As non-African writers have created images of Africa that suit their own needs, African writers have countered these images with African landscapes that emphasize the landmarks and horizons that are significant for Africans. In this volume, Loflin explores the importance of landscape description in African fiction, arguing that discussion of landscape can reveal the geographic, religious, political, and social boundaries of the text. In her analysis, Loflin examines themes of nationalism and ethnic identity, showing how the question of landscape is further complicated when writers in...

Alice Walker is one of the most influential and controversial figures in twentieth-century American literature. This collection of essays represents a dispassionate scholarly effort to comprehend the essential elements of her prolific imagination, which celebrates women by chronicling their troubled journey from silence to self-expression and from pain to resistance. The essays fall largely into three main groups, focusing on Walker's most famous and controversial novel, "The Color Purple," on her poetry, which has for too long met with critical neglect, and on her ecofeminist novel, "The...

Public education can be one of the most powerful tools at the disposal of a government wanting to maintain power, as it is the realm in which children are taught the social values and norms that will sustain the culture when they become adults. In South Africa, education was kept separate, unequal, and decidedly undemocratic, and as Hlatshwayo explains, it was used specifically to preserve and perpetuate inequality. In a work designed for historians and education professionals alike, he examines the tumultuous and highly politicized history of South African education and evaluates the...

Cobley presents five interconnected case studies of previously neglected aspects of recreation and social welfare policy in South Africa. He charts their historical development and poses the critical question: In shaping recreation and social welfare policy, by what rules did the protagonists play?

Drawing on current conceptual debates concerning the roles of ordinary people and the nature of the colonial state, Cobley seeks to develop an understanding of the operation of power relations--the rules of the game--in twentieth-century South Africa.

Some considerations on the current...

African religions, as well as those religions that derive much of their cosmology, beliefs, and rituals from African religions, are becoming more international in scope and appeal. Yet they continue to be viewed either as indiscriminately adaptable or as static traditions. Neither view suggests much spiritual or psychological value outside their original milieu when compared with the so-called world religions.

The chapters in this volume focus on African and African-derived religions, and challenge many of these positions. They examine how these religions display themselves in...

During the 1920s and 1930s, Willis Richardson (1889-1977) was highly respected as a leading African-American playwright and drama anthologist. His plays were performed by numerous black high school, college, and university drama groups and by theater companies in Chicago, New York, Washington D.C., Cleveland, Baltimore, and Atlanta. With the opening of "The Chip Woman's Fortune" (1923), he became the first African American to have a play produced on Broadway. Several of his 46 plays were published in assorted magazines, and in his essays, he urged black Americans to seek their dramatic...

African American writers have created a rich literature that reflects their experiences and achievements. In many instances, whites figure prominently in these works, frequently portrayed as oppressors. Through a careful examination of works by black writers, Davis constructs a typology of white images in the African American imagination. The book argues that these images repeatedly occur in works by black writers. Some of these stereotypes include the overt bigot, the hypocrite, the liberal, and the good-hearted weakling.

While black writers are often explicit in representing the...

Traces the development of the Baltimore "Afro-American," one of America's leading black newspapers, from its founding in 1892 to the dawn of the Civil Rights Era in 1950. It focuses on the "Afro-American"'s coverage of events and issues affecting Baltimore's and the nation's black communities, particularly its crusades for racial reform in the first half of the 20th century. Farrar examines how the "Afro-American" grew and prospered as a newspaper and as a business. How and why the "Afro-American" conducted its news and editorial crusades for a powerful local and national black community...

Slave narratives were one of the earliest forms of African American writing. These works, autobiographical in nature, later fostered other pieces of African American autobiography. Since the rise of Black Studies in the late 1960s, leading critics have constructed black lives and letters as antitheses of the ways and writings of mainstream American culture. According to such thinking, black writing stems from a set of experiences very different from the world of whites, and black autobiography must therefore differ radically from heroic white American tales. But in pointing to differences...

This volume investigates the causes of the political, economic, and moral problems of today's Africa and provides a framework for the reconstruction of modern African states. The author focuses on the interaction between religion and politics throughout history and on the role of the Church in postcolonial Africa. In order to develop a basis for African political and religious ethics, he uses an interdisciplinary approach that draws from political theory, history, and social and religious ethics. Among the issues discussed are ethnicity, mismanagement, corruption, and the African concept...