This book offers a compelling new approach to African literatures as formed by and itself a form of collective memory. It explores the historical spaces and maps that African literature brings to the surface and re-imagines in novel ways. The stories that matter about what happened in the past together constitute a collective memory that African writers and readers draw upon to locate themselves within the world. The book examines the mental maps that define the imaginative fields in which African literary texts have meaning. They provide answers to the questions that producers of texts must respond to: where stories are set, who writers write for, why writers write and how texts engage in meaning-making. It grapples with how writers imagine themselves contributing to a literary historiography and how readers get to understand the context within which texts are produced.
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Brings a new understanding of African literature as a collective memory built over the years by generations of authors.
Introduction Neil ten Kortenaar and James Ogude; Part I. Sources:
1. The
Colonial Archive Neil ten Kortenaar;
2. Responding to Orality in Literature
Senayon Olaoluwa;
3. The Idea of Africa: A Liberating Concept or a Western
Imperialist Trope? Reginald M. J. Oduor;
4. African Responses to European
Literature about Africa Julia Galmiche-Essue;
5. The Travelling Archive: The
Discursive Knowledge Circuits of Transatlantic Africas Ronit Frenkel; Part
II. Memories:
6. Black Antiquity Garnette Oluoch-Olunya;
7. Imagining Slavery
and the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Works of African Writers Cheryl
Sterling;
8. The Colonial Encounter David Attwell;
9. Arab Traces in Coastal
Eastern Africa Tina Steiner;
10. Recalling colonialism in North Africa Oana
Panaïté;
11. In the Name of God: Mission, Nation and the Postcolonial
Condition Alexie Tcheuyap;
12. Aestheticizing and Archiving the Women's War
of 1929 and the 1949 Women's March on the Grand-Bassam Prison Naminata
Diabate;
13. Queer Pasts Brenna M. Munro;
14. Liberation Struggles Grace A.
Musila;
15. The Archival Impulse in African Fictions of Civil Strife Chigbo
Arthur Anyaduba; Part III. Maps:
16. Valleys of Strife: Geology as Archive in
African Literature Robert Muponde;
17. Remembering the City: Lagos and
National Time Femi Eromosele;
18. Migrant City: Mapping Literary Johannesburg
across (Southern) Africa Rebecca Fasselt;
19. Algiers as a 'Realm' of Memory
in Contemporary Algerian Postcolonial Literature of French-Expression Valérie
K. Orlando;
20. Nairobi as an Archive of Literary Imagination James Ogude.
Professor James Ogude is the Director at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria and is the author of Ngugi's Novels and African History. He has edited nine books and his most recent edited volumes include, Ubuntu and the Reconstitution of Community (2019) and Environmental Humanities of Extraction in Africa: Poetics and politics of Extraction (2023). Neil ten Kortenaar, professor at the University of Toronto, is the author of Debt, Law, Realism: Nigerian Writers Imagine the State at Independence (2021) and Postcolonial Literature and the Impact of Literacy: Reading and Writing in African and Caribbean Fiction (2011), and an associate editor of the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.
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