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This article deals with the interaction of Oromo's oral literature with written poetry. The main objective is to indicate the way different types of oral literature elements are adapted to written poetry. Data were collected through qualitative methods such as document analysis, interviews, and group discussions and were analyzed qualitatively. Types of Oromo oral literature like a proverb, oral narrative, oral poetry, and riddles are adapted into written poetry by different authors. The interaction forms a bridge between the oral literary culture and written literature enabling both to complimentarily develop Oromo literature. As Richard M. Dorson states, "Oral literature can and frequently does enter into written literature. A new generation of African novelists... strews the proverbs of their native languages throughout their fiction" (2). The intermixing of African orality and written literary works makes literature closer to culture and societal life. These connections sustain the life of oral literature in written literature, on the one hand, and enable written literature to aesthetically communicate the culture, history, norms, and beliefs of a group of people who share it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing examples from pioneering, established, and emerging African writers' works, this article advocates an enrichment of global literature through Western and African writers' and critics' acknowledgement and celebration of the existence of a plurality of literary canons. It limns the Africanization of global literature and the globalization of African literature by arguing that African literature has unduly suffered from biased comparisons and subsequent denigrations by Western critics, who often uncritically dub Western literature the canon that needs to be sheepishly emulated by African writers who wish to enjoy global or universal acclaim. The article concludes that both global and African literatures would be enormously fecundated if their writers and critics were to acknowledge the existence of regional canons and masterpieces, thereby encouraging literary communities to nurture and celebrate their own canons and masterpieces, alongside the canons and masterpieces of other societies, in a spirit of creative complementarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Notwithstanding that any allusion to ghosts raises eyebrows, the term congruently evokes metaphysical and existential questions, concepts, and paradigms: death, hauntings, exorcism, healing, and mourning. It may speak to traumatic events—manifested spectrally—that leave an imprint on the psyche. The expression "to lay the ghost to rest" alludes to hauntings and processes of exorcism and healing. This article investigates how these processes condition and define identity politics in the Black and transatlantic world. It taps into contemporary African literature in an attempt not only to map out the literary and social functions of ghosts—as metaphors for historical traumas—and their impact on discursive identity formation but also to probe the role of mourning in healing the haunted. It calls for a critical and sustained evaluation and even denunciation of the historical and traumatic events of slavery and colonialism to avoid a repeat, for the benefit of humanity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an overview of the current status of Abdulrazak Gurnah in Chinese literary and academic circles. Although Gurnah won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, recognition and translation of his works in China are still in their infancy. Gurnah is regarded as an expert in postcolonial literature in China and is frequently cited in related research articles. However, it was not until 2013 that some of his short stories were officially translated into Chinese, and none of his ten novels have been translated into Chinese so far. Research on Gurnah in China has only provided brief descriptions of his literary works or reviewed the status of his research in China and internationally. After Gurnah won the Nobel Prize, newspaper reports and research articles focused on his role as an immigrant and diasporic writer, triggering an upsurge in recognition of his importance. It is hoped that translations of Gurnah's works in China can be promoted to enrich people's understanding of African and postcolonial literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes as its starting-point observations made by Lindsey Green-Simms in her paper "The Emergent Queer." Following an exploration of the term "emergent," the paper addresses the fact that, as homophobic legislation has become entrenched in the majority of African countries, more and more LGBTQ+-themed writing is emerging from or on the continent. There follows some documentation on the experience of LGBTQ+ writers such as Jude Dibia and Logan February and on the advantages to these writers of expatriation. Turning to the literature itself, coverage of the creative corpus is not comprehensive. The author has not, for example, had a chance to consider the 2013 volume Queer Africa: New and Collected Fiction , edited by Karen Martin and Makhosozana Xaba. But the central task of the paper is not to account for the relevant creative writing, but to focus on the body of critical work that addresses this and on texts that explore the historical and sociological context in which the creative corpus has been produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Recent scholarly publications on African literature discuss the African environment and the need to "naturalize" it as if the continent's environment is not or has not been "natural." By looking at only recent written African literature and not studying African oral literatures, the works on environmentalism have missed important parts of what the African creative mind has done before later postcolonial writers started. It is this gap that this essay on udje, an African oral poetic genre, is used to fill. This essay looks at how African oral poets made use of land that embraces bush/forests and water with its resources to express the congenial relationship between human and nonhuman beings. The physical environment becomes a repository of tropes to express human relationships and existential ideas. Oral literatures such as udje expressed a complementarity that newer literary works lack and so should be studied for a holistic environmental condition and solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Namwali Serpell's The Old Drift (2019) is decidedly about bodies of varied shapes and sizes, with beauty and without, bodies with the most enchanting and peculiar conditions, feverish bodies, withering in the throes of disease. Even commerce and enterprise in the novel are largely predicated on bodies; bodies that dig trenches and die in dams, economies that revolve around the scalps of women. In its presentation of bodies that operate and interact in ways that are as complex as the bodies themselves, it raises questions about how we read and consider women's bodies in African literature. This essay is a reflection on the discursive agency of the bodies of Sibilla, Agnes, and Matha—the novel's grandmothers. In particular, it contends with their dialectics, paradoxes, and fragmented nature of these bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article calls for original, unpublished manuscripts for submission to Research in African Literatures, emphasizing adherence to specific guidelines such as length limitations, language preferences, submission format, style requirements following the MLA Style Manual.

