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An essay is presented regarding the difference between non-fiction's prominence in South Africa and in the U.S. It mentions the non-fiction booms experienced both in the U.S. and in South Africa. It says that the memoir writing in the U.S. has been dominant in the market. It explores the divergent American and South African expectations when it comes to collectivity and selfhood.

9/11 was the day the ‘West’ became aware of Third-World Others’ increased mobility, leading national governments to use the risk of terror as currency in political processes of increasing ‘security’ via amplified surveillance. Coupling the narratives of my own experiences in the United States and South Africa with an examination of the work of South African-born writers Ishtiyaq Shukri and Imraan Coovadia gave me an entry-point for beginning a conversation about how nations behave under perceived threat, projecting terror onto the bodies of the Other. Coovadia and Shukri explicitly link apartheid-era legislation aimed at categorisation and containment with the events following the September 11 2001 attacks on US landmarks, where we saw ‘western’ nations similarly attempt to immobilise threatening Dark Bodies. For me, as a professor of postcolonial and transnational work, whose passport, life experiences and scholarship have been stamped by the political decisions subsequent to 9/11, this tangential entry – employing syllabi focused on apartheid-era South Africa in order to reflect on September 11 2001 and the subsequent effects of the War on Terror – was the way I could participate in my US students’s understanding of citizenship, constitutional rights and engagement within our nation. Beginning with our desire for (and simultaneous terror of) the Other, we learn how to use our critical faculties to shift that desire/terror towards discovering ways to converse with Otherness, thereby interrupting the legal and the epistemological imperative to ‘map’ and categorise Threatening Bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the idea of an African literary canon through the creative works of African writers, their criticism by African literary scholars, and the validation of African aesthetic values. Based on the premise that literature is a cultural production, modern African literature expresses the socio-cultural, historical, and other experiences as well as the sensibility of its people. Literary works that focus on certain criteria of cultural acceptability, African-ness, or Africanity constitute modern African literature and its canon. Since modern African literature is still relatively young compared to Western literatures, there have been debates and controversies over what is truly African literature. It is in the context of the people's overall experience and the aesthetic considerations involved that canonisation will be discussed. Among these issues are the language of modern African literature and the current debate as to whether African writers in the West (North America and Europe) writing and publishing there are still African writers. Cultural identity and what constitutes what Abiola Irele describes as "the African imagination" will thus be the touchstones of any African literary canon. As a result of the postcolonial experience shared by many African and Asian societies, many of the issues relating to African literature and its canon will likely have parallel responses in modern Asian literary discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a discussion about the thin line between fact and fiction in the novel "Welcome to Our Hillbrow," by Phaswane Mpe and the film "Tsotsi" by Gavin Hood. The author mentioned that Mpe elicited a strategy of address employed by African-American scholars and slave-narrative writers who spoke directly to their readers which insisted on the authenticity of the traumatic experiences of racism in America. It was also reported that the story attempted to veer away from the foul mood by adopting a moral communication designed to encourage social transformation in Africa.

Interviews Bernth Lindfors, scholar of African literary history in the U.S. Influence of the establishment of African American Studies programs on the foundation of the "Research in African Literatures" journal; Connection of the journal with the African Studies Association of the African Literature Association; Efforts to generate contributions on women's writing.

The author discusses the emergence of a new literary griot tradition in contemporary African writing and the meaning of the African work in the U.S. context. He states that the novel "Native Son," by Richard Wright, has changed the nature of the relationship between African writers and the larger U.S. society. Wright, according to the author, has freed subsequent generations of African writers to explore deeper psychological and emotional terrains of the African experience. He explains the influence that the U.S. society had on the African-American tradition in literature.

Pays tribute to Bernth Lindfors, head of African literature studies at the University of Texas in Austin. Role in bringing together the university's African and Afro-American Research Institute, the Humanities Research Center and the periodical 'Research in African Literatures'; Role as founder and editor of the periodical; Authorship of a biography of Ira Aldridge.