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Feminism represents the battle for equal access to opportunities in society for males and females and, therefore, a necessary struggle for social justice. It is sometimes the case, however, that feminism degenerates into a battle against men, a tendency Mawuli Adzei refers to as "radical separatist feminism" (47). In African literature, this standpoint is reflected in the abject degradation of male characters, who are usually presented as the oppressors of women, enemies of women, barriers to women's progress, and only without whom women would be able to achieve their highest potentials in society (Adzei 47). Against this backdrop, and using El Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero as a primary text, this paper, while acknowledging the validity and necessity of the crusade for gender equity in African societies, contests the logic fueling male-bashing by foregrounding certain often-ignored variables in this debate: first, the faulty homogenization/essentialization of men and women (and by extension, the neglection of intersectionality) and, second, the constraints certain cultural expectations pose to men. I conclude by highlighting Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's point that—because feminism is potentially liberating for both women and men—we can all be feminists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Matthew Omelsky has recently coined the term "African Anthropocene" to describe how the intertwined crises wrought by global capitalism and man-made ecological disaster have disproportionately affected the African continent. This paper discusses a short story collection by the Ugandan writer Dilman Dila, A Killing in the Sun (2014), as one instance of an African aesthetics that uniquely registers and responds to this dual crisis. I focus in particular on the "vampire story" that opens this collection, arguing that Dila not only reinvents, but, in critical ways, "mutates" the canonical Euro-American vampire figure. In reimagining the aristocratic European vampire as a mutant, genetically modified swarm of mosquitos, Dila's story suggests new, environmental forms of the monstrous emerging at the confluence of ecological catastrophe and corporate neocolonialism. At the same time, I show how Dila's fiction draws on the history of colonialism in Africa in imagining modes of survival within this vampiric ecology. In order to unpack the political implications of what I call Dila's "mutational aesthetics," I trace Dila's attempts to imagine forms of human-nonhuman entanglement that delink from a Western episteme and its ideological carapace of "the human," providing instead post-humanist visions of survival and refuge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1960s in Africa are usually described by historians and political scientists as the era of the "wind of change" because it was during this period that most African countries gained political independence from their colonial masters. In fact, this "wind of change" gave African countries the legitimacy and legality to be the custodians of their own progress and destiny. However, the African continent since then has been a furnace for social revolution, ethnic conflict, and martial dissension. The reasons for this political uproar in most postcolonial African states are wide and varied. However, a principal reason is that the ruling African elites have confiscated the sovereignty of the postcolonial African state for their own individual benefits thereby leaving the masses in desperate conditions. This tragic situation is reflected in the literary and cultural discourses of post-1960 Africa as seen in the novels of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Alobwed'Epie. Using Ngũgĩ's Matigari and Alobwed'Epie's The Death Certificate , this article analyzes the relationship between postcolonial African citizens and their political leaders and also shows how these leaders manipulate the dynamics of political or sovereign powers to the detriment of development in their societies. The article supports the view that the political leadership of the postcolonial fictional states, as seen in the novels, is the archetype of the misuse and abuse of state power in contemporary Africa. Using social semiotics as a theoretical paradigm, the paper affirms that postcolonial Africa is unprogressive, fragmented, and dismembered because of the mismanagement of political power for personal aggrandizement. This mismanagement of state powers has exacerbated the politicization of ethnicity in postcolonial Africa and is also responsible for the political tyranny, corruption, and ethnic conflict for which most contemporary African states have been noted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores an understudied aspect of print cultures in Africa and beyond. One affordance of print forms is their capacity to actively play host to a variety of ways of relating to the medium of print itself. This capacity is called here the hospitality of print—an affect of openness and invitation that suffuses certain print publics that solicit and accommodate disparate kinds of attention and use. This phenomenon is analyzed through a discussion of the early years of the glossy pan-African periodical Bingo. Launched in 1953 and published in Senegal and France under the editorial direction of Ousmane Socé, Bingo aimed for a mass audience across the Francophone world. Under Socé, Bingo made the printed page into a social space for its readers by opening itself up to multiple modes of engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article centers on the representation of dictatorship by Guinean author Tierno Monénembo and aims to elucidate his fictional writing by reading it against recent theories on violence and sovereignty. In line with Nganang's notion of protestas , a metonymic chain of violence emerges in a number of forms: spectacular and subtle, physical and psychological. These constitute what Scott labels a "dramaturgy of domination" (Domination and the Arts of Resistance). Disparity between public and hidden transcripts perpetuates a state of tension but also reveals spaces of dissent. In texts that not only denounce the crimes of Touré's regime, but critique the ongoing injustices enacted in Guinea and elsewhere, Monénembo writes resistance as a commitment to combating this violence, which is characterized by débrouillard practice. His fictional