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This article explores the theme of public transport in African literatures and aims to bridge the gap between mobilities research and African literary studies. It acknowledges the criticism that mobilities scholarship often focuses on the Global North and neglects experiences in the Global South. The article argues for a nuanced approach that considers historical and contextual specificities when studying African literary mobilities. It also emphasizes the importance of shedding light on local, intra-African forms of mobility and challenges the binary distinction between formal and informal public transportation. The article concludes by discussing the limited attention given to public transport in African literary studies and highlights the need to study its literary dimensions. The special issue of the journal further explores the politics and representations of public transport mobilities in African literatures, addressing topics such as accessibility, class, race, and the role of public transport in post-colonial societies. The studies emphasize the interconnected nature of public transport mobilities and call for more research in this area with a broader regional scope. [Extracted from the article]

This article identifies and explores an inciting incident in two pre-apartheid South African novels: the trope of an 'arrival from abroad'. This trope centres on a character arriving by train from a place figured as foreign, whether that is Cape Town or London, to the rural South African setting of the story, bringing ideas of interracial togetherness with them that challenge local racial hierarchizations. Two novels are used as case studies, one from the beginning of the 20th century – Perceval Gibbon's Margaret Harding (1911) – and one written on the eve of apartheid – Peter Abrahams's The Path of Thunder (1948). The traveller from abroad is either a black South African who has been educated in Europe or Cape Town and arrives home to effect change, or the traveller is a white character from Europe whose values are pitted against those of white South Africans. In both cases, the 'arrival from abroad' is a destabilizing force to the local community, bringing often unwelcome ideas from outside. Together, Gibbon's and Abrahams's novels allow me to explore the interrelations between the mobility of ideas from one place to another, ideologies of race, the figure of the outsider, and train travel in South African literature from the first half of the 20th century. Comparing Gibbon and Abrahams enables me to trace differences and continuities over time and in diverse uses of the trope. This article argues that the 'arrival from abroad' trope is used to embody a notion of mobile ideas at a time when trains served to shift both goods and people to radical effect on society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates how the recognition and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities influence small business performance via interactions with firm-level innovation capability and learning orientation. We frame the study within the maritime-sector context and seek to contribute to the understanding of how the interplay between opportunity recognition, exploitation, innovation capability and learning orientation affects the entrepreneurial performance of local businesses when there is a technological policy change. The study further frames its arguments from a dynamic capability perspective and tests its arguments with data from 284 local businesses operating in the Port of Tema. Findings reveal that opportunity exploitation and learning orientation as well as their interplay have a positive and significant effect on entrepreneurial performance. The study consequently presents local micro-entrepreneurial reactions to macro-level policy changes within the maritime sector – an issue that has largely remained uninvestigated in the African business literature due to maritime blindness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More powerful and influential than some smaller nations, multinational corporations exert a tremendous influence on the functioning of contemporary global society. From as far back as the dawn of capitalist modernity, proto-corporations furthered the ends of empire, bringing massive foreign populations and swathes of territory under economic and political control. This essay analyzes how recent works of sub-Saharan African fiction have conceptualized the corporation as functioning in a fundamentally imperialistic manner within the global system of neoliberal capitalism. In analyzing the novels How Beautiful We Were and Congo Inc., it considers to what extent these works see the operations of corporations within Africa as part of a long line of imperialistic exploitation of labor and resources stretching back to the days of the large European colonial empires, and to what extent these works see the machinations of the corporation as a novel socioeconomic phenomenon of our age of frenetic transnational flows of capital and information. In doing so it also asks how these novels envision possibilities of local-level resistance to these forms of corporate economic predation that threaten to stir up military conflict and despoil local ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses how the 'collective' and the 'speculative' emerge as intertwined conceptual models for imagining and concretising notions of the 'future' in contemporary African literatures. We argue that contemporary literary production from the continent is engaged in acts of conceptual and linguistic-decentring, or what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o has developed as a theory of 'globalectics' (2012). Beginning with Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor's channelling of a Pan-African collective consciousness in her keynote address to the European Conference on African Studies (2023), we move on to explore three aspects of African literary futures/isms: first, the idea of historical repair and the notion that the speculative mode often hinges on multidirectional community-making by reconfiguring the past; second, the way speculative ventures establish new material networks and readerships through South–South translation projects that themselves project speculative cartographies of connection and the revival of historical ties; third, how continental African speculative fiction disrupts the binaries between the local and the global by creating new spatial imaginaries invested in cosmological and philosophical materialities. We