In African Literature in the World, Simon Gikandi asks: Why do debates on language continue to inform and haunt African writing? What happened when writing replaced orality as the primary form of creative expression? When, how, and why did the novel come to occupy such a dominant role in African literary history? This is a comprehensive study of the histories and theories of African literature in the twentieth century and shows how African writers adopted and transformed the English langua...

It would be easy to assume that, in the eighteenth century, slavery and the culture of taste--the world of politeness, manners, and aesthetics--existed as separate and unequal domains, unrelated in the spheres of social life. But to the contrary, Slavery and the Culture of Taste demonstrates that these two areas of modernity were surprisingly entwined. Ranging across Britain, the antebellum South, and the West Indies, and examining vast archives, including portraits, period painti...

The transcript from this historic trial, long thought destroyed or hidden, unearths a piece of the British colonial archive at a critical point in the Mau Mau Rebellion. Its discovery and landmark publication unsettles an already contentious Kenyan history and its reverberations in the postcolonial present.Perhaps no figure embodied the ambiguities, colonial fears, and collective imaginations of Kenya’s decolonization era more than Dedan Kimathi, the self-proclaime...

The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English Since 1945 challenges the conventional belief that the English-language literary traditions of East Africa are restricted to the former British colonies of Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. Instead, these traditions stretch far into such neighboring countries as Somalia and Ethiopia.Simon Gikandi and Evan Mwangi assemble a truly inclusive list of major writers and trends. They begin with a chronology of key historical eve...

In Simon Gikandi's view, Caribbean literature and postcolonial literature more generally negotiate an uneasy relationship with the concepts of modernism and modernity—a relationship in which the Caribbean writer, unable to escape a history encoded by Europe, accepts the challenge of rewriting it. Drawing on contemporary deconstructionist theory, Gikandi looks at how such Caribbean writers as George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, Alejo Carpentier, C. L. R. James, Paule Marshall, M...

This collection explores the complexities of black existence, and intellectual and cultural life in the work and legacies of centenarian writers, Peter Abrahams, Noni Jabavu, Sibusiso Cyril Lincoln Nyembezi and Es’kia Mphahlele

This collection of essays reflects on the life and work of Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who celebrated his 80th birthday in 2018. Drawing from a wide range of contributors, including writers, critics, publishers and activists, the volume traces the emergence of Ngugi as a novelist in the early 1960s, his contribution to the African culture of letters at its moment of inception, and his global artistic life in the twenty-first century. Here we have both personal andcritical reflections on the differe...

The power of theatrical performance is universal, but the style and concerns of theatre are specific to individual cultures. This volume in the Global Theatre Perspectives series presents a reconstructed ancient performance text, four one-act indigenous African plays and five modern dramas from various regions of Africa and the Caribbean Diaspora.Because these plays span centuries and are the work of artists from diverse cultures, readers can see elements that occur across...

Reconceiving Identities in Political Economy comprises one volume in an unprecedented three-volume set, collectively subtitled Decolonial Reconstellations. Together with Volume One (Dynamics of Deep Time and Deep Place) and Volume Two (Dissolving Master Narratives), it gathers thinkers from across world regions and disciplines who reconfigure critical global thought.Collaboratively conceived, the volumes are founded on the observation that we cannot fully uproot the episte...

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Heart of Darkness meets Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Gods of Jade and Shadow in this exhilarating historical fantasy debut about what happens when the forces of progress slam against the forces of nature, and the unseen hand that moves us decides the fate of a cursed East African railroad.February 1898. The sanguine Lt. Col. Patterson sails to Mombasa with a mission straight from London: to build a rai...

Dynamics of Deep Time and Deep Place comprises one volume in an unprecedented three-volume set, collectively subtitled Decolonial Reconstellations. Together with Volume Two (Dissolving Master Narratives) and Volume Three (Reconceiving Identities in Political Economy), it gathers thinkers from across world regions and disciplines who reconfigure critical global thought.Collaboratively conceived, the volumes are founded on the observation that we cannot ful...