Migration has never before occupied such a prominent place in African cultural production as it does today. Yet, notwithstanding an increasing focus on intra-African migration in the social sciences, literary migration scholarship has largely focused on African migration to the West, as the growing body of studies on outward-oriented Afropolitan migration novels indicates. In this paper, I examine how the Afropolitan consciousness that structures South-North migration novels is reframed in literature of continental migration and mobility in post-Marikana South Africa. While the themes of xenophobia and migration have emerged as central preoccupations in South African literature from the early 2000s onward, there has been a shift in literary production more recently with the publication of a range of works by African diasporic writers in South Africa. Drawing on Ekow Duker's Yellowbone (2019), Rémy Ngamije's The Eternal Audience of One (2019), and Sue Nyathi's The Gold Diggers (2018), I argue that these texts interrogate South Africa's complex relationship to "Africanness" and forge new pathways for continental dialogue that allow us to resituate South African-based writing within larger debates in contemporary African literary studies. This category of intra-African diasporic fiction calls into question simplifying binaries of outward, Western-oriented African writing and locally produced popular, yet internationally disregarded, texts (Harris). Rather, it scrutinizes the idea of "Africa" in global literary circuits from the position of intra-African diasporic subjectivities. Drawing attention to the long history of intra-African mobilities, the cross-continental thrust in many of these works also productively speaks to recent scholarly efforts to reframe migration studies in ways that insist on the de-exceptionalization of migration and the breakdown of binary formulations of migrant and non-migrant identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines three post-apartheid literary texts in relation to the student movements known as Fallism, which came into public awareness in South Africa in the years 2015–17. Firstly, I argue that two novels, Room 207 (2006) by Kgebetli Moele and Unimportance (2014) by Thando Mgqolozana, foreshadow the ways in which Fallism would become leaderless through internal critique of cisgender heterosexual masculinity. Using Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Assembly (2017), the essay places debates about gender and leaderless movements in an international frame, before making the argument that Fallism morphed in and out of being a leaderless movement under pressures of discourse on gender. I then examine a play, The Fall (2016), which is a chronicle of Fallism created by a collective of "former students," to elaborate on debates about gender that resulted in Fallism becoming leaderless. In conclusion, the essay considers the significance of Fallism as a movement that broke with prior epistemologies while simultaneously building on struggles of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thando Mgqolozana's Unimportance traces one night in the life of a student on the verge of being elected Student Representative Council (SRC) president of the University of the Western Cape (UWC). Troublingly, though, the protagonist, Zizi, has physically and verbally abused his girlfriend, Pamodi, and he now fears the imminent revelation of this news. But through the course of one night, Zizi undergoes a seemingly dramatic transformation. Where for much of the narrative he is willing to go to great lengths to ensure that what he has done to Pamodi is not revealed to others, by the end of the story he himself discloses his actions to the student body in the form of a speech. He does so because he comes to the conclusion that he lacks integrity and must act to restore it in himself, even if it costs him his political career. In order to do so, Zizi will renounce the "spectacular" political world for the "ordinary" world of people. In this article, I explore the complexity of the vision of renewal (of Zizi and more broadly of South African politics) that Zizi provides and argue that his development is fundamentally flawed because it is premised on the notion of a personal sense of self that is separate and distinct from the social order. I therefore show that it is inevitable that his change of character does not correlate with a meaningful alteration of his relationship to and ideas on women. Instead, I contend that the novel actually is quite critical of Zizi's so-called transformation precisely because of its limited invocation of responsibility. By way of contrast, I discuss the #RememberKhwezi protest of 2016 and focus on the ways in which it confronted then-President Jacob Zuma, his party, and the wider South African public with their complicity with gender-based violence. What most interests me, finally, is the potential of a South African literature that, like Unimportance , moves beyond ideas of personal culpability and agency in order to explore power and its effects in complex and transformative ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shines a spotlight on the 21st-century growth of published travel books and blogs by black South Africans, with a focus on the 2013–20 period. It concerns itself with the publication of black South African travelogues of various kinds during the tumultuous post-transition years of the century's second decade, marked in extremis by the Marikana massacre. The period gave rise to diverse black literary-cultural forms, including travel texts with their spatial explorations and searching meditations. Through a survey of popular black post-2012 travelogues, many by women, I explore how the texts pursue spatial horizons and probe the parameters of the