Gender Issues in African Literature examines the ways in which some protagonists of African fictions are made to counter and challenge intertwined Western discourses on gender, employment, sexuality, and health. Here the conflict between Tradition and Modernity is argues from the favourite premise of male supremacist ideology showing how women have eunlearnedi these false concepts to build a sustained feminist movement and (re)learn the value of sisterhood. There is a bold attempt to reread Achebe as a consistent in urging women to fight the seemingly oppressive structures that have...

The Dark Edge of African literature proposes arguments and theories for interpretation or exposition of Africa's modern fictions irrespective of the language of narrative. It attempts to discern how such interpretation of contemporary history may be received from an African perspective and what the implications are for African cultures and literatures abound by such experience. Starting with a writers profile of twentieth century African dictatorships and the African writer critical approaches on Somali, Nigerian, Kenyan, Angolan, Sudanese literatures present many different, if often not...

This volume charts the widening frontiers of black literary aesthetics using the prose and dramatic fictions of writers from Africa and the African diaspora. The chapters come in two interactive phases of current critical discourses involving rejoinders from past-present concerns and issues of cultural and contemporary modernity. These studies stress the argument that African literature is hardly discussed outside contemporary history and that the reason for the apparent disconnection among groups in Africa and the diaspora can be traced to the disparate elements within the continent and...

Africa in Narratives illuminates or proves, against the backdrop of attitudes toward nations deemed 'ethnic' or 'minorities', that literature in Africa can live up to the challenge of aesthetic imagination to form an active, refreshing part of world cultural discourse. African countries have evolved imaginatively beyond their present ephemeral stages of social and political turmoil not to talk of intellectual imitations of western thought, nation literatures should be subject to the imperative of a continental cooperation.

With new integrative and indigenous approaches to literary affairs the focus of this volume is on the influence of tradition in African writing. Using the work of Chinua Achebe two scholars from outside Africa offer insight on oratorical devices in modern African fiction, two chapters follow which, by fusing traditional elements in transitional societies, illustrate the cultural awareness that touch on the exalted role of the artist in their communities. The post colonial rhetoric also continues with echoes of political commitment on modern poetry - town issues in the discourse of Africa's...

CROSSING Borders showcases intellectual attempts to commit the process of African interrogation of postcoloniality and postmodernity to the exploration of perspectives on black identities and interactions of contemporary cultural expressions beyond the borders of Africa and across the Atlantic. We have particularised on theoretical and critical perspectives that show how the controversial influence of westernisation of Africa has demanded remedial visions and counteractive propositions to the cycle of abuses and fragmentation of the continent. We have consequently distilled some very...

THIS study of oral tradition in African literature is borne from the awareness that African verbal arts still survive in works of discerning writers and in the conscious exploration of its tropes, perspectives, philosophy and consciousness, its complementary realism, and ontology, for the delineation of authentic African response to memory, history and other possible comparisons with modern existence such as witnessed in recent developments of the African novel. In this series we have strived to adopt innovative and multilayered perspectives on orality or indigeneity and its manifestations on...

In literature the ambiguous portraiture of female characters by some male writers and the phallic nature of men's writings have proved a matter of concern to female writers in Africa. For decades within African writing the issue of silencing was interrogated particularly as it addressed the muting and marginalisation of black women by male writers through the script of patriarchy which men follow. In this series we continue the literary and dramatic tradition of feminist concern for women's issues and we review novels, plays and poetry which demonstrate a commitment to exploring the...

This edition commits to the depths of black identities in modern black texts. The cultural reclamation of an African origin and/or roots as tied to the solemn remembrance of the Ancestor has demanded the intense attention of enlightened black writers for the social and psychic revaluation of their generation and others that follow. In this series we further examine the status of the oral performer in African traditional societies which encouraged a wide range of human expression to create identity for members of the community Africa -and we have proposed a challenge to sustain the methods of...