African Literature Book List
All Titles
Ayi Kwei Armah, Radical Iconoclast – On Sale
Pitting the Imaginary Worlds against the Actual
By Ode Ogede
Ghanaian novelist, essayist, and short-story writer Ayi Kwei Armah has won international recognition as one of Africa’s most articulate writers. In this book, Ode Ogede argues that previous critics have misinterpreted the aesthetic and literary influences that have shaped Armah’s artistic vision and overlooked his most significant and valuable contribution to the problems of writing “outside the prison-house of conventional English.…
Broken Lives and Other Stories – On Sale
In her startling collection of short stories, Broken Lives and Other Stories, Anthonia C. Kalu creates a series of memorable characters who struggle to hold displaced but dynamic communities together in a country that is at war with itself.…
Colonization, Violence, and Narration in White South African Writing
André Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, and J. M. Coetzee
The representation of pain and suffering in narrative form is an ongoing ethical issue in contemporary South African literature. Can violence be represented without sensationalistic effects, or, alternatively, without effects that tend to be conservative because they place the reader in a position of superiority over the victim or the perpetrator? Jolly looks at three primary South African authors—André Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, and J.…
Echoes of the Sunbird – On Sale
An Anthology of Contemporary African Poetry
Edited by Donald Burness
This volume presents a broad overview of the work of seven of Africa’s leading poets. Five of them have received international recognition: Niyi Osundare and Chinua Achebe, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize; Osundare and Antonio Jacinto, the Noma Prize; and Jose Craveirinha, the Camoes Prize.…
Es’kia Mphahlele – On Sale
Themes of Alienation and African Humanism
By Ruth Obee
"If you really want to understand South Africa, read black African writers. Read Es'kia Mphahlele," is the advice proffered to diplomats and scholars by professor and publisher Donald Herdeck.…
Freedom In Our Lifetime – On Sale
Collected Writings of Anton Muziwakhe Lembede
By Anton Muziwakhe Lembede
Edited by Robert R. Edgar and Luyanda ka Msumza
When a group of young political activists met in 1944 to launch the African National Congress Youth League, it included the nucleus of a remarkable generation of leaders who forged the struggle for freedom and equality in South Africa for the next half century: Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu, Jordan Ngubane, Ellen Kuzwayo, Albertina Smith, A.…
Nigerian Video Films
Revised and Expanded Edition
Edited by Jonathan Haynes
Nigerian video films—dramatic features shot on video and sold as cassettes—are being produced at the rate of nearly one a day, making them the major contemporary art form in Nigeria. The history of African film offers no precedent for such a huge, popularly based industry.…
Nomadic Voices of Exile – On Sale
Feminine Identity in the Francophone Literature of the Maghreb
Contemporary French writing on the Maghreb—that part of Africa above the Sahara—is truly postmodern in scope, the rich product of multifaceted histories promoting the blending of two worlds, two identities, two cultures, and two languages.…
Oral Literature and Performance in Southern Africa – On Sale
Edited by Duncan Brown
This book draws together contributions from literary studies, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and African language studies to analyze the complex functioning of oral texts and models in differing contexts.…
Rendering Things Visible – On Sale
Essays on South African Literary Culture
By Martin Trump
Much recent critical practice, sharpened by an engagement with theory, has questioned conventional notions about literature. There has been a tendency to democratize our understanding of literature, so as to include a wide range of cultural practices that might formerly have been excluded from literary-critical concern.…
Rewriting Modernity
Studies in Black South African Literary History
Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History connects the black literary archive in South Africa—from the nineteenth-century writing of Tiyo Soga to Zakes Mda in the twenty-first century—to international postcolonial studies via the theory of transculturation, a position adapted from the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz.…
The Sacred Door and Other Stories
Cameroon Folktales of the Beba
By Makuchi
The Sacred Door and Other Stories: Cameroon Folktales of the Beba offers readers a selection of folktales infused with riddles, proverbs, songs, myths, and legends, using various narrative techniques that capture the vibrancy of Beba oral traditions.…
Sol Plaatje
Selected Writings
By Sol T. Plaatje
Edited by Brian Willan
Sol Plaatje is one of South Africa’s most important political and literary figures. A pioneer in the history of the black press, he was one of the founders of the African National Congress, a leading spokesman for black opinion throughout his life, and the author of three well-known books: Mafeking Diary, Native Life in South Africa, and his historical novel, Mhudi.…
Swahili beyond the Boundaries
Literature, Language, and Identity
Africa is a marriage of cultures: African and Asian, Islamic and Euro-Christian. Nowhere is this fusion more evident than in the formation of Swahili, Eastern Africa’s lingua franca, and its cultures.…
The Twelve Best Books by African Women
Critical Readings
By Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi and Tuzyline Jita Allan
In 2002, at the annual Zimbabwe International Book Fair, twelve literary books by African women were included for the first time in the category of “Africa’s 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century.…
Available December 2008 (est.)
Voices from Madagascar/Voix de Madagascar
An Anthology of Contemporary Francophone Literature/Anthologie de littérature francophone contemporaine
Edited by Jacques Bourgeacq and Liliane Ramarosoa
There is currently in Madagascar a rich literary production (short stories, poetry, novels, plays) that has not yet reached the United States for lack of diffusion outside the country. Until recently, Madagascar suffered from political isolation resulting from its breakup with France in the 1970s and the eighteen years of Marxism that followed.…
Wanasema
Conversations with African Writers
Edited by Donald Burness
There is a tendency to regard African literature as a homogenous product. Certainly it is true that African writers have created a vibrant, modern literature. Nevertheless, they come from specific societies and reflect vastly differing worlds.…
Womanist and Feminist Aesthetics – On Sale
A Comparative Review
Alice Walker’s womanist theory about black feminist identity and practice also contains a critique of white liberal feminism. This is the first in-depth study to examine issues of identity and difference within feminism by drawing on Walker’s notion of an essential black feminist consciousness.…
Your Madness, Not Mine
By Makuchi
Women's writing in Cameroon has so far been dominated by Francophone writers. The short stories in this collection represent the yearnings and vision of an Anglophone woman, who writes both as a Cameroonian and as a woman whose life has been shaped by the minority status her people occupy within the nation-state.…
