" . . . a ground-breaking contribution to the field of African literature . . . " —Research in African Literatures"Anyone with the slightest interest in West African cultures, performance or theatre should immediately rush out and buy this book." —Leeds African Studies Bulletin"A seminal contribution to the fields of performance studies, cultural studies, and popular culture. " —Margaret Drewal"A fine book. The play texts are treasures." —Richard BaumanAfric...

This book offers a compelling vision of the dynamism of local printing presses across colonial Africa and the new textual forms they generated. It invites a reconceptualisation of African literature as a field by revealing the profusion of local, innovative textual production that surrounded and preceded canonical European-language literary traditions. Bringing together examples of print production in African, Europea and Arabic languages, it explores their interactions as well as their di...

This set of essays analyses the work of Isabel Hofmeyr, globally recognised as one of South Africa’s foremost literary and Indian Ocean scholars. The essays elucidate Hofmeyr’s path-breaking studies of transnational histories of the book, African print cultures, and cultural circulations in the Indian Ocean world.This book draws together reflective and analytical essays by renowned intellectuals from around the world who critically engage with the work of one of the global South’s ...

Popular culture in Africa is the product of everyday life: the unofficial, the non-canonical. And it is the dynamism of this culture that makes Africa what it is. In this book, Karin Barber offers a journey through the history of music, theatre, fiction, song, dance, poetry, and film from the seventeenth century to the present day. From satires created by those living in West African coastal towns in the era of the slave trade, to the poetry and fiction of townships and mine compounds in S...

The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel provides an engaging account of the postcolonial novel, from Joseph Conrad to Jean Rhys. Reflecting the development of postcolonial literary studies into a significant and intellectually vibrant field, this Companion explores genres and theoretical movements such as magical realism, crime fiction, ecocriticism, and gender and sexuality. Written by a host of leading scholars in the field, this book offers insight into the representative move...

The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Travel Writing offers readers an insight into the scope and range of perspectives that one encounters in this field of writing. Encompassing a diverse range of texts and styles, performances and forms, postcolonial travel writing recounts journeys undertaken through places, cultures, and communities that are simultaneously living within, through, and after colonialism in its various guises. The Companion is organized into three parts. Part I, 'Depart...

Key Concepts in Postcolonial Literature provides an overview of the main themes, issues and critical perspectives that have had the greatest effect on postcolonial literatures. Discussing historical, cultural and contextual background, it contains selected work of some of the major writers from this period.

More than a legal obligation, voting is our right as citizens and defines our democracies.The lies or intellectual laziness of our economists, administrations, and judicial systems creates a façade of legality, which could be considered fraudulent: replacing the power of a Monarchy by that of a Government applying relatively dictatorial laws, does not equal progress.A matter of moral conscience arises when laws are only in favour of the same class. “What kin...

“A brilliant and humane philosophy for our confused age.”—Samantha Power, author of A Problem from HellKwame Anthony Appiah’s landmark new work, featured on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, challenges the separatist doctrines espoused in books like Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations. Reviving the ancient philosophy of “cosmopolitanism,” a school of thought that dates to the Cynics of the fourth century BC, Appiah traces its influence ...

If you want to know what anthropology is, look at what anthropologists do. This Very Short Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology combines an accessible account of some of the disciplines guiding principles and methodology with abundant examples and illustrations of anthropologists at work. Peter Just and John Monaghan begin by discussing anthropologys most important contributions to modern thought: its investigation of culture as a distinctively human character...

*Shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay*Selected as a Book of the Year 2016 by the Financial Times, Guardian, New Statesman*, Observer**, The Millions* and Emerald Street**'Flâneuse [flanne-euhze], noun, from the French. Feminine form of flâneur [flanne-euhr], an idler, a dawdling observer, usually found in cities.That is an imagin...

Essential reading for anyone interested in the African continent and the diversity of human history, this Very Short Introduction looks at Africa's past and reflects on the changing ways it has been imagined and represented. Key themes in current thinking about Africa's history are illustrated with a range of fascinating historical examples, drawn from over 5 millennia across this vast continent.