African women writers have come a long way from the sixties when they were hardly acknowledged or noticed as serious writers. In the past four decades, their works have been steadily rising in quantity and quality. Today these writers are redefining images of womanhood, providing new visions, and reshaping distorted characterizations and representations of African women in fiction. This rapid upsurge of writing by African women has been one of the most dynamic, phenomenal trends of African literature at the end of the twentieth century.
This volume of the historical journal African Literature Today provides an overview of the position of African literature at the end of the 20th century and an examination of the directions that African literature is now taking with new and emerging writers and the growth of writing by African women. Contributors examine the influence of new concerns-- globalization and the view from the diaspora, as well as established themes such as childhood and war.
African literary texts can be approached in a variety of ways. They may be examined in isolation as verbal artifacts that have a unique integrity. They may be studied in relation to other texts that preceded and followed them. Or they may be seen against the backdrop of the time, traditions and circumstances that helped to shape them. In this book, all these approaches have been utilized, sometimes singly, sometimes in combination.
"Like its companion volume Palavers of African Literature, African Writers and their Readers is a magnificent and monumental tribute to Bernth Lindfors, the scholar who transformed African literary studies in North America. But his second volume is more than a tribute to a distinguished scholar-- it is a high powered exercise in critical scholarship, which in its choice of issues and methedologies, takes up many of the questions that Lindfors put at the forefront of scholarship on Africa and its literary traditions..." -Simon Gikandi, Robert Schirmer Professor of English, Princeton University
By placing Africana womanism, an evolutionary Africana paradigm, within a literary context, this book expands the layered meanings of this family-centered, race-based theory and applies them to the works and ideas of renowned international literary figures such as Toni Morrison, Paula Marshall, and Buchi Emecheta.
“In his inimitable, insightful and incisive style, Femi Ojo-Ade has produced an in-depth, challenging, critical reading of Aimé Césaire’s theatre that promises to be an indispensable companion to the study of African and Caribbean drama.” —Victor Aire Professor of French & Francophone Studies, University of Jos, Nigeria
Of the ten papers in this collection, the first three are concerned with problems in translating language and culture, the next four focus on the African writer as translator, and the last three deal broadly with the way history and culture are translated into literature. Contributors include André Djiffack, Gillian Gane, Raoul J. Granqvist, Kwaku A. Gyasi, Olabode Ibironke, Lisa McNee, Philip A. Noss, Michael A. Toler, Ann Elizabeth Willey, and Christopher Wise.
Tongue and Mother Tongue is takes on two compelling challenges: the language question and the place and role of the mother tongue in African literature. This collection is the culmination of the fierce, decades-old debates on the question of African literature and its criticism. The fourteen essays, which range from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives, have been organized in to five thematic categories whose sequence should be experienced as a continuous dialogue rather than a collection of discrete statements...
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