African Literature in the World

Simon Gikandi is Class of 1943 University Professor of English at Princeton University. He is a scholar of the literatures of Africa and its diasporas, and postcolonial criticism, and the author of many award-winning books including Slavery and the Culture of Taste (2011), winner of the James Russell Lowell Award.

• Acknowledgements; Introduction: African literature in the world; Part I. The Criticism of African Literature; 1. This thing called literature…what work does it do?; 2. Provincializing English; 3. The (de)formation of English; 4. The politics of African literary criticism; 5. Africa in poststructuralism; 6. Orality and the writing lesson; Part II. The Cultural Work of the Novel; 7. Realism, romance, and the problem of African literary history; 8. Romance, tragedy, and the narrative of decolonization; 9. Transporting fiction: the novel in a (post)colonial world; 10. Cultural translation and the task of writing; 11. Arrow of God: the novel and the problem of modern time; Part III. On Modernity/Modernism; 12. African literature and the colonial factor; 13. African literature and modernity; 14. Reading the referent: postcolonialism and the writing of modernity; 15. On modernism and nationalism: the short African century; 16. African and the idea of the aesthetic; Select bibliography; Index.

'This indispensable volume by a preeminent scholar offers fresh ways to think about African writing and literary criticism in the context of world literature. Always alert to the global locations of authors, readers, scholars, and ideas, Simon Gikandi examines the shifting histories of literary genres, questions the limits of postcolonial theory, and reflects on the role of intellectuals in African literary criticism. In the process, he reimagines colonial identity and modernity, and rethinks debates about the language of African literature. The intellectual honesty of this volume rubs off on readers as Gikandi blends cultural history with theory, personal reflections, and close readings.' Stephanie Newell, George M. Bodman Professor of English