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Full Description
In African Literature in the World, Simon Gikandi asks: Why do debates on language continue to inform and haunt African writing? What happened when writing replaced orality as the primary form of creative expression? When, how, and why did the novel come to occupy such a dominant role in African literary history? This is a comprehensive study of the histories and theories of African literature in the twentieth century and shows how African writers adopted and transformed the English language and its traditions to account for African identities and experiences. Concerned with writing and reading as forms of mediation, Gikandi provides examples of how imaginative works shaped the public sphere in Africa in relation to decolonization and the politics of language. He explores how the emergence of a modern tradition of African writing has generated new forms of criticism in relation to the form of the novel, modernity, and modernism.
Contents
Acknowledgements; Introduction: African literature in the world; Part I. The Criticism of African Literature; 1. This thing called literature...what work does it do?; 2. Provincializing English; 3. The (de)formation of English; 4. The politics of African literary criticism; 5. Africa in poststructuralism; 6. Orality and the writing lesson; Part II. The Cultural Work of the Novel; 7. Realism, romance, and the problem of African literary history; 8. Romance, tragedy, and the narrative of decolonization; 9. Transporting fiction: the novel in a (post)colonial world; 10. Cultural translation and the task of writing; 11. Arrow of God: the novel and the problem of modern time; Part III. On Modernity/Modernism; 12. African literature and the colonial factor; 13. African literature and modernity; 14. Reading the referent: postcolonialism and the writing of modernity; 15. On modernism and nationalism: the short African century; 16. African and the idea of the aesthetic; Select bibliography; Index.