nation, continent, and world. The article engages with South Africa's heightened historical and contemporary contexts of racialized mobility and border tightening against which to examine impetuses and articulations of boundary-traversing black travel. Its dual focus is on travelogues that venture across the African continent and on those that cover the length and breadth of South Africa, if taking in some trips beyond. It engages with works by Sihle Khumalo, Zukiswa Wanner, Lerato Mogoatlhe, Niq Mhlongo, Lesego Malepe, Fikile Hlatshwayo, and the Black Project Children of Post-Apartheid South Africa collective. On one level, the travelogues are concerned with claiming the map and the page, centering black travel subjectivities. On another level, the texts evaluate and calibrate the extent to which post-apartheid, post-Marikana South Africa has "traveled" in relation to its fraught past and how it is faring in relation to imagined futures. As the travelogues reach and breach South Africa's borders, they draw on senses of distance—spatial and temporal—to reflect on individual lives, national trajectories, and considerations beyond. The article thus attends to how the travelogues explore what black South African freedoms mean, what it is to be black and on the move in 21st-century contexts, and how questions of the nation and other identifications push and pull in space, as well as in time. In sum, the article argues that the travelogues test concepts of freedom through negotiating and narrating mobility in and beyond contemporary South Africa with all its instabilities, contradictions, and hopes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers Sello K. Duiker's two novels Thirteen Cents (2000) and The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001) as precursors of recent literary trends in the South African post-transitional period. It makes an argument that these two novels anticipate the recent preoccupation with utopian idealism as a response to the challenges of the post-transitional postapartheid dispensation. To this day these texts remain unrivaled in their comprehensive meditation and elaboration on utopian idealism through their depiction of varied utopian paradigms, from singularity of pastoral solitude in Thirteen Cents to multiplicity of different monastic enclaves in The Quiet Violence of Dreams. These narratives not only pay tribute to utopian idealism through a depiction of its varied forms, but they are also a critique about its limitations and pitfalls. Hence, the narratives also foreground apocalyptic demise of the world as an alternative narrative resolution that competes with utopianism as the final and decisive panacea to the social imperfections of the postapartheid dispensation. In conclusion the paper argues that both Duiker's texts are presciently prophetic not only about what is to come but also what needs to be done. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The creative and critical work of the South African-born, Scottish-resident writer and public intellectual Zoë Wicomb (b. 1948) has spanned the sociocultural epochs we now label "transitional," "post-transitional," and perhaps even "post-post-transitional" in South African literary historiography. Her work has repeatedly explored collective political inheritances refracted through the consciousness of characters who are writers (or writers manqué), from Frieda in the linked stories of her debut, You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), to the academic Mercia Murray in October (2014), via the unnamed narrator-amanuensis of David's Story (2000) and several writercharacters in the stories collected in The One That Got Away (2008). Wicomb's fictions repeatedly cast projects of writing as problematically complicit acts of witnessing that require readers to consider what is occluded from foundational narratives—whether these be racial or ethnic, parochial or cosmopolitan, or even anti- or decolonial. The author's range of reference has always looked to the future and beyond the borders of South Africa, as much for the trajectories of her characters as for the intertextual allusions with which the works engage. Wicomb's most recent novel, Still Life (2020), revisits many of these preoccupations, although predictably with a twist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies of contemporary South African writing have remarked on the challenges that have come with naming the time and place, and thus the interpretive framework, in which this writing could be situated today. In part, this is because the past remains the point of reference and the foundational moment for both the writing and the studies of it in the present. Moreover, it is not a singular and absolute past that has shaped the present, but a multiplicity of contending senses of the past. Another reason for the challenge could lie in the nature of the time itself, in its relation to space and events. This is especially so when the time seems, as Hamlet says of his own time, "out of joint" (Hamlet , 1.5.195–96). Besides marking particular historical sensibilities and trajectories—they are all conspicuous by their sense of time as moving inexorably forward, even though what has actually been said about South African literature under these terms suggests a more complex reality—the terms "post-apartheid," "transition," "post-transition," "post-post-apartheid," "post-anti-apartheid," "post- Marikana," and others that have served at various times to give the present shape and meaning are indicative of the groping for fitting calibrations of our times. Nevertheless, they have had something to say about what is otherwise a "dizzyingly heterogeneous corpus" of "postapartheid South African literature" (de Kock 1). