Texts, Tasks, and Theories

Summary

African literary theory has recently gained immensely from an emerging multitude of perspectives and scholarly approaches. This volume offers a welcome opportunity to assess trends in the twenty-first century?s discourse on African literature: Twelve different articles treat such lively issues as modernity, nation, civil society, postcolonial theory, and feminism, relating these both to more recent short stories, poems, and novels and to a large variety of texts that have in one way or another acquired canonical status. The first section ?Language, Modernity and Modernism? explores ocial and aesthetic figurations of modernity in African literary discourse. ?New Readings in African Literature and Postcolonial Theory? offers fresh and critical approaches to this hotly contested area. In the closing section, ?Identity, Dissidence and Cultural Practice,? the questions tackled concern the role of literature and the African writer in an increasingly plural and diversifying social environment. Some of the authors treated in detail are: Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, Okot p?Bitek, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nuruddin Farah, Nadine Gordimer, Helon Habila, Kojo Laing, Alexander Kanengoni, Farida Karodia, Lewis Nkosi, Flora Nwapa, Ike Oguine, Ben Okri, and Wole Soyinka.

Postcolonialism, Gender, and Modernity: African Literatures and the Agendas of Theory at the Outset of the Twenty-First Century
Language, Modernism, and Modernity
African Literature and Modernity	p. 3
African Literature and the Micropolitics of Modernity: Post-Traditional Society in Wole Soyinka's Season of Anomy, Nuruddin Farah's Sardines, and Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions	p. 21
Kojo Laing and the Cultural Specifics of an African Modernity	p. 37
Romantic and African Notions of Poetic Language: Shelley and Okot p'Bitek	p. 59
New Readings in African Literature and Postcolonial Theory
Toward the Decolonization of African Postcolonial Theory: The Example of Kwame Appiah's In My Father's House vis-a-vis Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy, Helon Habila's Waiting for an Angel, and Ike Oguine's A Squatter's Tale	p. 71
The River, the Earth, and the Spirit World: Joseph Conrad, Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri, and the Novel in Africa	p. 93
Postcoloniality, Modern African Poetry, and Counter-Disourse	p. 111
Looking at the Local/Locale: A Postcolonial Reading of Lewsi Nkosi's Mating Birds	p. 133
African Literature and Contemporary Society: Identity, Dissidence, and Cultural Practice
African Literature, African Literatures: Cultural Practice or Art Practice?	p. 153
Theorizing African Feminism(s): The 'Colonial' Question	p. 165
The Multilayered Construction of Identity in Alexander Kanengoni's Echoing Silences and Farida Karodia's "The Red Velvet Dress"	p. 175
Intellectuals Between Resistance and Legitimation: The Cases of Nadine Gordimer and Christa Wolf	p. 191
Notes on Contributors and Editors	p. 213
Notes for Contributors	p. 217
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

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