subjects' capacity to move between worlds responds to calls for a wider recasting of African subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a yet-unpublished interview the Kenyan novelist Meja Mwangi deplores the Big Man syndrome as an unjust form of power prevalent on the African continent. Mwangi's understanding of the Big Man as someone who is above the law resonates with certain interpretations of Big Man power proffered in political theory. In contemporary African literature, Big Men are a recurring subject of literary representation and this article explores selected contemporary African novels as texts that simultaneously affirm and subvert Big Man power through a strategic redistribution of what Alex Woloch terms "character-space" (13–14). As characters inhabiting (gendered) human bodies, the bodies of Big Men become the site of the performance of sovereign power. This article contends that if sovereignty is understood as not monopolized by the state but as shared by both state and non-state actors—Big Men emerge as playing a fundamental role in its constitution. Not only do mode of dress and stature become important markers of that which is sovereign; the ability to command one's body and will violence, or life and death on other bodies, becomes the mark of sovereignty par excellence. While the literary text attests to the sovereignty of Big Men, it also carries with it its own subversion and contests Big Man power by juxtaposing their bodies with those of alternative characters that draw the reader to more just forms of power. It is this ability of the author to manipulate character bodies that enables the writer to both represent brutal forms of power and the resistance to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah concentrates on the problem of political leadership in postcolonial Africa like none of his other post-independence novels— A Man of the People or No Longer at Ease. It narrates the abuse of power and the failure of political leadership in a way the others do not and has thus generated criticism along this axis. While some critics have explored the nature of brutality in the novel, others have seen it as essentially tragic from various perspectives. It has also generated concerns about Achebe's reaction to political leadership in Africa. The formation of a postcolonial nation-state as presented in the novel has been seen as problematic for reasons ranging from the inability of citizens to integrate and forge a common course to the lack of belonging fostered by visionless, selfish leadership. Most of these concerns have been triggered by the question of leadership performance and the idea of the state as failed. This article, however, investigates the processes by which actors—state and non-state—make and remake the state. By so doing, it seeks to achieve three aims: to expand domains of power and oppression beyond state apparatuses, to investigate mechanisms of resistance and agency among the oppressed, and to unveil the relationship between play and power within, but not limited to, the political class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the Modern Language Association conference of the African Studies Association, the African politics and culture and the increase of criminalization.

This article concatenates an idea of the customary as a potential site of queer agency and mode of sovereignty against the claims of international law, national constitutional law, and customary law. It tracks the current contested emergence of the right to sexual orientation and gender identity in international law alongside the ongoing conflict between the right to sexual orientation in the South African constitution and customary law. Next, it discusses recent attempts to inhabit the customary queerly in the cases/spectacles of two queer 'weddings,' one in South Africa in 2014 and one in Malawi in 2010. Finally, it turns to a compromised historical and cultural archive in the imagining of the customary as a source of new political and sexual imaginaries and as a site of circumscribed community self-determination through the possibility of the appeal to multiple authorities beneath and above the reach of the law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reflects on the African diaspora heritage and its civilization. It mentions that Africans are like dehumanization of Atlantic slave trade and which reflects the Africa irony. It states that Africa is facing several problems including drought, incurable diseases, famine, extreme poverty and savagery, and results in abnormal and condemned death of Africans.

Previous studies in Yoruba oral poetry have largely focused on Oyo, Egba, and Egbado in the Northwest, giving little attention to other areas of Yorubaland, including Ondo and Ikale, among other parts in the Southeast. Furthermore, the forms on which these studies concentrated, mostly chants, are invariably cultic and of a restricted spread. The more general, non-cultic forms, cutting across the vocal patterns of Yoruba poetry, are less frequently investigated where they are investigated at all. The consequence is that they are becoming extinct due to social modernity that is driven, on the one hand, by a combination of new spirituality and westernization and, on the other hand, by neglect in the academy. This is the point at which this study seeks entry, focusing on the less-investigated forms of indigenous songs that are performed at the birth of a child or during child-naming ceremonial rites in Southeast Yorubaland. This genre of traditional songs is rooted in Yoruba philosophy and poetry and constitutes the life-spring of popular, neo-traditional music like juju, fuji, waka, and highlife. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 21st century has seen an outpouring of works by African women writers and many of them have been unabashedly feminist. These works have one thing in common: they tell of bodies in pain and they provoke pertinent ethical questions in that regard. This article examines Chika Unigwe's novel, On Black Sisters' Street, and argues that it belongs to the new generation of African women's writing that recasts feminism as a moral issue of our times. The novel draws attention to some of the central issues of feminism: rights and dignities of the body of woman. In so doing, it establishes women's rights as fundamental human rights that have to be addressed in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]