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines the ambiguous operational logic of South African literature after the Marikana massacre in 2012, while using a framework of historical hauntings and ghostly silences where the utopian and dystopian intertwine. In a context of accelerated change both locally and globally, literary patterns and trends must necessarily reflect changing cultural configurations both inside and outside borders. I trace patterns in South African literary studies after Marikana, revealing the ambiguous operational logic that encompasses the utopian with the dystopian, the personal with the political, silence with vocalization, success with failure, within a cultural framework that Njabulo Ndebele characterized as having dislocation at the heart of its structure of thinking and feeling. This framework is constantly in dialogue with "from what is before," relating to the historicized term "South African literature a priori" where the specter of the past continues to haunt the present, and where the present is no longer transitioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, an increasing number of African and Afrodescendant artists in Spain have been speaking from an in-between space defined by the experience of being perceived as the "racialized Other." Their work is characterized by a political commitment and an aim to provide visibility to their communities and (re)value their African heritage. From a cultural studies and discourse analysis perspective, I explore three diverse examples, poems by Yeison García López, a photobook by Rubén H. Bermúdez, and a documentary by Sergio Aparicio, that all imagine Afrodescendance as a shared narrative and empowering moment relating Africa and her diaspora. In their works, García López, Bermúdez, and Aparicio conceptualize Afrodescendance as a powerful source of belonging. Relating to the multitude of African/Afrodiasporic realities, they offer a decentered space of identification that enables the subject to embrace (new) networks of solidarity and, through active self-positioning, transcend an experience of marginalization characteristic of her/his diasporic condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic principles about Africa have ignored the contributions of African literature. For scholars in the social sciences, African literature has no business in economic theorizing. The role of African writers, many think, is simply to tell African stories, discuss African cultures, and address social issues within the continent. African literature goes beyond these; it contains fascinating economic projections that can support the development of a better economic model for Africa. This paper argues that African literature is a philosophical text that transcends beyond stories on African cultural heritage. Chimamanda Adichie's Americanah will serve as my primary text for analysis. In order to understand how African writers function as economic thinkers, I situate Ifemelu's blogging and Obinze's enterprising formation within the economic theory of entrepreneurship. In Mariama's hair braiding salon, I foreground Adichie's projection for vocation , and with the narrative on Edusco, I conceptualize the idea of the Igbo apprenticeship model, Igba-Odibo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates that Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani's novel I Do Not Come to You by Chance dialogues with a multiplicity of texts and discourses at literary and popular registers. It explores affiliations between African literary narratives about 419 and the popular narratives that migrate through minor and informal transnational networks of production and consumption in Africa and the diaspora. The article analyzes the textual strategies Nwaubani's novel adopts to negotiate between literary and popular publics, paying close attention, on the one hand, to the novel's entanglements with local, popular narratives and, on the other, to the strategies of literariness it takes up. The aim is to describe, in particular, the novel's intersections with and rewriting of the idioms and aesthetics so pronounced in popular texts, such as Nollywood and Ghanaian movies, as well as its playful and poignant reimagining of the tropes and forms adopted in 419 fraud emails. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fredric Jameson's theorization that postcolonial novels are necessarily characterized by their incorporation of national allegory retains cultural influence despite having been debunked multiple times. Through an analysis of two imaginative accounts of the Biafran war, this article considers the dangers of applying such a totalizing vision of postcolonial literary history. It does so through its consideration of the material conditions of publication and through articulating how literary prize culture has the effect of compounding the effect of narratological "truth" in historical fiction. In considering the anxiety of influence, stemming from the work of Chinua Achebe, it articulates the way in which Chinelo Okparanta and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie incorporate an Achebean strategy of "double consciousness" in their fiction as a means of depicting their commitment to a dialectical model of simultaneous conformity and resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reads Micere Mugo's collection My Mother's Poem and Other Songs (1994) as an illustration of self-inscription in nationalism and exile. It argues that beyond the sundry concerns articulated in the collection, an understanding of her work must begin with an acknowledgment of her place among second generation Anglophone African poets. By paying particular attention to the work's investment in orature and performance, the paper contests the reductionist critique that ascribes little poetic significance to the