This book volume engages the emergent ways and exercises of world-making in eastern African literatures and cultures. It also includes how the world comes to eastern Africa as well as how eastern Africa speaks to the world. Writers within the region have come up with novel commentaries on diverse social issues. Artists and other users have invented new forms of expression through digitalization. The structure and content of this literature and cultural conversations, in line with modernity, has exhibited a fluidity that calls for the critical appraisal carried out in this book. Therefore, this book volume centralises the emergence of new patterns of engagement in the literatures and cultures of the region. Taking cue from the cultural transformations, technological advancements and political influences, the volume raises questions on politics, conflict and war, and the evolving genres and canon. The book crosses language barriers beyond English and includes critical attention to texts written in the Swahili and French languages. The chapters aim to give a broad overview of the writings and cultural expressions in the eastern African region, including novels, films, short stories, theatre, poetry, oral, and digital performances. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: An Overview of Trends in Eastern African Literatures and Cultures Oduor Obura Part One: The Evolving Literary Canon Literary Disruptions of the Ugandan Canon in Selected Ugandan Short Stories Edgar Nabutanyi A Discipline under Siege: Interrogating the Place of Literature in English in the Secondary School Curriculum in Tanzania Obala Musumba Cartographies of Killing: Transnational Drones in Eye in the Sky Jana Fedtke Performing in the Cyber Space: The Online Mchongoano Battles Kimingichi Wabende Mobile Phones in the Public Space: Communication as Contextual Cultural Practice in Kenya James Ogone Part Two: Conflict, Politics, and War Narrating Violence in Burundian Genocide and Civil War Literat

This book investigates the thematic and conceptual dimensions of insidious trauma in contemporary eastern African literatures and cultural productions. The book extends our understanding of trauma beyond people’s immediate and conventional experiences of disastrous events and incidents, instead considering how trauma is sustained in the aftermaths, continuing to impact livelihoods, and familial, social, and gender relationships. Drawing on different circumstances and experiences across and between the eastern African region, the book explores how emerging cultural practices involve varying modes of narrating, representing, and thematising insidious trauma. In doing so, the book considers different forms and practices of cultural production, including fashion, social media, film, and literature, in order to uncover how human subjects and cultural artefacts circulate through modalities of social, cultural and political ecologies. Transdisciplinary in scope and showcasing the work of experts from across the region, this book will be an important guide for researchers across literature, media studies, sociology, and trauma studies.

The Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures series offers stimulating and accessible introductions to definitive topics and key genres and regions within the rapidly diversifying field of postcolonial literary studies in English. This volume offers an overview of contemporary Eastern African writing in English since the mid-twentieth century. It takes a fresh look at what has been an under-represented regional literary tradition within what continues to be an under-represented continental literary tradition. In particular, it broadens the scope of such an overview, complementing the extant monographs on well-known Eastern African writers such as Ngũgĩ to include a host of more recent, less-publicized novelists, dramatists, and poets. It extends the geographical range of existing studies from the familiar triad of Kenyan, Ugandan, and Tanzanian traditions of writing in English, to include the lesser-known Somali, Ethiopian, or Sudanese, or Mauritian or Madagascan traditions. Rather than simply addressing national traditions or broad thematic bundles, the volume treats works as literatures of a region: that is, as literatures of place and space. Eastern African Literatures stresses the formative role of space, place and geography in fashioning the fabric of social interaction, whether individual or collective, in generating history, in moulding identities, and as a consequence in defining the shape of the future. The 'spatial' perspectives allow the 'proximate' rather than the 'distant' influence of literary art to come into view. Proximate modes of literary communication, arising out of residual but vibrant traditions of oral communication, blend with contemporary media to produce hybrid genres of proximity specific to Eastern African literary production. In this way, the book also makes a contribution to the ongoing theorization of literary and cultural innovation in the cultures of the Global South.

