Ernest N. Emenyonu 
ALT 32 Politics & Social Justice: African Literature Today 

Examines some of the varied African literary responses to politics and social justice and injustice under colonialism/neocolonialism.


In 1965, Chinua Achebe, in his classic essay ‘The Novelist as Teacher’, declared that the ‘African past – with all its imperfections – was not one long night of savagery from which the early Europeans acting on God’s behalf, delivered them.’ That assertion included a still reverberating sentiment shared by many of the first generation of African writers that it is possible to reclaim that distorted past creatively in order to show and understand ‘where andwhen the rain started beating Africa’.

Many genres and forms of literary and cultural production have recalled and recorded and reconfigured that past – many projecting a new confident African future defined by self-determination. The spectrum of that complex engagement, which encompasses critical issues in politics and social justice, provides the basis of this volume, which concludes with tributes to the life and works of Kofi Awoonor.


Articles on:

Binyavanga Wainaina + Ben Okri & Nationhood + J.M. Coetzee & the Philosophy of Justice + Isidore Okpewho & ‘Manhood’ + Ngugi’s
Matigari & the Postcolonial Nation + Politics & Women in Irene Salami’s
More Than Dancing + Ayi Kwei Armah’s
The Resolutionaries


Ernest Emenyonu is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint, USA; the editorial board is composed of scholars from US, UK and African universities


Nigeria: HEBN

Tabela de Conteúdo

Editorial article: Fiction and Socio-Political Realities in Africa: What Else Can Literature Do? – Ernest N. Emenyonu

The Novel as an Oral Narrative Performance: The Delegitimization of the Postcolonial Nation in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s
Matigari Ma Njiruungi – Nicholas Kamau-Goro

The Novel as an Oral Narrative Performance: The Delegitimization of the Postcolonial Nation in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s
Matigari Ma Njiruungi – Emilia V. Ilieva

Abiku in Ben Okri’s Imagination of Nationhood: A Metaphorical Interpretation of Colonial-Postcolonial Politics – Ikenna Kamalu

Refracting the Political: Binyavanga Wainaina’s
One Day I Will Write About This Place – Rachel A. Knighton

Ayi Kwei Armah’s
The Resolutionaries: Exoteric Fiction, the Common People & Social Change in Post-Colonial Africa – A Critical Review – Edward Sackey

In Quest of Social Justice: Politics & Women’s Participation in Irene Isoken Salami’s
More Than Dancing – H. Oby Okolocha

Breaking the Laws in J. M. Coetzee’s
The Childhood of Jesus: Philosophy & the Notion of Justice – Laura Wright

The Rhetoric & Caricature of Social Justice in Post-1960 Africa: A Logical Positivist Reading of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s
Matigari – Eric Nsuh Zuhmboshi

‘Manhood’ in Isidore Okpewho’s
The Last Duty: Authority or Accountability? – Deborah L. Klein

REMEMBERING KOFI AWOONOR (13 March 1935 – 21 September 2013) I: Kofi Awoonor: In Retrospect – Kofi Anyidoho

II: Kofi Awoonor: Poem for a Mentor & Friend – Ghirmai Negash

III: Looking Death in the Eye: The Human Condition, Morbidity & Mortality in Kofi Awoonor’s Poetry – Mawuli Adjei

IV: Eulogy for an Artist, a Statesman, a Teacher & Friend: Kofi Awoonor – Richard Priebe

V: Postcolonial Trauma & the Poetics of Remembering the Novels of Kofi Awoonor – Prince K. Adika

VI: Song for Nyidevu – Kofi Anyidoho

Reviews – James Gibbs

Sobre o autor

Laura Wright is a Reader in English Language at the University of Cambridge, where she works on the history of English.