conclude that such a diverse focus allows us to open out the terms of our discussion to the wider implications of decolonial future-making from the perspective of a de-hierarchical, globalectically oriented view of contemporary African writing. As such, we imagine this article as an act of collaborative co-creation which is in conversation with two contemporary African writers – Novuyo Rosa Tshuma and Wole Talabi – whose works are among those discussed in the piece. Their interviews form the 'Appendix' to this article, and offer new directions for creative and critical re-negotiations of African literary futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the ways in which the interview form was deployed in the 1960s and 1970s as a means to engender and critique a pan-African anglophone literary public within the context of decolonization. In so doing, it argues that the transcribed interview becomes a troublesome signifier of the legacies of colonialism while also offering a generative means by which to constitute literary publics and models of authorship across a number of newly decolonized countries. To do so, the article draws on three collections: broadcast interviews produced by the BBC's English-language African service with host Edward Blishen; broadcast interviews produced by the London-based Transcription Centre, an organization dedicated to promoting anglophone African culture and funded by the Central Intelligence Agency-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom; and satirical interviews published over several issues of the leading little magazine of African arts and culture, Transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper problematizes the anthropocentrism that dominates critical responses to Yvonne Vera's Butterfly Burning (1998). It considers how Vera inscribes colonial issues within the landscape and emplaces nature in decolonial thought. Contrary to claims that most African writers have resisted the ecocritical paradigm, I argue that writers such as Vera exhibit an environmental consciousness. In my reading, I focalize the everyday experiences of ordinary people as they relate to nature in the wake of colonial modernity. While colonialism was dehumanizing to black people, Vera underscores the environmental injustice and capitalist phallocracy that undergirds it. The paper draws from and builds on the growing body of work on postcolonial ecocriticism, suggesting that postcolonial and ecocritical discourses can productively enrich each other in deconstructing toxic modernities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article serves to fill a theoretical lacuna in African language literary scholarship. To date there have been very few literary geographic analyses related to South African literature and there are none that deal with African language literature. The purpose and objective of this article is to apply theoretical aspects of literary geography to an isiXhosa novel, Ingqumbo Yeminyanya. This novel, written by AC Jordan is perhaps the best known and most widely read and translated novel written in isiXhosa. The authors of this article aim to contribute to postcolonial studies by reading the novel of A.C. Jordan spatially, using Hones's conceptual framework of the novel as a spatial event, considering the complex relationship between the author, the text, and the readers. The background of the author and the historical circumstances that surround the writing of the novel are also explored to see how Jordan's own spaces are reflected in the novel through characterization and other techniques. The core focus of the article lies in the descriptions and relationship to real or imaginary or in-between spaces and places in relation to the research question, namely how space and places are depicted in Ingqumbo Yeminyanya, as part of the spatial event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a special issue of the Journal of African Cultural Studies that focuses on the cultural expressions of universities in Africa, specifically in Francophone African countries. The articles in this issue explore the diverse forms of campuses, including love stories, student experiences, and protests. The issue also addresses the use of French, the socio-political implications of institutionalized Francophonie, and economic and military injustices. The special issue is part of the AFRIUNI project, which critically examines universities and their role in addressing present and future challenges. The articles in this issue cover topics such as the teaching of literature during the COVID-19 pandemic, student experiences, and the production of knowledge in postcolonial contexts. The text also discusses the role of art in university education in Benin, highlighting efforts to create a structured arts and culture program at Abomey-Calavi University. It emphasizes the need for multilingual and pluriversal knowledge production and addresses the financial barriers and linguistic dominance that hinder the circulation of academic knowledge in Africa. [Extracted from the article]

This essay explores Okpewho's Call Me By My Rightful Name (2004) and its unique contributions to the discourse of the old African diaspora consciousness. It examines how Okpewho harnesses the extraordinary element of existential tensions as a significant strategy to reconnect the old African diaspora to their ancestral community in Africa. Showing how this novel is similar, different and transcendent to other old African diaspora narratives, I argue in this piece that Okpewho's mastery and use of the Ifá divinity that functioned as a reminder, an emotional therapy and a tour guide to reconnect the old African diaspora to their African ancestry, is a critical way to underscore the "Nigerianness" of such a contemporary neo-slave narrative. Okpewho is an important African diaspora writer whose works have been largely ignored and by interpreting his creative ingenuity as regards the old/new African diasporic experiences, I bring a fresh contribution to the discourse of African literature in the diaspora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental education aims to tackle the diminishing engagement between human beings and the natural environment, identify possible remedies, and facilitate positive transformations. Within the context of the early twenty-first century, there has been a growing acknowledgment, both at a worldwide level and particularly among nations of the Global South, regarding the importance of environmental education in understanding, mitigating, and resolving diverse environmental