West African Literatures

Stephanie Newell is Reader in English Literature at the University of Sussex. Her research interests include West African literature, African newspaper culture, African readerships, and postcolonial theory. She has published widely on African popular culture and West African newspaper history. Her most recent books include two studies of West African popular literature and a queer history of colonial West Africa, The Forger's Tale: The Search for 'Odeziaku'.

• West African Timeline ; Introduction: Where is 'West Africa'? ; 1. Negritude ; 2. Facing East: Islam and Identity in West African Literature ; 3. Oral Literatures ; 4. Lost and Found in Translation ; 5. Things Fall Apart: Presence and Palimpsest in the Colonial-Scape ; 6. Popular Literature ; 7. Griots with Pens in their Hands: Literary Experiments with Oral Genres, 1960s-1990s ; 8. Feminism and the Complex Space of Women's Writing ; 9. Marxism and West African Literature ; 10. The Three 'Posts': Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, Postcolonialism ; 11. Experimental Writing by the 'Third Generation' ; 12. 'Queering' West African Gender Theory: Calixthe Beyala, Werewere Liking, and Veronique Tadjo ; Conclusion: West Africa in Postcolonial Theory

The first books in this series are exemplary. Newell, Patke, and Keown all achieve the difficult task of combining accessible, wide-ranging and authoritative introductions to particular areas and genres with new perspectives and fresh insights into specific texts. I found them remarkably readable and rewarding.