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Die Schriftenreihe ALE befasst sich mit der Erforschung der englischsprachigen Literaturen Afrikas in der Breite und Vielfalt ihrer Themen, Formen und soziohistorischen Kontexte. Gleichzeitig impliziert der Titel, dass der Forschungsgegenstand als Hinterlassenschaft des britischen Kolonialismus ein kulturell hybrides Phänomen ist, welches im weiteren Umfeld der Colonial Studies mitsamt deren postkolonialer Kritik und Revision anzusiedeln ist. Entsprechend sollen die relevanten Texte einerseits als Teil des Symbolsystems Literatur einschließlich seiner einschlägigen ästhetischen Verfahren verstanden werden, in anderer Hinsicht aber als Teil des Sozialsystems und damit der Selbstinterpretation wie Selbstverständigung von Gesellschaften über ihre gemeinsame Sinngebung zu sehen sind.

The series ALE is focused on researching all African literatures written in the English language, encompassing the breadth and multiplicity of their thematic, formal and socio-historical aspects. The title equally implies that the object of study is conceived as a consequence of British colonialism, thus making it into a cultural hybrid that is inscribed in the wider context of Colonial Studies including their postcolonial critique and revision. Accordingly the texts to be studied are not only understood as forming part of the symbolic system of literature and its aesthetic procedures, but in an equal measure as part of the social system where they belong with the process of societies making meaning of themselves.
Journal for African Culture and Society
Matatu is a journal on African literatures and societies dedicated to interdisciplinary dialogue between literary and cultural studies, historiography, the social sciences and cultural anthropology.
Matatu is animated by a lively interest in African culture and literature (including the Afro-Caribbean) that moves beyond worn-out clichés of “cultural authenticity” and “national liberation” towards critical exploration of African modernities. The East African public transport vehicle from which Matatu takes its name is both a component and a symbol of these modernities: based on “Western” (these days usually Japanese) technology, it is a vigorously African institution; it is usually regarded with some anxiety by those travelling in it, but is often enough the only means of transport available; it creates temporary communicative communities and provides a transient site for the exchange of news, storytelling, and political debate.
Matatu is firmly committed to supporting democratic change in Africa, to providing a forum for interchanges between African and European critical debates, to overcoming notions of absolute cultural, ethnic, or religious alterity, and to promoting transnational discussion on the future of African societies in a wider world.
Matatu will be published as journal as of 2016. All back volumes are still available in print.
Swahili Poetry of Commitment by Ustadh Mahmoud Mau
The present volume is a pioneering collection of poetry by the outstanding Kenyan poet, intellectual and imam Ustadh Mahmmoud Mau (born 1952) from Lamu island, once an Indian Ocean hub, now on the edge of the nation state. By means of poetry in Arabic script, the poet raises his voice against social ills and injustices troubling his community on Lamu. The book situates Mahmoud Mau’s oeuvre within transoceanic exchanges of thoughts so characteristic of the Swahili coast. It shows how Swahili Indian Ocean intellectual history inhabits an individual biography and writings. Moreover, it also portrays a unique African Muslim thinker and his poetry in the local language, which has so often been neglected as major site for critical discourse in Islamic Africa.
The selected poetry is clustered around the following themes: jamii: societal topical issues, ilimu: the importance of education, huruma: social roles and responsabilities, matukio: biographical events and maombi: supplications. Prefaced by Rayya Timamy (Nairobi University), the volume includes contributions by Jasmin Mahazi, Kai Kresse and Kadara Swaleh, Annachiara Raia and Clarissa Vierke. The authors’ approaches highlight the relevance of local epistemologies as archives for understanding the relationship between reform Islam and local communities in contemporary Africa.
Author:
Early African Caribbean Newspapers as Archipelagic Media in the Emancipation Age shows how two Black-edited periodical publications in the early decades of the nineteenth century worked towards emancipation through medium-specific interventions across material and immaterial lines. More concretely, this book proposes an archipelagic framework for understanding the emancipatory struggles of the Antiguan Weekly Register in St. John’s and the Jamaica Watchman in Kingston. Complicating the prevalent narrative about the Register and the Watchman as organs of the free people of color, this book continues to explore the heterogeneity and evolution of Black newspaper print on the liberal spectrum. As such, Early African Caribbean Newspapers makes the case that the Register and the Watchman participated in shaping the contemporary communication market in the Caribbean. To do so, this study engages deeply with both the textuality and materiality of the newspaper and presents fresh visual material.
From a Survivor Parent to the Next Generation
Known for its breathtaking scenery, the central-east African country of Rwanda lived through one of the worst episodes of violence of the late 20th century, the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, in which over a million people were brutally murdered in 100 days.This book recounts the personal story of Claver Irakoze who survived the genocide as an eleven-year-old child and, like other Rwandans of his generation, is now grappling with the heavy responsibility of raising children in the post-genocide context.Tracing the various stages of Irakoze’s life experiences, each chapter teases out issues surrounding childhood, parenting and the transmission of memories between generations. The final chapter draws on Irakoze’s personal and professional experience to provide some reflections on managing memories of genocide within the family.
Volume II: Pop Culture, Environment, Colonialism and Migration
Volume II of Africa's Radicalisms and Conservatisms continues the broad themes of radicalisms and conservatisms that were examined in volume I. Like volume I, the essays examine why the two “isms” of radicalisms and conservatisms should not be viewed as mere irreconcilable conceptual tools with which to categorize or structure knowledge. The volume demonstrates that these concepts are intertwined, have multiple and diverse meanings as perceived and understood from different disciplinary vantage points, hence, the deliberate pluralization of the terms. The twenty-two essays in the volume show what happens when one juxtaposes the two concepts and when different peoples’ lived experiences of politics, pop culture, democracy, liberalism, the environment, colonialism, migration, identities, and knowledge, etc. across the length and breadth of Africa are brought to bear on our understandings of these two particularisms.

