This volume 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. These studies stress the argument that African literature is hardly discussed outside contemporary history and that the reason for the apparent disconnection among groups in Africa and the diaspora can be traced to the disparate elements within the continent and diaspora.

The African novel occupies a central position in the criticism of colonial portrayal of the African continent and her people. [...] What is primary on his mind and central to his work is the urge to put the record straight and illuminate the threshold between past and present, thought and action, self and Other, and Africa and the world. [...] It is on the basis of the foregoing background that in this paper I propose to examine how post-colonial African novelists use their novels to facilitate the transgression of boundaries and subversion of hegemonic rigidities previously mapped out in precursor literary canonical texts about Africa and her people. [...] In Robinson Crusoe, Defoe leaps into the realm of ignorance about Africa and Africans, conceiving the terrain of the continent as peopled with cannibals, heathenism and rustic specimens in a primordial state of existence, and whose only knowledge of the spoken language is a chain of gibberish utterances. [...] In summary, the paper attempts to look at Coetzee, an African novelist who occupies a distinguished place at the very apex of the emerging counter-canon in African fiction and at only one of his books, Foe, which has already become something of a classic of this counter-canon.

The book Counter-narrative and Ambivalent Discourse towards Christianity in African Postcolonial Literature explores the encounters and conflicts between Christianity and African traditional culture represented in three African postcolonial literature: Achebe's Arrow of God, Thiong'o's The River Between, and p'Bitek's Song of Lawino. Using postcolonial perspective, this book reveals a counter-narrative discourse against the arrival of Christianity in the three African postcolonial literary works and highlights the ambivalent nature of this resistance, as the authors cannot escape the trap of conformity to Chtistianity and Western hegemony. Christianity, as a missionary and culturally-destructive religion in postcolonial Africa, is considered complex religion that can have both positive and negative effects on traditional African societies. While it can be a ideological tool of colonialism that destabilizes the fabric of local life, it also provides solutions to some local problems. This new religious belief disrupts the social structure and cultural traditional in the context of African postcolonial society.

Christianity and the African Counter-Discourse in Achebe and Beti: Cultures in Dialogue, Contest and Conflict intervenes, in light of African literary products, the history of Christianity in Africa in late 19th and early 20th centuries, goes beyond the existing clichés about the operations of the European Christian missionaries whether Protestant or Catholic in Africa, and opens alternative ways to read the chain of missionary-native African, and missionary-European colonists relationships. Christian missionaries did not come to Africa for: their own interests, the Christianization of Africa, European colonial projects, the interests of Africans, the establishment of European civilization in Africa, but came for all. Once, there was a dialogue between the Christian missionaries and pagan Africans which was in time replaced by contest for superiority, and finally by conflict. Accordingly, the countenance of the continent has changed forever.

This book discusses the psychological topography of Korean, Nigerian, and Indian people by exploring the counter-colonial discourse through the study of works by three writers - Yom Sang-Sop, Chinua Achebe and Salman Rushdie - counter-colonial discourse in the works of these three writers strikes back at powerful colonial discourses, Soonsik Kim successfully brings out the Third World «voice» against the colonial legacy of the West and gives readers a taste of being «the Other». This book marks a significant transition in the critical attention of Third World discourse from mere projection to subjective viewpoint.

This book "intervenes, in light of African literary products, the history of Christianity in Africa in late 19th and early 20th centuries, goes beyond the existing clichâes about the operations of the European Christian missionaries whether Protestant or Catholic in Africa, and opens alternative ways to read the chain of missionary-native African, and missionary-European colonists relationships. Christian missionaries did not come to Africa for their own interests, the Christianization of Africa, European colonial projects, the interests of Africans, the establishment of European civilization in Africa--but came for all. Once, there was a dialogue between the Christian missionaries and pagan Africans which was in time replaced by contest for superiority, and finally by conflict. Accordingly, the countenance of the continent has changed forever"--