challenges that exist in different communities. Environmental literature plays a significant role in facilitating environmental education. Stories are not only enjoyable for readers but, in their unique ways, build on the emotional connections necessary for enabling understanding. The present article examines Bessie Head's first novel, When Rain Clouds Gather (Edinburgh: Pearson, 1968) as a compelling work of environmentalism. In delineating the detrimental outcomes resulting from Western concepts of development and colonial intervention in African ecosystems, the novel emphasises the need to question Western epistemic hegemony. It inculcates critical thinking, leading to an understanding of the deeper politics of environmental degeneration in Africa. This article focuses on how the novel exhibits a forward-thinking quality by highlighting the necessity to decolonise and demonstrating methods and narratives around growth and transformation. These are too often assumed to be universal. Finally, the article establishes that literary works of this nature accentuate engagement with indigenous stories, perceptions, and knowledge forms to achieve sustainability in contemporary times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turkey is labelled an emerging middle power and aspiring to play a more visible role in world affairs with Africa as one prominent region where Turkey expanded its diplomatic presence. Turkey's growing presence in Africa unfolds along hard and soft diplomatic endeavours with each avenue featuring its own objectives and set of policy instruments to pursue Turkish foreign policy goals. Overall, the countries featuring within Turkey's Africa policy drive include several coastal states like Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, Nigeria, and Libya. While Libya represents an aggressive Turkish response, other coastal states like Somalia, Sudan and Eritrea receive security sector support encased in softer capacity building terms. On balance, demarcating and describing the maritime and naval avenues of Turkey's diplomacy and how Africa features in this shift are underplayed in the growing body of literature on Turkey's African agenda. To this end, Turkey's security objectives, the use of its military assets, and mixing soft and hard diplomatic instruments offer scope to also explore the maritime security, and naval diplomacy avenues of Turkey's interests in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jeanne-Marie Jackson's article in Safundi discusses the African Novel of Ideas, exploring the intersection of philosophy and narrative in African literature. The text delves into the philosophical contemplation and social realism depicted in African writers' works, highlighting the nuanced approaches to individualistic, abstract reasoning in the context of collective liberation. Jackson's book aims to showcase the historical possibilities for philosophy's integration into African literary texts, emphasizing the importance of balancing continuity and transformation in truth-seeking practices. [Extracted from the article]

Literary conversations on African philosophy and literature often mirror two sides of the same epistemic dilemma in African intellectual history. On the one hand, questions emerge in negotiating the ontology or being of African philosophy or literature with regard to its substantive value. On the other hand, are epistemic anxieties on legitimation of stories told about Africa or in Africa often couched as residual epistemology to the Western intellectual gaze. The short review herein wades into these challenges and questions, showing how Jeanne-Marie Jackson, in an intriguing work delineates new perspectives that unmasks historical mis-presentations of the African novel while forging a new direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tries to interrogates the way in which the demands for the African novel of ideas can be fulfilled on an African historical fiction. It uses thesis of Professor Jean-Marie Jackson's seminal book, The African Novel of Ideas as its substructure. Toward the end it gives a brief global summary of the origins of historical fiction and discusses the status quo of the Southern African historical fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the complex relationship between reason, cultural plurality, and individuality in the context of decolonization, philosophy, and literature. It discusses different perspectives on decoloniality theory, liberalism, and individualism, highlighting the role of African literature in providing alternative viewpoints. The author, Lucy Allais, emphasizes the importance of engaging with diverse philosophical and literary traditions to challenge assumptions about Western values and to promote a more inclusive understanding of reason and individuality. Through a nuanced analysis, the article encourages readers to reconsider traditional narratives and explore the potential for collaboration between philosophy and literature in addressing complex philosophical questions. [Extracted from the article]

The article "Their ideas are imprisoned in action": reflections on The African Novel of Ideas" discusses the novel of ideas as a form, contrasting it with the prevailing emphasis on experience and personal relations in fiction. The author, Matthew Taunton, explores the critical judgments that have marginalized novels of ideas, drawing on examples from British literature and culture. Taunton highlights the importance of philosophical debate in African fiction, challenging essentialist views of African orality and emphasizing the value of discursive and essayistic ideas in novels. The article encourages readers to reconsider the literary merit of novels that engage with ideas in diverse and complex ways. [Extracted from the article]

The article "African literature of ideas and the prospect of collective individualism" by Darlington Chibueze Anuonye explores the philosophical orientation of African literature, focusing on works like Tendai Huchu's The Hairdresser of Harere and Abdulrazak Gurnah's Pilgrims Way. It delves into how African writers embed their ideas and philosophies in their works, reflecting their commitment to human liberation and cultural heritage. The article also discusses the concept of collective individualism, exemplified by characters like Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Daud in Gurnah's novel, who challenge racism and colonial legacies. Ultimately, the text raises questions about broadening the philosophical scope of African literature beyond formal philosophy to encompass diverse perspectives on freedom and human agency. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the character Samba Diallo from Cheikh Hamidou Kane's novel "L'Aventure ambiguë," focusing on his pursuit of philosophy in France and the fatal consequences it leads to upon his return to Senegal. It also explores similar themes in other African novels, particularly the concept of philosophical suicide and failure in intellectual pursuits. The analysis by Jeanne-Marie Jackson in "The African Novel of Ideas" challenges traditional critical perspectives on African literature, emphasizing the importance of intellectual projects and philosophical exploration in literary works that may not conform to mainstream expectations. [Extracted from the article]

