Reading Contemporary African Literature brings together scholarship on, critical debates about, and examples of reading African literature in all genres – poetry, fiction, and drama including popular culture. The anthology offers studies of African literature from interdisciplinary perspectives that employ sociological, historical, and ethnographic besides literary analysis of the literatures. It has assembled critical and researched essays on a range of topics, theoretical and empirical, by renowned critics and theorists of African literature that evaluate and provide examples of reading African literature that should be of interest to academics, researchers, and students of African literature, culture, and history amongst other subjects. Some of the essays examine authors that have received little or no attention to date in books on recent African literature. These essays provide new insights and scholarship that should broaden and deepen our understanding and appreciation of African literature.
“[…] un livre sans aucun doute très intéressant et actuel, dont les auteurs ont su examiner la condition postcoloniale de l’Afrique tout en nous donnant accès aux genres littéraires les plus variés parmi ceux qui sont produits actuellement sur ce continent, spécialement dans l’aire anglophone.” - Fernanda Vilar, 2015, pp. 217-219
Moradewun Adejunmobi: Foreword
Reuben Makayiko Chirambo & J. K. S. Makokha: Introduction
Section I: General Perspectives Stella Borg Barthet: ‘English Does Not Kill’: Writing Lives in the Language of the ‘Other’
Section II: Fiction Sarala Krishnamurthy: A Stylistic Analysis of the Story Element in Ngugi’s
A Grain of Wheat Tewodros Gebre:
Mahilet: A Laboratory of Stylistic Experimentation
Cheela Chilala: Through the Male Eyes: Gendered Styles in Contemporary Zambian Fiction
Nick Mdika Tembo: Politics and Stylistics of Female (Re)Presentation in James Ng’ombe’s
Sugarcane with Salt Marita Wenzel: Telling Lives: Myth, Metaphor and Metafiction in Zakes Mda’s
Cion J. K. S. Makokha: Politics and Poetics of Characterization in M. G. Vassanji’s
The Book of Secrets Stephanie Cox: The Invisible Twin: Visibility and Identity in Marie-Thérèse Humbert’s
À l’autre bout de moi Kofi Owusu: Thematic Design and Stylistic Patterns in Cameron Duodu’s
The Gab Boys Abiodun Adeniji: ‘We Can Redream this World and Make the Dream Real’: The Utopian Quest in Ben Okri’s Primary Myths
Maurice Taonezvi Vambe: Orality and the Emergence of Disrupted Narrative Voices in Charles Samupindi’s
Pawns Flora Veit-Wild: ‘Zimbolicious’: Shona-English Stylistics in Lyrics and Literature
Section III: Poetry and Orature Reuben Makayiko Chirambo: Repression and Beyond: Ideological Commitment and Style in Jack Mapanje’s and Steve Chimombo’s Poetry
Leonard Acquah:
Oguaa Aban and Cape Coast Castle: Same Edifice, Different Metaphors in the Poetry of Gaddiel Acquaah and Kwadwo Opuku-Agyemang
Gloria M. T. Emezue: Self and Nature: The Cean Dialogues
Sonja Altnöder: Transitions in South African Urban Poetry: The City of Johannesburg in Three Poems of the Apartheid Period
Chris Wasike: Verbal Fluidities and Masculine Anxieties of the Glocal Urban Imaginary in Kenyan
Genge Rap
Section IV: Drama and Theatre Kizitus Mpoche: Language Use and Identity Negotiation in Cameroonian Drama
Marisa Keuris: Afrikaans and Afrikaner Nationalism in Deon Opperman’s
Donkerland Richard Boon: ‘Neither Peace nor War’: The Role of Theatre in Re-Imagining the New Eritrea
Contributors