Hundreds of handwritten letters found in an archive have revealed the real import of the writer’s enduring influence.
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Articles on African literature
Displaying 41 - 60 of 60 articles
That none of his collections were published in apartheid South Africa testifies to the police state’s censorship.
An African literature lecturer shares how embodied teaching can help students feel that their lives and stories matter.
Brutus’s life was closely interlinked with the rise of apartheid and offered a way to look at resistance to this system.
A study of the late Keorapetse Kgositsile shows how the poet influenced black American culture. It also shows how his mother and his grandmother’s oral traditions in turn influenced him.
Crime fiction is the second most popular literary genre in Africa after romance. A reading of Kenyan author Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ’s Black Star Nairobi reveals how it has disrupted the genre.
Despite Nigeria’s draconian laws against homosexuality, authors like the award-winning Akwaekwe Emezi are important new voices that add complexity to the question of identity.
African academics draw up a reading list that speaks to the vibrancy of contemporary as well as older African literature.
It’s hailed as one of the greatest works of fiction to emerge from Africa. But Things Fall Apart was written in English, sparking debate about the colonisation of language.
Amos Tutuola has contributed significantly to the resilience of ways of life and worldviews that could easily have disappeared under the weight of colonialism, globalisation and the market economy.
Khanya College’s curriculum was quite different from the one taught at other universities of the time. Its students studied oral African literature and history alongside Western literature.
There is a thriving counter-current of transnational African literary life that confounds rather than caters to an international taste for “digestible” fiction.
How did Sol Plaatje, a man with only four years of formal schooling, become one of South Africa’s most brilliant and committed public educators?
Its critics complain that current Afrodiasporic literature is not in tune with everyday life on the continent. They see its versions of Africa as sanitised and Westernised.
Obioma’s novel struggles to get going, then splutters and stalls to an unimpressive conclusion.
Is there a place for Shakespeare in African schools, or is his time long past?
There’s a fierce debate underway about changing university curricula in Africa and the UK to be less Eurocentric. Three academics offer their suggestions for a decolonised reading list.
Evidence from an 18-month-old research project suggests that making elements of the Humanities curriculum more Afro-centric boosts student engagement.
There is a surfeit of book prizes. Big ones, small ones, ones that award experimental fiction, others that concentrate on female authors, or young authors, or authors from Ireland or Latin America. African…
In Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, the fictional character Whisky Sisodia comments that the “trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo…
Top contributors
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Associate Professor, Department of Literary Studies in English, Rhodes University
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Junior Research Fellow, University of Oxford
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Senior Lecturer, Stellenbosch University
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Professor of Practice, Aga Khan University Graduate School of Media and Communications (GSMC)
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Senior research fellow, University of the Western Cape
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Assistant Professor, American University of Paris (AUP)
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Senior Lecturer, University of Pretoria
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Professor, Department of Literary Studies in English, Rhodes University
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Adjunct Professor, Richmond American International University
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Associate Professor, University of Cape Town
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Tutor in West African Literature, University of Oxford
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Professor of English, University of Johannesburg
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Professor of Gender Studies, University of the Western Cape
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Associate Professor, Centre for Higher and Adult Education, Stellenbosch University
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Lecturer in English, SOAS, SOAS, University of London
