Overview

This book offers a compelling new approach to African literatures as formed by and itself a form of collective memory. It explores the historical spaces and maps that African literature brings to the surface and re-imagines in novel ways. The stories that matter about what happened in the past together constitute a collective memory that African writers and readers draw upon to locate themselves within the world. The book examines the mental maps that define the imaginative fields in which African literary texts have meaning. They provide answers to the questions that producers of texts must respond to: where stories are set, who writers write for, why writers write and how texts engage in meaning-making. It grapples with how writers imagine themselves contributing to a literary historiography and how readers get to understand the context within which texts are produced.

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9781009662321

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Author Information

Professor James Ogude is the Director at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria and is the author of Ngugi's Novels and African History. He has edited nine books and his most recent edited volumes include, Ubuntu and the Reconstitution of Community (2019) and Environmental Humanities of Extraction in Africa: Poetics and politics of Extraction (2023). Neil ten Kortenaar, professor at the University of Toronto, is the author of Debt, Law, Realism: Nigerian Writers Imagine the State at Independence (2021) and Postcolonial Literature and the Impact of Literacy: Reading and Writing in African and Caribbean Fiction (2011), and an associate editor of the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.

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