Africa's Narrative Geographies

Dustin Crowley is a Lecturer at the University of Kansas, USA.

• Introduction: Charting a Path for Geocriticism 1. "My Black Land": Senghor's Construction of "Africa" 2. Place and Scale in Ng?g?'s "Universal Garden" 3. Imagining the Global Village: Bessie Head's Narratives of Migration and Boundaries 4. Cosmopolitan Somalia: Place and Identity in Farah's Maps and Links 5. Half Slum, Half Paradise: Abani's Global Cities Conclusion: The Landscape of Geocritical Inquiry: Finding Common Ground for Geocriticism and Ecocriticism

“Africa’s Narrative Geographies: Charting the Intersections of Geocriticism and Postcolonial Studies addresses these overlapping and mutually reinforcing critical practices, while also providing analyses of key works of modern African literature. It is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship involving spatial and postcolonial approaches to literary studies.” (Sirsha Nandi, Transnational Literature, Vol. 11 (1), December, 2019)“Crowley’s attentiveness to and illustrations of how ‘the nature of place provides the means for both hegemonic control and the challenge to hegemony’, which inspires a perspective that precludes any easy dissociation of resistance and liberation from the power to dominate. … the reader gets rich and detailed insight into the historical, social, and political aspects of the matters of place, space, and scales in African literature.” (Sten Pultz Moslund, ARIEL, January, 2018)“The breadth of primary readings covered in Africa’s Narrative Geographies, which span across each individual author’s oeuvre, as well as the generic diversity of the works covered (including poetry, prose, and drama), is a real strength … . Africa’s Narrative Geographies will be of interest to students and scholars looking for an entry-point to the spatial turn in African literary studies. … a welcome addition to this emerging subdiscipline.” (Madhu Krishnan, Research in African Literatures, Vol. 47 (4), 2016)