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"Offers a compelling new approach to African literatures as a collective memory built over the years by generations of authors. It considers what African writers assume readers know and need to know, the shared sense of the past as it has shaped identity and space"--
List of contents
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.
About the author
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.