Applied pesticides end up in non-target environments as complex mixtures. When bioavailable, these chemicals pose a threat to living organisms and can induce oxidative stress (OS). In this article, attention is paid to OS and the physiological role of the antioxidant defense system. South African and international literature was reviewed to provide extensive evidence of pesticide-induced OS in non-target organisms, in vivo and in vitro. Although in vitro approaches are used internationally, South African studies have only used in vivo methods. Considering ethical implications, the authors support the use of in vitro bioassays to screen environmental matrices for their OS potential. Since OS responses are initiated and measurable at lower cellular concentrations compared to other toxicity endpoints, in vitro OS bioassays could be used as an early warning sign for the presence of chemical mixtures in non-target environments. Areas of concern in the country could be identified and prioritized without using animal models. The authors conclude that it will be worthwhile for South Africa to include in vitro OS bioassays as part of a battery of tests to screen environmental matrices for biological effects. This will facilitate the development and implementation of biomonitoring programs to safeguard the South African environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conclusion The awarding of the 2021 Booker Prize to Damon Galgut's novel I The Promise i must be seen in the context of the long and controversial history of the Prize's engagement with postcolonial literature. He had been nominated for what is undoubtedly one of the world's most prestigious literary prizes three times previously, yet Damon Galgut still reported feeling a touch of imposter syndrome when his most recent novel, I The Promise i , was awarded the Booker Prize in 2021 and he joined the prestigious ranks of South African laureates Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee (Eloff [1]). I would argue that Galgut does much the same in I The Promise i , simultaneously wishing to conform to the criteria of what is considered "acceptable" South African literature in the hope of commercial success, whilst metatextually holding up a proverbial mirror to his metropolitan readership to critique their enjoyment of the "commercialized" version of South Africa and its people that the novel serves up for them. [Extracted from the article]

Displacement has been a major theme in African literature and, arguably, a central preoccupation of African diasporic fiction on migration. This article examines three intertwined levels of displacement in NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names (London: Vintage, 2013). The first level is the internal displacement suffered by Zimbabweans in the aftermath of Operation Murambatsvina in 2005, which was purportedly aimed at cleansing urban areas of rubbish. The second level concerns the resultant emigration of Zimbabweans to other southern African countries to escape poverty. The third is exemplified by the illegal emigration of Bulawayo's protagonist, Darling, to the USA. I argue that the three levels of displacement are rooted in the abjection induced by political, economic, and social disintegration. The analysis reveals why the characters in We Need New Names cannot enjoy the Afropolitan identity of characters in the works of diasporic authors like Taiye Selasi and Ngozi Chimamanda Adichie. The analysis counters Helon Habila's criticism of Bulawayo's novel as "poverty porn" and adds context to the discourse on migration, both legal and illegal, within and out of Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the multifaceted process of queer subjectivity (re)formation that queer Maghrebi subjects undergo as they (re)interpret their relationship to and orientation toward social norms, masculinity, and the spaces of exchange they inhabit. Bahaa Trabelsi's Une vie à trois [A Life of Three] (2000) assembles an intricate literary text to signal the inequalities many non-normative or queer Maghrebi subjects encounter via conservative discourse. This article understands Trabelsi's work as a critique of masculinity and society, in which she does reconfigure masculinity to develop a plural form, which is to say, "masculinities," to go beyond singular, essentialized interpretations of the concept. To engage with Trabelsi's apparent critique of Moroccan society, this article postulates that the several narratives in the novel assemble figures of revolt, which involve subjects purposefully eliding societal pressures, therefore, situating themselves as "others" within their communities to maintain agency and individual subjecthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In African philosophical literature, and especially in Afro-communitarianism, there are discussions about the value of the relationship an individual has with her respective community. By community, reference is made to the metaphysical holistic view of community which includes all beings in nature. But since the article deals with gender, which is a social construction, most of the arguments appeal to a narrower version of community, that of human beings. Therefore, discussions about "value" refer to the value that is given to the relationship that surpasses any individual value, and it applies or appeals to human beings. One implication of this understanding and the prioritisation of the relationship is that identity is something that is conferred by this sort of relationship. In this article, we argue that this way of understanding "identity" from an Afro-communitarian world view has something to offer in understanding or conceptualising gender(ed) identity(ies). The assumption is that gender identity will be understood as socially conferred and most importantly, one that