Contributors are: Adesoji Oni, Admire M. Nyamwanza, Akin Tella, Akinpelu Ayokunnu Oyekunle, Bamidele Omotunde Alabi, Charles Nkem Okolie, Craig Calhoun, Diana Ekor Ofana, Edwin Etieyibo, Folusho Ayodeji, Gabriel Akinbode, Godwin Oboh, Joseph C. A. Agbakoba, Julius Niringiyimana, Lucky Uchenna Ogbonnaya, Maxwell Mudhara, Muchaparara Musemwa, Nathan Osareme Odiase, Obvious Katsaura, Okpowhoavotu Dan Ekere, Olaniran Olakunle Lateef, Omolara V. Akinyemi, Owen Mafongoya, Paramu Mafongoya, Philip Onyekachukwu Egbule, Rutanga Murindwa, Sandra Bhatasara, Takesure Taringana, Tunde A. Abioro, Victor Clement Nweke, William Muhumuza, and Zainab M. Olaitan.
Following the traces first left by The Arabic Literature of Africa volume 3A published in 2003, this widely enlarged and precisely updated edition of that pioneering work aims at providing a full-fledged and meticulously detailed reference book on the literature produced and circulated by the Muslim communities of the Horn of Africa. This entirely revised version of ALA3A makes use of the absolutely fresh data discovered and collected by the editors from 2013 to 2018 the framework of the ERC-funded project Islam in the Horn of Africa: A Comparative Literary Approach and draws a new comprehensive picture of the textual production of the Islamic scholars of the Horn of Africa since its first attestations until the present time.

Contributors
Sara Fani, Alessandro Gori, Adday Hernández, John M. Larsen, Irmeli Perho and Michele Petrone.
The essays in this collection are written to make readers (re)consider what is possible in Africa. The essays shake the tree of received wisdom and received categories, and hone in on the complexities of life under ecological and economic constraints. Yet, throughout this volume, people do not emerge as victims, but rather as inventors, engineers, scientists, planners, writers, artists, and activists, or as children, mothers, fathers, friends, or lovers – all as future-makers. It is precisely through agents such as these that Africa is futuring: rethinking, living, confronting, imagining, and relating in the light of its many emerging tomorrows.
Celebración, resistencia furtiva y transformación cultural
En Cofradías Afrohispánicas: celebración, resistencia furtiva y transformación cultural, Manuel Apodaca Valdez ofrece un estudio de 42 cofradías de afrodescendientes del periodo colonial y seis cofradías contemporáneas aún vivas en cuatro zonas geográficas: España, Perú, México y República Dominicana.

Esta investigación histórica y comparativa de corte trasatlántico analiza datos recogidos en archivos históricos e investigación de campo. El estudio muestra evidencias de las condiciones sociales, políticas, culturales y espirituales de las personas de origen africano que se integraron en cofradías durante el periodo colonial. Su legado trazó un camino caracterizado por la hibridación y la transformación, cimentando las bases para las cofradías afrohispánicas del presente, un fenómeno que el autor interpreta como resistencia furtiva y celebración de la identidad cultural.

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In Cofradías Afrohispánicas [Afro-Hispanic Confraternities], Manuel Apodaca Valdez offers an account of forty-two confraternities of African descendants of the colonial period, along with six contemporary confraternities still alive in four geographical regions: Spain, Perú, México, and the Dominican Republic.

This historical and comparative trans-Atlantic study analyzes data gathered from archives and field work research. The work shows evidence of the social, political, cultural, and spiritual conditions of the peoples of African descent integrated in confraternities during the colonial time. Their legacy traced a path historically marked by hybridism and transformation laying the foundation for contemporary Afro-confraternities, a phenomenon interpreted by the author as furtive resistance and celebration of cultural identity.
Remembering Captivity, Enslavement and Resistance in African Oral Narratives
Author:
Emmanuel Saboro’s study on memories of the slave era in northern Ghana is a most welcome addition to a long and storied scholarly tradition examining song lyrics associated with the institution of slavery. As one might expect, the vast majority of such studies focus on the music traditions of the enslaved in North America. Collected between the mid-19th and early 20th century, historians, musicologist, and literary scholars have systematically analyzed these songs for what the lyrics can tell us about experiences during the era of slavery and the slave trade. Similar works that focus on West Africa, however, are rare indeed. Like his North American counterparts, Saboro examines the songs of northern Ghana as coded messages that express hope, comfort, resistance, rage and triumph over adversity. Having “no fixed meanings”, Saboro describes them as both flexible and greatly useful for conveying a variety of meanings.