collection. The essay concludes that her reflection on nationalism and exile destabilizes the hegemonic construction of home as a stable category, but nevertheless projects hope for Africa as homeland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a reading of a sampling of one of the earliest examples of South African prison literature, poet-activist Dennis Brutus's "Letters to Martha," first published in Letters to Martha and Other Poems from a South African Prison in 1968. While Brutus has a reputation as a political firebrand, the article reveals the craft and poetic principles that underlie the poetry by comparing the poems with prose representations of prison life (including Brutus's own memoirs) under apartheid. The analysis focuses in particular on the manner in which Brutus "embrace[d] the status of prisoner," enabling him to speak as and on behalf of prisoners (political and nonpolitical) and developing in him a broad sympathy for prisoners worldwide criminalized by unjust laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Congolese-born French writer Alain Mabanckou is the architect and creative entrepreneur of a world literature project that unmakes the Francophone African novel into a world literature text and recalibrates the relations between literary traditions in the category of world literature. The undisciplined intertextuality of Mabanckou's Verre cassé [ Broken Glass ], the novel that propelled him onto the global literary marketplace, serves as a good example of the new geopolitics of literature that the writer envisions. These are horizontal geopolitics, along the lines of what Kenyan writer and scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o theorized, albeit in utopian fashion, as "globalectics," meaning a horizontal way of doing and reading world literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins with the assertion that world literature is in danger of becoming a closed system, whereby literature anticipates its critical reception in both its form and content. Emergent African literary forms are often excluded from the field of world literature precisely because they demand methods of reading that challenge this anticipatory logic. We refer to this emergent literature circulating in African urban spaces as "African street literature." This paper focuses on three such street forms: ephemeral print literature, flash fiction, and spoken word poetry. In all three cases, the literary form registers its situated-ness, and as such its location is co-constructive of the field of the literary text. The methodological intervention that the paper makes explores ways of reading context, material, form, and content as combined and codetermining without losing attention to the literariness of the text under examination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing interest in the middle class in Africa and the Global South has prompted new discussions of social class since 2010; however, this literature does not adequately theorize migration, despite the role that global flows play in cultivating class aspirations. Migration complicates the concept of social class as a stable identity, in that migrants usually have multiple class statuses across their lifetime and in different social fields and geographic locations. Furthermore, class remains undertheorized within the literature on African migration and migration in general, despite the fact that class-making projects are central to migrants within, into, and out of Africa. The introduction to this special issue contends that migration and social class should be considered together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although describing Achebe as "the father of African literature" is hyperbolic, it provides a figurative sense of his impact on the Anglophone African authors who followed him. Achebe's Things Fall Apart launched both a counterdiscursive dialogue with exemplars of the Western literary tradition and a number of ongoing intra-African authorial dialogues on themes including the effects of colonialism and patriarchy, the enduring value of African spirituality, the exploitation of tradition, and the place of proverbs and orality. One dialogue that merits closer attention for what it reveals about the deterioration of the social fabric is that of debt and repayment, which begins with the plight of Okonkwo's father, Unoka, and continues in Achebe's own work as well as that of Nwapa and Okri. The work of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, famously described as "the 21st-century daughter of Chinua Achebe," both continues and departs from these ongoing dialogues of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first work of Francophone African literature, Bakary Diallo's autobiographical novel Force-Bonté (1926), is generally misread as simply an homage to France, the "naive" account of an African colonial soldier. Yet Force-Bonté is neither mere homage nor nonfiction account. Rather, Diallo's volume is an attempt to reconcile the "human" egalitarian values of the republic with the hierarchical values of empire. Confronted with the paradox of a French "imperial republic" and the paradoxical condition of the African colonial soldier, Force-Bonté offers a critique of inequality that is both complicit with and critical of the French imperial project. This ambivalence is epitomized by a passage in which Diallo and his comrade debate the human exploitation of laboring horses—will communication prevent such injustice, or will it continue as long as relationships of domination remain? In its most critical moments, Force-Bonté challenges the colonial identification between "France" and "human" values, while extending those values to relations with nonhuman creatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since