EN 221 Literature of African Peoples: E-Books

The book examines how modern global development largely privileges Western multinational interests at the expense of local or indigenous concerns in the 'developing' nations of the East. The practices of development have mostly led not to economic, social, and political progressivism in local society but rather to instability, poverty, debt, and repression.

Offers trenchant, historically sensitive readings of writings by Coetzee, Gordimer, Fugard, Tlali, Dike, Magona, and Mda, focusing on the intimate relationship between place, subjectivity, and literary form. It also explores the way apartheid functioned in its day-to-day operations as a geographical system of control, exerting its power through such spatial mechanisms as residential segregation, bantustans, passes, and prisons.

Charts the widening frontiers of black literary aesthetics using the prose and dramatic fictions of writers from Africa and the African diaspora. The chapters come in two interactive phases of current critical discourses involving rejoinders from past-present concerns and issues of cultural and contemporary modernity.

Many African countries achieved independence from their colonizers over five decades ago, but the people and the continent largely remain mere spectators in the arena of their own dance. The post-independence states are supposed to be sovereign, but the levers of economic and political powers still reside in the donor states. Not in many fora is the complex reality that defines Africa more trenchantly articulated than in imaginative literature produced about and on the continent. On the whole, there is an overwhelming feeling of angst and pessimism, but the authors perceive a glimmer of hope despite daunting odds, under different conditions. Thus, they depict the plausible fate of Africa in the twenty-first century, as informed by its ancient and recent past, gleaned from primary texts.