The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English Since 1945 challenges the conventional belief that the English-language literary traditions of East Africa are restricted to the former British colonies of Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. Instead, these traditions stretch far into such neighboring countries as Somalia and Ethiopia. Simon Gikandi and Evan Mwangi assemble a truly inclusive list of major writers and trends. They begin with a chronology of key historical events and an overview of the emergence and transformation of literary culture in the region. Then they provide an alphabetical list of major writers and brief descriptions of their concerns and achievements. Some of the writers discussed include the Kenyan novelists Grace Ogot and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Ugandan poet and essayist Taban Lo Liyong, Ethiopian playwright and poet Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin, Tanzanian novelist and diplomat Peter Palangyo, Ethiopian novelist Berhane Mariam Sahle-Sellassie, and the novelist M. G. Vassanji, who portrays the Indian diaspora in Africa, Europe, and North America. Separate entries within this list describe thematic concerns, such as colonialism, decolonization, the black aesthetic, and the language question; the growth of genres like autobiography and popular literature; important movements like cultural nationalism and feminism; and the impact of major forces such as AIDS/HIV, Christian missions, and urbanization. Comprehensive and richly detailed, this guide offers a fresh perspective on the role of East Africa in the development of African and world literature in English and a new understanding of the historical, cultural, and geopolitical boundaries of the region.

The most comprehensive reference work on African literature to date, this book covers all the key historical and cultural issues in the field. The Encyclopedia contains over 600 entries covering criticism and theory, African literature's development as a field of scholarship, and studies of established and lesser-known writers and their texts. While the greatest proportion of literary work in Africa has been a product of the twentieth century, the Encyclopedia also covers the literature back to the earliest eras of story-telling and oral transmission, making this a unique and valuable resource for those studying social sciences as well as humanities. This work includes cross-references, suggestions for further reading, and a comprehensive index.

Rediscover the diversity of modern African literatures with this authoritative resource edited by a leader in the field How have African literatures unfolded in their rich diversity in our modern era of decolonization, nationalisms, and extensive transnational movement of peoples? How have African writers engaged urgent questions regarding race, nation, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality? And how do African literary genres interrelate with traditional oral forms or audio-visual and digital media? A Companion to African Literatures addresses these issues and many more. Consisting of essays by distinguished scholars and emerging leaders in the field, this book offers rigorous, deeply engaging discussions of African literatures on the continent and in diaspora. It covers the four main geographical regions (East and Central Africa, North Africa, Southern Africa, and West Africa), presenting ample material to learn from and think with. A Companion To African Literatures is divided into five parts. The first four cover different regions of the continent, while the fifth part considers conceptual issues and newer directions of inquiry. Chapters focus on literatures in European languages officially used in Africa -- English, French, and Portuguese -- as well as homegrown African languages: Afrikaans, Amharic, Arabic, Swahili, and Yoruba. With its lineup of lucid and authoritative analyses, readers will find in A Companion to African Literatures a distinctive, rewarding academic resource. Perfect for undergraduate and graduate students in literary studies programs with an African focus, A Companion to African Literatures will also earn a place in the libraries of teachers, researchers, and professors who wish to strengthen their background in the study of African literatures.

The profound effects of colonialism and its legacies on African cultures have led postcolonial scholars of recent African literature to characterize contemporary African novels as, first and foremost, responses to colonial domination by the West. In Africa Writes Back to Self, Evan Maina Mwangi argues instead that the novels are primarily engaged in conversation with each other, particularly over emergent gender issues such as the representation of homosexuality and the disenfranchisement of women by male-dominated governments. He covers the work of canonical novelists Nadine Gordimer, Chinua Achebe, NguÅgiÅ wa Thiong'o, and J. M. Coetzee, as well as popular writers such as Grace Ogot, David Maillu, Promise Okekwe, and Rebeka Njau. Mwangi examines the novels' self-reflexive fictional strategies and their potential to refigure the dynamics of gender and sexuality in Africa and demote the West as the reference point for cultures of the Global South.