African Francophone bandes dessinées are a subset of print culture, their production, distribution, and consumption closely resemble that of African Francophone literature. European publishers and festivals remain crucial gatekeepers while African festivals are supported by European institutions and feature European cartoonists. Similarly, editors and well-established cartoonists often inhabit the paratextual space in many bandes dessinées , thus generating a patronage system in which African cartoonists heralded by European cultural brokers go on to validate the talent of other cartoonists. However, since the rise of such bandes dessinées occurred well after the height of Négritude and decades after the era of mega-festivals in Africa, including Léopold Senghor's FESMAN, cartoonists benefit from lessons learned by previous generations. Focusing on cartoonists' participation and performance, this article considers recent festivals to examine how such events and their byproducts reveal and challenge neocolonial trends and ideologies embedded in the global marketplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African literature is a rich source for learning about politics, specifically systems of justice. Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart), Sahle Sellassie (The Afersata), and Ousmane Sembène (God's Bits of Wood) present stories of crime and punishment in three African societies. Insights from these texts allow for a better understanding of the values that inform contemporary ideas of justice in Africa. A comparative reading of the texts challenges the dichotomous thinking that informs much of the popular and scholarly work on Africa, demanding a reimagining of the dualities of individual/community and modernity/tradition. Thus, the stories of the past help illuminate and contextualize present structures and practices, with the hope of constructing more effective, relevant, and humane systems of criminal justice in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the uses of multilingualism in Adichie's body of creative work. As against Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's stipulation that authentic African literature must be written in indigenous languages, Adichie adopts a primarily English narrative medium, while at the same time interpolating a wealth of Igbo content. In this respect her practice coincides with that of a number of other Nigerian writers ranging from Achebe to Nwaubani, but reaches beyond theirs in its variety and artistry of effect. Although this "mixing" might invite charges of market-targeted exoticism, it actually succeeds in transmitting to readers a familiarizing, rather than estranging, sense of character and conduct. Adichie's self-consciousness regarding language springs from, and rewardingly honors, the complexities of the Nigerian linguistic matrix that has fostered her talent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although his high school aptitude tests had put Keïta on the course to work as a translator, Keïta retained an interest in archeology and history. Of his meeting with Conrad through this book project, Keïta reflects, "Sometimes difficulty can lead to enrichment." "In Mande culture", Chérif Keïta explains, "it is said that your ears are older than yourself. [Extracted from the article]

The common goal of both historical and animist materialism is the re-enchantment of the world. To realize this goal, contemporary African literature must do more than simply represent the world. Its most vital role is to perform itself as a surrogate rite of re-ancestralization, one that engenders a radically expanded, trans-species spirit of relatedness. Chris Abani's 2007 novel Song for Night is an exemplary allegorization of this expansive process of re-ancestralization in that its narrator, blown apart by a landmine, must reinvent his Igbo grandfather's forgotten song of connectedness in order to rejoin the world of the ancestors. Insofar as his lyrical song for night transposes the improvised sign language of his platoon of muted minesweepers, the narrative mimes their creative resistance to the instrumentalization of human life. However, this creativity does not constitute a recovery of the human so much as a spirited affirmation of corporeal similarity, or what I term creaturely mimesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New media and African literatures are in a constant dialogue. While digital space offers new possibilities for the worldwide circulation of literature, new media formats have become important elements of intermedial writing. This essay analyzes contemporary examples of genre innovation in African romance and chick-lit novels, focusing on the use of new media forms. The concept of remediation serves as a theoretical starting point. Not only does digital space remediate previous media, but the novel in its classical book format remediates new media as well. Through a cross-reading of two novels that rely on a plot of romance —Cunie by the Togolese writer Chris-Edgar Locoh and Now Following You by the South African writer Fiona Snyckers—the forms and functions of new media in the listed texts are examined. This analysis shows that remediation allows for creative, but not necessarily subversive, genre rewriting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates over African publishing tend to circulate around long-standing arguments about the appropriate language in which to write and whether it is better (or more ethical) for writers to support local presses or to seek international publishers to promote their writing more globally. In this article, the idea of the gift economy is used to explore how one African writer's publishing practices—Lindsey Collen from Mauritius—can be interpreted as a challenge to such debates. Collen