takes community as essential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African Literature has gone through many phases: from its being denied a literary category to becoming Third World, Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literature respectively and to its latter categorization as a "Global Anglophone Literature" subsumed under an overarching "Area Studies" American academic quota. This essay examines these shifts between categorizations and focalizes the politics, both professional and disciplinary, that undergirds such unstable and sliding nomenclature. It proceeds to tease out, within a postcolonial framework, the Euro-American empire-building imperatives of such naming. While some of these questions are not necessarily completely new, what is unique here is that this reflection concludes by suggesting Afropolitanism as a possible alternative discourse for reading postcolonial African and African diasporic culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article ostensibly underscores the interpretation of gender, structural inequalities and violent identity-interplay in selected novels in Zimbabwe. It vigorously examines the effects of the state of disaster on Zimbabwean's post 2017 experience. A plethora of themes ranging from the entangled past, stunted memories of the present were exemplified in the article. The paper epitomises how trends in the novels emanate from African literature, with specific reference on the fictional writings in Zimbabwe delineating and it depicts social issues of both the past and present which have haunted Zimbabwean social constructs. After Zimbabwe's independence on 18 April 1980, Zimbabweans anticipated euphoria that independence would usher in the desired peace. The political ruling class from the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) promised a strong political framework and commitment to the course of women's liberation. The achieved independence did not bring about the anticipated freedom but promoted the dichotomy among women and men and also, that of Black and White that had earlier preoccupied the defunct Rhodesia. Relying mainly on female novel writers, the paper hinges on Tsitsi (1988) Nervous Conditions, Vera's (2002) The Stone Virgins and other works in passing to delineate trends in the constructions of characters' responses to identities created by masculine stereotypes. This article explores Butler's theory of performativity to argue that there is an ambiguous link between the past and present, the depiction of gender violence and structural inequalities in the postcolonial Zimbabwean literary space which were largely demonstrated in Zimbabwean novels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay I read Bessie Head's novel When Rain Clouds Gather from a broadly eco-materialist perspective, arguing that the social transformation of the protagonist, Makhaya Maseko, is fundamentally bound up with the text's nuanced descriptions of the physical environment. Charting Maseko's departure from the toxic milieu of apartheid South Africa, and his gradual process of settling into a new lifeworld in the village of Golema Mmidi, I argue that his familiarization with the material grounds of life in a new clime provides an elemental coherence that enables the structuring of his personal narrative into a meaningful system. Through a series of close readings, I demonstrate that the novel's expression of a composite ecological being is also reflected in the stylistic idiosyncrasies of Head's writing. Throughout, I draw on Head's correspondence, and on biographical aspects of her life, to situate Makhaya's journey against a larger theme of struggling to make a home in the face of social alienation and the bureaucratic indifference of the nation-state. Reference to the work of anthropologists like Tim Ingold and Hannah Knox situates my argument in the context of a larger ontological move in debates around the relationship between nature and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite geo-political distances, the Beat Generation writers, and individuals or groups within Polish and South African literature of the period 1948–1968, shared similar artistic outlooks, literary concerns, and thematic as well as formal experimentation in response to their socio-political situations and mainstream national literatures. In addition, there is evidence to suggest that they sought out each other's work, despite language barriers and censorship, and that several points of confluence can be identified. This article focuses on five significant encounters or movements and considers how these might be illustrative of broader issues within transnational studies of these groups and writers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to articles in the issue is presented on topics including literature and music, French rap music, and Bahaa Trabelsi's queer Maghrebi literature.

Early research on fatherhood in South Africa emphasize the prevalence of absent fathers and the detrimental impact thereof on families. More recent research on fatherhood, however, has shown a shift in fathering practices, where contemporary men engage in more involved and complicated fathering practices, which include nurturing and caring activities. Although local studies have begun to identify nurturing and caring activities in fathering, they have not comprehensively explored these caring ideas and practices. Furthermore, there has been a call for research providing more contextual knowledge on fathering practices across diverse groups of fathers locally and globally. This study, therefore, explored the ideas and practices of paternal care in a group that is especially under-represented in South African fatherhood literature. We draw on the data of fifteen families, each consisting of a father-figure, a mother-figure and an adolescent child. These 45 individuals were interviewed separately. The thematic analysis of participants' accounts revealed complicated notions of paternal care. Although more contemporary caring ideas and practices of fathering behaviour were reported, these caring masculinity ideas remained intertwined with traditional hegemonic masculinity ideals. Nevertheless, these findings indicate that traditional ideas about fatherhood and masculinity have expanded to incorporate more nurturing, caring and expressive qualities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the various ways in which food is introduced into three novels by the Zimbabwean writer, Tsitsi Dangarembga (Nervous Conditions, The Book of Not and This Mournable Body). A