African Literature and Social Change Tribe, Nation, Race [Hardcover]

Alert to the ways in which critical theory and imaginative literature can enrich each other, African Literature and Social Change reframes the ongoing project of African literature. Concentrating on texts that are not usually considered together--writings by little-known black missionaries, so called black whitemen, and better-known 20th century intellectuals and creative writers--Olakunle George shows the ways in which these writings have addressed notions of ethnicity, nation, and race and how the debates need to be rehistoricized today. George presents Africa as a site of complex desires and contradictions, refashioning the way African literature is positioned within current discussions of globalism, diaspora, and postcolonialism.

A new and welcome addition to the field of African literary studies, Olakunle GeorgesAfrican Literature and Social Changeis dense where it needs to be and glories in productive close readings when its objects call for it.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Missionary Moments
1. Crossing Currents: Postcoloniality, Globalism, Diaspora
2. Mission Tide: Bishop S. A. Crowther and the Black Whitemen
3. Decolonization Time: Abrahams, James, Wright
4. Globalization Time: Achebe, Soyinka, and Beyond
Epilogue: Gaps
Bibliography
Index

Olakunle George rethinks the entirety of African literature by considering texts from the 19th century and mid-20th century alongside canonical texts by Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and others, and thus expands the standard canon of African literature which begins roughly at independence in 1960.

Olakunle George is Associate Professor at Brown University. He is author of Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters and coeditor of The Encyclopedia of the Novel.

This book is a bold exploration of the complexity of different modes of writing about Africa in the context of current debates on the nature of the literary in the production of African knowledge. Concernedl³,