century story, the emigration to Ethiopia in the early 1960s of Judy Linder and of her marriage to African musician Abubaker Ashakih. What emerges from the pages of this book is not simply a personal memoir but also a living picture of a unique time and place in East Africa before it was forever changed by revolution and famine." -John Roth Publisher, Westron Press
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