taxonomy of the different ways in which food and meals are used in fiction is presented, and then applied to these novels. Food is employed as a means of setting a scene for the heroine, Tambudzai: living in the rural impoverished homestead of her childhood; in the mission with her headmaster uncle, Babamukuru, and his family; in the Young Ladies' College of the Sacred Heart and finally in the offices where Tambudzai works in later life. Food is also used to illustrate the relationships between various characters, to develop the characters, and to represent the relationships and deracination created by the disjunctions between a colonial education and the traditional African cultures of Zimbabwe. Tambudzai's cousin, Nyasha, suffers from bulimia. The article considers some possible readings of the disorder in this context. For example, is Dangarembga's character a "native" in "a nervous condition" as a result of colonialism, a condition suggested by Frantz Fanon, or does it reflect the oppressive patriarchy represented here by her father, Babamukuru? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study highlights how constructs of importance to management in Africa – ambidextrous leadership and team learning – can extend or modify our existing management theories. Adopting an exploratory design with an interpretive philosophy, this study explores how supermarket store managers engage their subordinates in team learning sessions to enable their collective ambidexterity, facilitated by the presence of reflective conversations (RC) and ambidextrous human resource management (HRM) policies and practices. Based on our raw data, we develop a process-based model that shows how ambidextrous leadership behaviors can help develop team-level ambidexterity, including the supporting roles of RC and ambidextrous HRM practices in the process. This model thus seeks to motivate theoretically future ambidexterity research in Africa, as the theoretical ideas and themes in this study can be replicated and be broadly applied to future ambidexterity research on the continent. This model will, therefore, contribute to the theoretical development of African management literature and, accordingly, adds significant value to the mainstream ambidexterity literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes off from two of the angles of contention found in critical responses to Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic and subsequent Atlanticist studies: asymmetries and exclusions along gender lines, and insufficient attention to the dynamics of contemporary global capital. It examines what gets articulated when recent African short fiction is approached via a frame centered on the location of home, gendered labour, sexual and reproductive economies, and the interrelation of the domestic and capitalism. In particular, it is informed by Alexis Pauline Gumbs's counter-heuristic to Gilroy, the Black Feminine Domestic. Gumbs's attempt to make visible such a subject position and forms of labour prompts my focus on domestic workers and analogous figures, often migrant and low paid and sometimes found only at the edges of texts. I discuss Efemia Chela's 'Chicken' (2014), Chibundu Onuzo's 'Sunita' (2015), Lesley Nneka Arimah's 'Skinned' (2019), and, from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's collection The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), the stories 'Imitation,' 'The Thing Around Your Neck' and 'On Monday of Last Week.' Here the tropes of circulation and regimes of rationality identified by Gilroy find counterparts in the structuring of workforces, the reach of body and biopolitics, and discourses of national borders and migration. The lens of 'women's work' permits an intersectional shift in and beyond Black Atlantic frames and the heteropatriarchal imagination, but the selected material and preoccupations here also seek to offer another opening on debates about, and genres of, 'African' writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay traces the predominant counter-hegemonic, counter-discursive political and cultural models that obtain on either side of the Atlantic – the black Atlantic and the (pan-)Africanist. Typically read as disparate, even oppositional, competing ideologies, this essay examines the ways in which black Atlantic and Africanist thought migrate – travelling and journeying in ironic echoes and reverberations – across space and time, following similar contours that inscribe troublingly totalizing and exclusionary ideational narratives of black diaspora cultures and ontologies. Engaging the delimiting, signifying imprints and prescriptive modalities that inform and structure both theoretical models, this essay attempts to put black Atlantic and Africanist paradigms into conversation in ways that expand critical studies of black diasporic cultures, African cultures, and their intersecting relationships. In this regard, arguing that such intersectional relations can be evidenced in the migratory, border-crossing ethos and transgressive aesthetic of contemporary African diasporic literature, the essay's particular reading of Adichie's Americanah and Bulawayo's We Need New Names suggests the ways in which these texts advance an ethical imperative for more malleable, inclusive and expansive, ways of reading and re-inscribing the (black) world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines African noir as a literary sub-genre that attempts to articulate a revised and updated black Atlantic counterculture (1993). Using the framework provided by Paul Gilroy's concept of a black Atlantic model of critique, African noir is shown to be transnational and intercultural in many aspects, thereby resisting racist discourses and expanding on conceptualisations of blackness and gender. Two primary texts are selected for analysis: Mukoma Wa Ngugi's Nairobi Heat (2010) and Leye Adenle's Easy Motion Tourist (2016). In both novels, detective figures are shown to be transnational, with local, national, or ethnic affiliations and intercultural relations which enable their detection. The article mounts a two-pronged argument. Primarily, both examples of African noir are read as texts which continue the legacy of Gilroy's pioneering black Atlantic project of uncovering the cultural impact of colonialism and slavery on Africans on the continent and in the African diaspora. Secondarily, by examining the representation of female figures in the selected the texts, the article critically evaluates African noir's attempt to resist the hegemonic racial and gendered representations of