This is a novel of education: social, political, radical, and medical. The protagonist is collective, a group of medical students from French Guiana at the University of Montpellier, France, who learn what separates them as Caribbean people from their French and African counterparts.

Juminer characterizes the three principal types of men drawn together in the stuggle for emancipation: -those who sooner or later will opt for violence; those who, by their sterling example, prefer to work patiently in the socioprofessional arena, in order to instill a certain moral and civic sense in...

This novel, winner of the coveted Grand Prix de Litterature d'Afrique Noire, has been seen as a story about the struggles of nation-building in Africa, as a fierce depiction of dictatorships in the Third World, and as a profound meditation on the nature of pwer everywhere.

Cesaire has been read politically as a poet of revolutionary zeal since the 1960s. This collection, the only one in existence in any language to give a truly comprehensive retrospective of Cesaire's poetic production, demonstrates the narrowness of earlier readings that grew...

Nedjma is a masterpiece of North African writing. Its intricate plot involves four men in love with the beautiful woman whose name serves as the title of the novel. Nedjma is the central figure of this disorienting novel, but more than the unfortunate wife of a man she does not love, more than the unwilling cause of rivalry among many suitors, Nedjma is the symbol of Algeria. Kateb has crafted a novel that is the saga of the founding ancestors of Algeria through the conquest of Numidia by the Romans, the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, and French colonial conquest. Nedjma is symbolic of...

Leonara is a first in francophone Caribbean literature: neither fiction nor biography, this book by sociologist and Creole-culture advocate Dany Bebel-Gisler has elements of both novelistic and documentary style. It has been likened to the Latin-American testimonio genre (testimony novel). The real-life Leonara- model for and subject of this book- told Bebel-Gisler that -in this book made up of my words, it is my very self that is present. You have written the story just as I have told it-

In the course of her life, Leonara has witnessed, from her perspective as the mother of a large...

Reflections of Loko Miwa is th first novel for Lilas Desquiron, one of few Haitian women writers to gain international recognition. The country's complex social and political situation is the setting for the story of two women ordained by the spirits of Vodou to be marasa (twins) in spite of their birth into unrelated families of different classes. Desquiron's intricate narrative shifts among characters, bringing diverse perspectives to bear on the dramas of class prejudice.

The novel is a very personal account of a young woman's adherence to folk beliefs and resistance to prejudices...

Of Dreams and Assassins is the urgent and rhythmic fourth novel of Malika Mokeddem, her second to appear in English. Born in Algeria to a Bedouin family that had only recently become sedentary, Mokeddem was raised on the stories of her grandmother, who encouraged her education at a time when girls did not go to school. Though raised in a tolerant version of Islam, Mokeddem nevertheless felt the weight of custom and tradition. Of Dreams and Assassins, though not strictly autobiographical, evokes through the beauty and vastness and oppressive heat of the desert Mokeddem's early yearning for...

Widely acclaimed when first published in French in 1994, Mongo Beti's tenth novel, L'histoire du fou, continues the author's humorous yet fierce criticism of the colonial system in Africa and its legacy of governmental corruption.

Translated here as The Story of the Madman, the novel gives the English-speaking world Beti's comic satire of the fictional Chief Zoaeteleu and his favorite sons Zoaetoa and Narcisse. In a modern fable that Beti uses to illustrate the problems of a people's disintegrating values in a postcolonial state, Chief Zoaeteleu, a puppet under two dictatorial...

One of the first literary works to portray Djiboutians from their own point of view, The Land without Shadows is a collection of seventeen short stories. The author, Abdourahman A. Waberi, one of a handful of francophone writers of fiction to have emerged in the twentieth century from the -confetti-sized state- of Djibouti, has already won international recognition and prizes in African literature for his stories and novel. Because his writing is linked to immigration and exile, his native Djibouti occupies center stage in his work. Drawing on the Somali/Djiboutian oral tradition to...