self-identifies as a storyteller (in oral and written narratives) who is gifting her narratives to her audience, which allows an exploration of her novels as more than mere commodities in the material form of published books. Instead, using John Holloway's notion of the "social flow of doing," Collen's publications are seen as only one element in a network of activity that enables the political and activist elements of her work to be foregrounded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing in on book launches hosted by publishers Kachifo in Lagos for Eghosa Imasuen's Fine Boys (2011) and by Kwani Trust in Nairobi for Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor's Dust (2013), this article conceptualizes a critical model of literary networks. Through these case studies, it explores the potential for reading literary events as 'multilayered expressive fragment(s)' (Quayson 21) through which to explore the relationships and flows out of which writers and texts are created and validated. By mapping these exchanges, it argues it is possible to make visible alternative literary geographies and show the significance of Kwani Trust and Farafina in forming the foundations of a pan-African literary network out of which the space, value, and texts of 21st-century African literature in English are being made material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the directions in which the celebrated Guinean author Tierno Monenembo's aesthetics have gone following the publication of L'Aîné des orphelins (2000) [ The Oldest Orphan, 2004], a pivotal book. It proposes an in-depth analysis of the ways in which his ensuing novels, Peuls (2004), Le Roi de Kahel (2008) [ The King of Kahel, 2010], Le Terroriste noir (2012) [ The Black Terrorist, 2015], and Les Coqs cubains chantent à minuit (2015), manifest an expansion in his range of representations and textual strategies, his tackling new types of historical silences, connecting colonial and postcolonial histories, and opening genre categorizations. The article shows how Monenembo is broadening the range of Francophone African literatures by weaving new tales of black diasporic heritage, creativity, and intellectual history that contribute to a complex and original understanding of the African presence in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After a brief introduction, the following interview with Nigerian-American writer, photographer, and cultural critic Teju Cole addresses a wide range of topics. Cole discusses his novels, social media, travel writing, politics, Lagos, photography, Beirut, and his place in multiple discourses. In terms of African literature, Cole advances the notion of 'Lumpy Sympathies,' arguing that he does not mind being associated, i.e. lumped, with Afropolitans or other groups as long as his work is not limited to a single characterization. The interview ends with a discussion on race and the expectations of writers from the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ahmed Daoudi's 1994 novel El diablo de Yudisand Montserrat Abumalham's 2001 novel ¿ Te acuerdas de Shahrazad?each employ unique narrative framings in order to create literary encounters that utilize imagined space to decenter notions of hispanidad, disrupt binaries of center/periphery, and reconceptualize literary models of transcultural expression. The current project undertakes a literary analysis of the creation of space and voice in these two works and will show how Daoudi and Abumalham structure their narrative in ways that evidence a preoccupation with transnational identities and the agency and potential of peripheral voices. Their unique fictional worlds and the employment of imaginary Thirdspaces make possible narratives that consciously reject limiting binaries. The theoretical work of Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, and Fatema Mernissi contributes to the analysis of space and alterity. Lefebvre's spatial trialectic and Soja's conceptualization of the Thirdspace serve to analyze and articulate the creative power of these two novels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Samir and Omar intend to cross the Strait of Gibraltar to reach Spain-a country that they perceive not as an illusionary 'Promised Land,' but as the only chance to ameliorate their lives. They are the only characters who have names in the play El reto del Estrecho[ The Challenge of the Strait] by the Hispano-Moroccan writer Abdelkader Benabdellatif, while all the others who share their tragic situation are condemned to anonymity, exchangeable figures representing those clandestine refugees who arrive daily at the southern coasts of what seems to become a European fortress. In the present article, I analyze the position of the play's characters, who-entering the migratory moment as singular, individual migrants-transform into a situational group formation that exceeds mere transnational movement conceptions and can best be described by applying the ambiguous concept of 'diaspora.' After examining the changes and the strategic productivity of this notion for recent contexts, the contribution focuses on three key terms closely linked to the term 'diaspora'-the conception of 'homeland,' the formation of the diasporic group itself, and the category of 'hostland'-to show how these terms are interdependent and need to be de- and reterritorialized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A critical survey of the novelistic production of Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo reveals the existence of a dialectical relationship in the conceptualization of 'home' and 'abroad,' be it as a consequence of colonialism, exile, migration, or dictatorship. Studied together, the unnamed protagonist in the first two novels of his promised trilogy titled