classic noir. To conclude, the article considers how, through the creation of intercultural and intersectional detective trios, the novels explore new black Atlantic race and gender relations, and the potential for solidarity in the face of crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While postcolonial scholarship has long sought to decentre Europe, the cumulative effects of such work have been to fetishize and homogenize a figure of Europe. Recent scholarship has recognized the value of reading postcolonial narratives alongside the ramifications of the Cold War for enriched understandings of each and both together. This article enters these conversations by developing a "migrational" reading of three texts about the city of Prague: Czech-born Libuše Moníková's Prager Fenster (1994), South African-born Nadine Gordimer's A Sport of Nature (1987), and Indian-born Nirmal Verma's Days of Longing (1964). Proposing the notion of a "Prague text", this reading performatively decentres Western Europe while maintaining a nuanced grasp on differences within the continent. The juxtaposition enabled by a Prague text puts up for scrutiny various attributions of European centrality, as the article critically engages notions of "Europeanness" and challenges configurations of Europe as a determining point of reference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document provides brief biographical information about various contributors to the Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History. The contributors come from diverse academic backgrounds and research interests, including topics such as Francophone African literature, Russian literature, the Slave Bible, colonial and postcolonial studies, urban space in Hong Kong, postcolonial theory, British and French imperial history, British-Spanish economic and political relationships, British social history in colonial South Asia, South African history, and colonial and postcolonial encounters between France and North Africa. The document highlights the contributors' qualifications, research areas, and recent publications. [Extracted from the article]

The essay is based on a paper given at the "Symposium of African Literature in Global Perspectives" at the University of Kansas, sponsored by the Hall Center for the Humanities. It reflects thoughts on the predicaments of an emigrant African writer in his attempts to gain wider exposure on the global stage. In the process, the essay questions the validity of equal and reciprocal cultural and economic benefits that globalization is supposed to provide for African authors and participating theatre directors, producers, literary agents, and audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This correction notice is for an article titled "Toward a relational theorization of racisms" published in the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies. The correction addresses an error in a quote and reference used in the article. The original quote attributed to Cristina Lombardi has been corrected to Caterina Romeo, and the corresponding reference has also been corrected. The correction ensures accuracy in the article's citations and sources. [Extracted from the article]

This paper begins with the contention that scholars of African oral literature have exhibited a 'best avoided' approach towards formula, the most important aspect of the oral-formulaic theory of Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord. It argues that, even in this century, the dominant approaches to the study of African folklore have been performance, Marxism, formalism, structuralism, feminism and functionalism. Therefore, building on the meager literature on formula, this article investigates its occurrence in traditional Ịjọ poetry, particularly in the praise chants of Chief Adolphus Munamuna. It points out that the formula density is high in the bard's praise poems. This article also notes that formulas are useful and necessary to the Ịjọ bard because they enable him to compose his poems rapidly in the course of performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the representation of sacred spaces in the novels of four authors from southern Africa and their translations. It critically considers the representation of sacred spaces and the marginalisation of some areas of Africa. The selected passages feature common themes, such as the dispossession of the soil. A convenient distinction between sacred spaces is made in this article through categorising these spaces as apotropaic, chthonic, mystic and messianic, and theological and epiphanic. Translations into the Romance languages of predominantly Catholic countries show evidence of textual divergence in the cohesion of symbols, lexico-semantic shifts, and cultural domestication. Whether this is imputed to ideological barriers and sociocultural filters is a matter for further investigation. Ultimately, the challenging issue is whether there is still space for the sacred in world literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Nobel Prize in literature can be used as a tool for selecting high prestige literature, i.e., consecrated and canonised literature. This paper examines the Swedish publishing of six Nobel Prize in Literature laureates 1970–2016 that have a connection to an African country: John Maxwell Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Doris Lessing, Naguib Mahfouz, and Wole Soyinka. By examining all Swedish editions of the laureates, their respective publishing trajectories can be explored, which enables the study of publishing practices of high prestige literature in the Swedish semi-peripheral language space. The publishing trajectory of Wole Soyinka is interesting, since he was introduced in Swedish by the independent publishing house Cavefors förlag. Cavefors was important as a publisher of African literature in Sweden, and was invested in 'the African question'. Cavefors was able to stabilise their financial situation thanks to the Swedish state financial subsidy for translated and literary valuable fiction, introduced in 1975. All these aspects play an important part in understanding the mechanisms activated by the Nobel Prize and its consequences for the publishing of translated high prestige literature in the Swedish context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinua Achebe's influence on the development and institution of African literature has proved to be pertinent, critical, and indelible. This paper reflects on the history of translating and publishing this renowned Nigerian writer's major novels and essays