African Literature in Transition: Volume 4
Intellectual Traditions of African Literature, 1960-2015
Published on 20. November 2025
Book
Hardback
406 pages
978-1-009-64483-9 (ISBN)
Description
This volume provides scholars and students with a birds-eye view of the stories African literature has told about itself. It elaborates on Africa's contributions to an evolving, transnational literary vocabulary and though its organization around key terms rather than specific periods or national canons, Intellectual Traditions of African Literature also facilitates movement between and across African traditions: its framework is intrinsically comparative. As befits a project of this scale and versatility, its contributors are drawn from across professional ranks, areas of geographical and subfield expertise, and academies of origin. By contextualizing African literature within a larger set of literary terms and movements, it demonstrates that African literature is intrinsically worldly and transnational, even at points of local historical engagement.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises
Dimensions
Height: 161 mm
Width: 237 mm
Thickness: 33 mm
Weight
744 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-009-64483-9 (9781009644839)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Jeanne-Marie Jackson is a Professor of English at Johns Hopkins, where she is also Senior Editor of the flagship journal ELH. She is the author of The African Novel of Ideas (Princeton 2021) and South African Literature's Russian Soul (Bloomsbury 2015), and is the co-editor of Ethiopia Unbound: A Critical Edition (Michigan State 2024). She has also published dozens of essays and chapters in both scholarly and public-facing venues, and in 2021 was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Cajetan Iheka is Professor of English at Yale University, where he is the Director of the Whitney Humanities Center and Chair of the Council on African Studies. He is the author of Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Duke University Press, 2021). He serves as editor-in-chief for African Studies Review, the flagship journal of the African Studies Association.
Content
Introduction Cajetan Iheka and Jeanne-Marie Jackson; I. Decolonization Currents: 1. Unfinished communities: African novels, African nationalisms Jill Jarvis; 2. Pan-Africanism Tsitsi Jaji; 3. Negritude and the promise of African literature Doyle Calhoun; 4. Third Worldism in African literature: China as a trope in Dongala's fiction Duncan M. Yoon; 5. Modernism and the chimera of modernity in African letters Nathan Suhr-Sytsma; 6. Magical realism in African literatures Christopher Warnes; 7. Orality and modern African writing Isidore Diala; II. Theoretical Turn: 8. The African location of postcolonialism Stefan Helgesson; 9. Descartes in his pith helmet: Afrofuturism and genre theory Ranka Primorac; 10. Poststructuralism Michael Syrotinski; 11. Feminisms in African literature: conceptualizations and epistemic shifts in the twentieth and twenty-first century Asante Mtenje; 12. The Anatomy of African queer fiction, criticism, and theory: the evolution of a genre Edgar Nabutanyi; III. Contemporary Reconfigurations or Shifting Globalities and Positionalities: 13. The African ecological imaginary Kirk B. Sides; 14. Aesthetics of immobility and the digital in Afropolitan literatures James Yeku; 15. 'The World Is up for Grabs': African literature's positionality and the struggle for universality Mohammad Shabangu; 16. Digital Africas Ainehi Edoro-Glines; 17. The black diaspora's African imagination Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu; 18. Trauma theory and postcolonial African fiction Thando Njovane; 19. The materialisms of African literature? Madhu Krishnan.