Routledge Handbook of African Literature

Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of contributors
1.
Introduction
	Mapping Political Agencies
	Journeys, Geographies, Identities
	Working through Genres
	The World of and beyond Humans
	Everyday Sociality
	Bodies, Subjectivities, Affect
	Literary Networks
	Critical junctures
	Notes
	References
PART I: Mapping Political Agencies
	2. ‘Children of the Cold War’: Rethinking African literary generations through the global conflict
		Notes
		References
	3. Ethics and the politics of the ordinary in African literature
		Literature, the ordinary and ethics
		The ordinary as the political
		Recognition and care as contours of everyday agency
		Conclusion
		Notes
		Bibliography
	4. Globalisation, mobility and labour in African diasporic fiction
		Funding acknowledgement
		Notes
		References
	5. Towards an ethics of the humanitarian imagination
		Notes
		Works cited
PART II: Journeys, Geographies, Identities
	6. Decolonising the Afropolitan: Intra-African migrations in post-2000 literature
		Introduction: re-framing the ‘migrant novel’
		Pluriversal migration narratives
		Conclusion
		Notes
		References
	7. History, imperial eyes and the ‘mutual gaze’: Narratives of African-Chinese encounters in recent literary works
		Representing otherness: the postcolonial and the Global South
		Recent literary narratives of Africa–China encounter
		Femi Osofisan’s adaptation of Thunderstorm
		Yan Geling’s travelogue in Nigeria
		Conclusion
		Notes
		References
	8. Ethnicity in post-2000 African writing
		Notes
		References
	9. Mythopoesis of the self: Nation, textuality and the writer as political hero
		Introduction
		Fractures, revisions and counter-discourse in the making of identity
		Narrating the nation: Soyinka’s life writings
		Mythos and the self: Wole Soyinka, ‘the perpetual dramatist … in every
drama of his own manufacture’
		Conclusion
		Notes
		References
PART III: Working through Genres
	10. How to be a writer in your 30s in Lagos: Self-help literature and the creation of authority in Africa
		The history of self-help literature in Africa
		‘Problem-solving texts’: self-help literature and social change
		Creating new readerly selves by making progress
		Self-help literature and the creation of authority
		Note
		Acknowledgements
		References
	11. Gothic supernaturalism in the ‘African imagination’: Locating an emerging form
		Gothic: fear, enlightenment and the supernatural
		Situating gothic in the African imagination
		The gothic prism?: verticality as a strategic relation
		Postcolonial gothic – and beyond
		Gothic as a situated feminist strategy
		Why now? Gothic aetiologies of Africa’s millennial present
		Notes
		References
	12. Contested filial voice in African female-authored autobiographies
		Introduction
		Reading methods and modes of re-membering filiation in African
(women’s) autobiographies
		The filial voice’s contestation and re-invention of history in
El Saadawi’s autobiographies
		The filial voice’s contestation of cultural and religious hegemony in
Ali’s autobiographies
		Conclusion
		Notes
		References
	13. ‘I can’t go forward; I must go back’: Ben Okri’s (p)anachronistic utopias
		The utopian spectrum
		From cloud city to white walkers
		‘How can I turn from Arcadia and live?’
		Europe on the margins
		Notes
		Works cited
PART IV: The World of and beyond Humans
	14. African literature, audience and the search for the (non)human
		Conclusion: African literature, the critic, and the greater meaning
		Notes
		References
		Filmography
	15. Dirty ecology: African women and the ethics of cultivation
		I.
		II.
		III.
		Notes
		References
	16. African fictions, animal figures and anthropocentric frameworks
		Introduction
		Framing African animals: African oratures and cultural debates
		‘The autobiographical animal’: the story of the nonhuman in Alain
Mabanckou’s Memoirs of a Porcupine
		Wildness and civilization: the African body in the imperial center in Buchi
Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen
		Notes on the finitude of lives: Njabulo Ndebele and the vulnerability
of flesh
		Conclusion
		Notes
		References
	17. Depictions of Kenyan lands and landscapes by four women writers
		Notes
		References
PART V: Everyday Sociality
	18. Geopolitical and global topologies in fiction: Islam at the fault lines in Africa and the world
		Local and global topologies: Islam in Africa; Africa in the world
		Established and emergent fictions on Islam: topologies over time
		Works cited
	19. Appetite and everyday life in African literature
		Notes
		References
	20. ‘Foundational fictions’: Variations of the marriage plot in Flora Nwapa’s early Anglophone-Igbo novels
		Plotting marriage: Anglophone-Igbo approaches
		Amadi’s The Concubine and the embedded love-marriage plot
		The marriage-procreation plot in Nwapa’s Efuru and Idu
		Conclusion
		Notes
		References
	21. Drinking scenes: Alcohol in the Francophone African novel
		Notes
		References
PART VI: Bodies, Subjectivities, Affect
	22. Desire and freedom in Yvonne Vera’s fiction
		Exiles from the future
		What is freedom to me? Nostalgia for the future
		Note
		Works cited
	23. The forms of shame and African literature
		Shame as form
		African literature and its shames
		Conclusion
		Notes
		References
	24. Scattered testimony: Locating the Rwandan genocide in transnational witnessing
		Introduction
		Reading the genocide through acts of displaced witnessing
		Addressing violent histories in transnational belonging: Binyavanga
Wainaina’s (2003) ‘Discovering Home’
		The meanings of silence: Yvonne Owuor’s (2003) ‘Weight of Whispers’
		Drama on a silent screen: Billy Kahora’s (2010) ‘The Gorilla’s Apprentice’
		Displacing empathetic witnessing
		Conclusion
		Notes
		Acknowledgement
		References
	25. Contestations through same-sex desire in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu
		Introduction
		Conclusion
		Notes
		Acknowledgement
		Works Cited
PART VII: Literary Networks
	26. The Story Club: African literary networks offline
		African literary clubs and networks
		Shadreck Chikoti: the face of the Story Club’s networks
		Face-to-face meetings and live crowdfunding
		Notes
		Bibliography
	27. Language and prizes: Exploring literary and cultural boundaries
		African literature and the awards industry
		Language and literary awards
		Conclusion
		Notes
		Works cited
	28. Publishers’ networks and the making of African literature: Locating communities of readers and writers
		Publishers’ networks and African literary production
		Launching Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus in Nigeria
		Launching Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write About This Place
in Kenya
		Disjunctures and intersections
		Conclusion
		Notes
		References
	29. Literary networks in the Horn of Africa: Oromo and Amharic intellectual histories
		Scholarship on Ethiopian and African literature
		Studying literary networks: theory and methodology
		Ethiopia: historical background
		Amharic and Oromo literary networks in the late nineteenth and twentieth century
		Notes
		References
Index