African Literature and Social Change: Tribe, Nation, Race

by Olakunle George

Overview

Alert to the ways in which critical theory and imaginative literature can enrich each other, African Literature and Social Change reframes the ongoing project of African literature. Concentrating on texts that are not usually considered together—writings by little-known black missionaries, so called "black whitemen," and better-known 20th century intellectuals and creative writers—Olakunle George shows the ways in which these writings have addressed notions of ethnicity, nation, and race and how the debates need to be rehistoricized today. George presents Africa as a site of complex desires and contradictions, refashioning the way African literature is positioned within current discussions of globalism, diaspora, and postcolonialism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253025807
Publisher:	Indiana University Press (Ips)
Publication date:	10/16/2017
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Olakunle George is Associate Professor at Brown University. He is author of Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters and coeditor of The Encyclopedia of the Novel.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Missionary Moments
1. Crossing Currents: Postcoloniality, Globalism, Diaspora
2. Mission Tide: Bishop S. A. Crowther and the "Black Whitemen"
3. Decolonization Time: Abrahams, James, Wright
4. Globalization Time: Achebe, Soyinka, and Beyond
Epilogue: Gaps
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Neil ten Kortenaar]]>

Olakunle George rethinks the entirety of African literature by considering texts from the 19th century and mid-20th century alongside canonical texts by Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and others, and thus expands the standard canon of African literature which begins roughly at independence in 1960.

"This book is a bold exploration of the complexity of different modes of writing about Africa in the context of current debates on the nature of the literary in the production of African knowledge. Concerned with a rhetoric of self-writing as it has developed over two hundred years, Olakunle George attends to local details within the larger configurations of colonial discourse in this ambitious and timely work. It is a caution against the neglect of the conditions of possibility that made an African literature possible."

Neil ten Kortenaar

Olakunle George rethinks the entirety of African literature by considering texts from the 19th century and mid-20th century alongside canonical texts by Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and others, and thus expands the standard canon of African literature which begins roughly at independence in 1960.

Simon Gikandi]]>

This book is a bold exploration of the complexity of different modes of writing about Africa in the context of current debates on the nature of the literary in the production of African knowledge. Concerned with a rhetoric of self-writing as it has developed over two hundred years, Olakunle George attends to local details within the larger configurations of colonial discourse in this ambitious and timely work. It is a caution against the neglect of the conditions of possibility that made an African literature possible.

Simon Gikandi

This book is a bold exploration of the complexity of different modes of writing about Africa in the context of current debates on the nature of the literary in the production of African knowledge. Concerned with a rhetoric of self-writing as it has developed over two hundred years, Olakunle George attends to local details within the larger configurations of colonial discourse in this ambitious and timely work. It is a caution against the neglect of the conditions of possibility that made an African literature possible.

Editorial Reviews

"A new and welcome addition to the field of African literary studies, Olakunle George's African Literature and Social Change is dense where it needs to be and glories in productive close readings when its objects call for it."—Comparative Literature Studies

"Olakunle George rethinks the entirety of African literature by considering texts from the 19th century and mid-20th century alongside canonical texts by Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and others, and thus expands the standard canon of African literature which begins roughly at independence in 1960."—Neil ten Kortenaar, author of Postcolonial Literature and the Impact of Literacy

"This book is a bold exploration of the complexity of different modes of writing about Africa in the context of current debates on the nature of the literary in the production of African knowledge. Concerned with a rhetoric of self-writing as it has developed over two hundred years, Olakunle George attends to local details within the larger configurations of colonial discourse in this ambitious and timely work. It is a caution against the neglect of the conditions of possibility that made an African literature possible."—Simon Gikandi, author of Slavery and the Culture of Taste

From the Publisher

A new and welcome addition to the field of African literary studies, Olakunle George's African Literature and Social Change is dense where it needs to be and glories in productive close readings when its objects call for it.

Comparative Literature Studies