Hijos de la tribu[ Sons of the Tribe], and Obama Ondo, the protagonist of his third novel, present intricate dimensions for examining questions relating to migration, exile, and the attendant issues of alienation, diasporic (re/de)constructions, and transcultural subject positioning, among others. With the aim of presenting perspectives from Hispanophone African literature, and broadening the scope of perspectives on debates surrounding the transnational/transmigrant subject, the diaspora, and the homeland/hostland dichotomy, this paper foregrounds the notion of 'disruptions' (Salman Rushdie) germane to the movement and deterritorialization of transnational subjects through its reflections on the writings of three key texts in Hispanophone African literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On October 1, 1990, the Rwandan Patriotic Army invaded Rwanda from Uganda, thereby launching a civil war that was to last until the end of the 1994 genocide. While a number of fictional responses to the one-hundred-day genocide have appeared since 1994, very little fiction has been written in response to the civil war itself. This article discusses two little known novels written by Rwandan authors who engage specifically with the civil war: Aimable Twagilimana's 1996 novel, Manifold Annihilation, and Anicet Karege's Sous le déluge rwandais, published in 2005. While both authors have very different relationships with the events of 1994, they paint a similar picture of Rwanda in the early 1990s, which they both experienced firsthand. Through their fictional representations of Rwanda on the eve of genocide, they challenge the ill-informed, mythologized versions of the history of Rwanda that were so widespread in 1994 and continue to this day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses African writings about religion and secularity. Topics discussed include professor of literature Edward Said's views on secular criticism, Vincent Pecora's adoption of Said's notion of secular criticism in his book "Secularization and Cultural Criticism," and philosopher Charles Taylor's book on secularity "A Secular Age."

The Conradian journey into the African interior also signified, in the Western colonial imaginary, an encounter with a seemingly incomprehensible spirituality. African spirituality was the site of excess, epitomized by darkness, frenzy, madness, superstition, and illogicality. Based on a reading of Andrea Eames's The Cry of the Go-Away Birdand Peter Godwin's Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa, this article proposes that white-authored Zimbabwean narratives written after colonialism display a wider range of attitudes toward African spirituality, which are at once multiple and ambivalent. The two narratives, appearing at least a decade after Zimbabwe's independence from white minority rule, work against the dominant 'white' fear of Christian decline and the attendant descent into spiritual darkness and enable a secondary non-secular experimentation with African spirituality. I use the core concept of horror from Heart of Darknessto treat jointly the experience among whites in Africa of encountering an 'other' faith and the literary tradition of representing such an experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern secularity is sometimes taken to require an understanding of time as shapeless and open-ended. In contrast, Armah's novel Two Thousand Seasonsand Ngũgĩ's novel Matigarideploy a temporality that steers the reader's attention to a certain deliverance in the future. Rather than taking this teleology as the rejection of secularity, I propose a notion of secularity derived from the North African Aurelius Augustine's fourth-century The City of God. Like these two novels, Augustine's work was disparaged as 'manichean' because it seems to deny human freedom by dividing up individuals, institutions, and eras too starkly. However, Augustine's dualism complements a notion of the saeculum-the current age-as a time of intractable mixedness. In embracing key aspects of manicheanism without its morally exclusivist and politically separatist vision of the present, Augustine anticipates and illuminates the interventions by Armah and Ngũgĩ into the problem of postcolonial time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

José Eduardo Agualusa's My Father's Wivescelebrates a liberation of the strictures usually underpinning identity construction, by both affirming those notions and simultaneously undercutting their validity. The novel proposes a textual and cultural celebratory promiscuousness as way of reimagining a Creole identity that goes beyond the customary dual poles of Portugal and Angola to embrace most of Southern Africa as well as Asia. The contradictions spawned by this strategy open up a gap that is filled with signs of excess and slippage, the result of a parodic mimicry and the failure of the paternal function at the textual and personal levels. Structured around the search for Faustino Manso and his alleged seventeen children, the discovery of his infertility empties out his paternal function and puts into doubt the Lusotropical stereotype of Creoleness. This geocultural polyphony is replicated at the textual level with the presence of an unnamed narrator-figure whose metatextual narrative serves as authorial framing for the fictional text. However, the replication of the fictional narrative within the authorial text-with some seepage of the latter into the former-again points to both mimicry and excess. This paper will argue that by emptying the two vectors structuring the text of their narrative objectives, My Father's Wivesconstitutes the doubly absent paternities of a Luandan Creole stereotype typically projected over the rest of the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]