This is a study of the ‘unofficial’ side of African fiction—the largely undocumented writing, publishing, and reading of pamphlets and paperbacks—which exists outside the grid of mass production.
Stephanie Newell examines the popular fiction of Ghana produced since the 1930s, analyzing the distinctive ways in which narrative forms are borrowed and regenerated by authors and readers.
Familiar narratives from local and international literary sources are endowed with new meanings and relevance, bearing little relation to the metropolitan “centers” in which the sources originated.
The exploration of gender relations is a dominant theme in the novels through which the authors express, mediate, and often resolve commonly held preoccupations about marriage, manhood, and money.
As well as filling a gap in Ghana’s literary history, the book explores comparative cross-cultural perspectives.
Stephanie Newell is a professor of English at the University of Sussex, UK, and the author of West African Literature: Ways of Reading, Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana, and Ghanaian Popular Fiction: How to Play the Game of Life. More info →
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Paperback
978-0-8214-1368-5
Retail price: $28.95,
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Release date: January 2001
192 pages
Rights: World (exclusive in Americas, and Philippines) except British Commonwealth, Continental Europe, and United Kingdom
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978-0-8214-1367-8
Retail price: $80.00,
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Release date: January 2001
192 pages
Rights: World (exclusive in Americas, and Philippines) except British Commonwealth, Continental Europe, and United Kingdom
Nigerian Video Films
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.
Art | Film & Video · Film and Video - History and Criticism · Media Studies · Nigeria · African Studies · African Film · Hausa · Yoruba · Igbo
Ayi Kwei Armah, Radical Iconoclast
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.”Professor
Leaf of Allah
Khat and Agricultural Transformation in Harerge, Ethiopia, 1875–1991
By Ezekiel Gebissa
Khat is a quasi-legal psychoactive shrub, produced and marketed in the province of Harerge, Ethiopia, and widely consumed throughout Northeast Africa. In the late nineteenth century the main cash crop of Harerge was coffee. Leaf of Allah examines why farming families shifted from cultivating coffee and food crops to growing khat.Demographic, market, and political factors facilitated the emergence of khat as Harerge’s leading agricultural commodity.
Food Studies · Political Science · African History · Ethiopia · African Studies
