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Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Notes on Contributors -- Preface -- Part I East and Central Africa -- Chapter 1 East and Central Africa: An Introduction -- African-Language Literatures and the Language Question -- The Makerere Conference -- The Abolition of the English Department -- Selected Writers -- Diasporic Imaginaries -- Present Directions -- Bibliography -- Chapter 2 Rereading East African Literature Through a Human Rights Lens: The Example of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Weep Not, Child -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Chapter 3 Of Authenticity and Engagement in Francophone African Cultural Production -- The African Author and the Duty Toward Engagement -- Language and Postcolonial Performance -- Cinema and African Postmodernisms -- Writing Without France: Defining New Approaches -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Chapter 4 Literature and Hybridity in Mauritius and Réunion -- Language and Literacy -- The Colonial Novel and Hybridity -- Fluid Hybridities in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Chapter 5 The Representation of Nation and National Identity in Modern Amharic Literature -- Constructing and Narrating the Modern Nation, 1896-1960 -- Walks on a Thin Line between Hope and Despair, 1960-1974 -- The Quest for Hibretesebawinet, 1974-1991 -- The Phoenix Rises from the Ashes of Ethnic Strife: 1991 to Present -- The Politics of Authorship, Language, and Identity -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Chapter 6 Swahili Literature (Fasihi ya Kiswahili) -- Introduction: The Intercultural Heritage -- Oral Literature/Orature (Fasihi Tamshi) -- Early Writing: Beginnings in Religious Verse -- The Rise of Secular Writing -- Poetry of the Nonconforming "Modernists" -- Prose -- Drama and Theater -- Women Writers and Gender Concerns -- Swahili Translations -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Part II North Africa. "This book is designed to serve as research resource for scholars, teachers, and students of African literature and related fields like world literature, comparative literary studies, and postcolonial studies. A Companion to African Literatures contains twenty-eight historically grounded and theoretically informed essays written by experts in the diverse subfields in the study of African literatures. The intended audience includes specialists, teachers, and students of modern African literature, as well as non-specialists in ancillary fields. In contemporary literary studies, notions of "world literature" and "globalism" have become central and influential. Here, the notion of world literature is to be understood as a set of theoretical perspectives and protocols of interpretation, rather than simply a corpus of literary works. In the turn to broad transnational perspectives, there is always a risk of de-emphasizing the specific backgrounds, thematic concerns, and significant transformations that characterize African literatures. This volume addresses the need for richly contextualized accounts of the diversity of literary production on the African continent. Taken as discrete individual chapters or as a whole, the volume will be useful to specialists and non-specialists in their research; it will likewise be useful to teachers who seek rigorous and lucid essays that can be assigned in college courses. With regard to genres and forms, A Companion to African Literatures covers novels, poetry, dramatic literature, nonfiction, and film. The focus is mainly on modern African literatures from around the nineteenth century. Even though literatures in Amharic, Arabic and Swahili date much farther back, in order to make the volume manageable the focus is on the historical span that extends from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first"--
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