in France. It identifies two French publishers, Présence Africaine and Actes Sud, as the most important agents in the translation and publication of Achebe's works. By conducting interviews with Achebe's French editor and translator as well as reviewing published work by scholars and one of Achebe's translators, this study examines the trajectory of Achebe's works in France and how the ideologies of the agents may have affected which/when works were chosen for translation and publication. This study demonstrates that Achebe's trajectory in French has been eclectic and largely controlled by both publishers' worldviews and politics as well as broader discourses in African literature, such as literary legitimisation and colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this special issue, we read discourses and practices of development in Africa through the lens of African literature and cultural imaginations. Neither in development theory as academic field, nor in the development agendas of governments and international organisations, has the knowledge expressed in literature and oral culture in Africa been seriously integrated. Indeed, in Africa in particular "culture" has often been constructed as an obstacle and as backward in the discourse on African development (see Odhiambo [10]). The article thus contests an "emerging, but synthetic narrative of precarious woman's land rights in Acholi" in Western-oriented feminist discourse and male-centred traditionalist discourse alike and brings a pragmatic African feminist approach to a topic that, as Okot shows, is often misunderstood or wilfully misinterpreted. [Extracted from the article]

Manav Ratti's The Postsecular Imagination (2013) situates secularism and religious discourse within national and colonial contexts. His literary critical approach, which brings postcolonial critiques of nationalism to bear on the literary registration of secularism, has informed my own work in sub-Saharan African fiction. I focus on Ratti's postcolonial analysis of the secular; his conceptualization of the postsecular as an imaginative and recuperative humanist ethic that foregrounds 'powerful modes of living together in spite of the divides of religion and nation' (Ratti 2013, xviii); and finally how the Nigerian writer, Okey Ndibe, engages with the secular, religion, and the nation as flawed, incomplete projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The explosion of African literatures in 2021 is not a coincidence, but is dictated by the continent's decolonial, diasporic and hybrid cultural manifestations, its more than a hundred years of struggle for cross-regional integration, its spirit of vigorous and persistent action, and the unique attraction of an Africanness that upholds its selfhood, bridges the gaps, and remembers its history but looks to the future. The diasporic characteristic of attending to, absorbing and squarely facing the tension of heterogeneous cultures means that indigenous African literatures contain a distinctive world consciousness and rational philosophy. They have given rise to diverse civilizations marked by dialogue, inclusiveness and the contemporary spirit of African nations, enabling African literatures to participate effectively in the dialogue of world literature and in new patterns of civilization, displaying as they do a strong vitality, creativity and influence in the positive-sum game with Western culture. This will provide positive encouragement to the mutual learning, integration, harmony, symbiosis and coexistence of civilizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central problem in the Anthropocene, according to Rob Nixon, is the representational difficulty involved in rendering forms of injustice legible across different scales of time. This paper argues that Nadine Gordimer's work can be read as a sustained narrative experiment with dissonant temporalities, and hence that it lays the groundwork for a social critique that extends beyond the limits of apartheid South Africa into the disjunctive planetary present. Her novella "Something Out There," which intertwines the story of a baboon on the loose in 1980s Johannesburg with a revolutionary plot to blow up a power station, is the focus of my essay. I draw on Homi Bhabha and Benedict Anderson to describe the temporal paradigm of white suburbia in Gordimer's Johannesburg, and read the baboon as a figure of social critique amid that peculiar modern timescape. The part of the narrative concerning the revolutionaries, I argue, advances the critique by pointing to alternative structurings of time in materialist or more-than-human terms. Perspectives on temporality from Gareth Dale, Michael Hanchard and Dipesh Chakrabarty, among others, sustain my conclusion that Gordimer's stylistic accommodation of alternative timescales gives her work a compelling resonance in our uncertain and unequal planetary present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Christopher Ouma, a literary critic and professor of African literature, discusses his experiences as an African intellectual in South Africa and the role of the African intellectual in the country. He reflects on the impact of the anti-apartheid movement on his education and the importance of Pan-Africanism in shaping his identity. Ouma also discusses his early interest in African literature, which was sparked by a rigorous reading program in primary school and exposure to popular African novels. The text is a conversation between two individuals, CJL and CO, discussing CO's interest in literature and his experiences as a student. CO expresses his passion for reading and writing, particularly during his high school years, where he found solace in poetry after the loss of his parents. He also discusses his undergraduate studies in Kenya, where he was exposed to African literature and the works of authors such as Ayi Kwei Armah, Buchi Emecheta, and Derek Walcott. CO eventually pursued graduate studies in African literature at Wits University in South Africa, influenced by the connections between the literature departments at Moi University and Wits. The conversation between CJL and CO explores the changing dynamics of African academia, particularly in South Africa. They discuss the impact of exile on African intellectuals, with Mphahlele's memoir serving as an example of personal growth during exile. They also highlight the role of universities in facilitating exile and fostering connections between African countries. The conversation then shifts to the current state of South African universities, [Extracted from the article]