Rethinking Négritude through Léon-Gontran Damas analyses four cases in which Damasian Négritude shifted through generic experimentation: Pigments (1937), Retour de Guyane (1938), Veillées noires (1943) and Black-Label (1956). In doing so, it also advances scholarship on Damas (1912–1978) in two ways. On the one hand, it undertakes the crucial and in-depth research needed to challenge the understanding of Négritude as a bipartite (Césaire and Senghor) phenomenon. On the other hand, it offers an innovative reading of Damas whose work deserves more complete consideration than it has received thus far. Reading this essay will illuminate Damas’s works and their relationship to one another, thus demonstrating the continuity of Damasian Négritude. F. Bart Miller holds a PhD in French Studies from the University of Liverpool. He is a specialist in French Caribbean Literature, and his other publications have appeared in International Journal of Francophone Studies, Romance Studies and in the volume Adaptation: Studies in French and Francophone Culture, in the series Modern French Identities, with Peter Lang publishers.

The Negritude Movement provides readers with not only an intellectual history of the Negritude Movement but also its prehistory (W.E.B. Du Bois, the New Negro Movement, and the Harlem Renaissance) and its posthistory (Frantz Fanon and the evolution of Fanonism). By viewing Negritude as an “insurgent idea” (to invoke this book’s intentionally incendiary subtitle), as opposed to merely a form of poetics and aesthetics, The Negritude Movement explores Negritude as a “traveling theory” (à la Edward Said’s concept) that consistently crisscrossed the Atlantic Ocean in the twentieth century: from Harlem to Haiti, Haiti to Paris, Paris to Martinique, Martinique to Senegal, and on and on ad infinitum. The Negritude Movement maps the movements of proto-Negritude concepts from Du Bois’s discourse in The Souls of Black Folk through to post-Negritude concepts in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. Utilizing Negritude as a conceptual framework to, on the one hand, explore the Africana intellectual tradition in the twentieth century, and, on the other hand, demonstrate discursive continuity between Du Bois and Fanon, as well as the Harlem Renaissance and Negritude Movement, The Negritude Movement ultimately accents what Negritude contributed to arguably its greatest intellectual heir, Frantz Fanon, and the development of his distinct critical theory, Fanonism. Rabaka argues that if Fanon and Fanonism remain relevant in the twenty-first century, then, to a certain extent, Negritude remains relevant in the twenty-first century.

The essays in this volume capture the exciting energy of the emergent novel in East and West Africa, drawing on diffe¬rent theoretical insights to offer fresh and engaging perspectives on what has been variously termed the ‘new wave’, ‘emer¬gent generation’, and ‘third generation’. Subjects addressed include the politics of identity, especially when (re)constructed outside the homeland or when African indigenous values are eroded by globaliz¬ation, transnationalism, and the exilic condition or the self undergoes fragmen¬tation. Other essays examine once-taboo concerns, including gendered accounts of same-sex sexualities. Most of the essays deal with shifting perceptions by African women of their social condition in patriarchy in relation to such issues as polygamy, adultery, male domination, and the woman’s quest for fulfilment and respect through access to quality education and full economic and socio-political participation. Themes taken up by other novels examined in¬clude the sexual exploitation of women and criminality generally and the ex¬posure of children to violence. Likewise examined is the contemporary textual¬izing of orality (the trickster figure). Writers discussed include Chima¬manda Ngozi Adichie, Okey Ndibe, Helon Habila, Ike Oguine, Chris Abani, Tanure Ojaide, Maik Nwosu, Unoma Azuah, Jude Dibia, Lola Shoneyin, Mary Karooro Okurut, Violet Barungi, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, Abidemi Sanusi, Akachi Ezeigbo, Sefi Atta, Kaine Agary, Kojo Laing, Ahmadou Kourouma, Uwen Akpan, and Alobwed’Epie Ogaga Okuyade teaches popular/folk culture, African literature and culture, African American and African diasporic studies, and the English novel in the Department of English and Literary Studies, Niger Delta University, Wilberforce Island, Nigeria. He has guest-edited special issues of ARIEL and Imbizo, and is the editor of Eco-Critical Literature: Regreening African Landscapes (2013).

Translation—as a concept—has become central to postcolonial theory in recent decades, offering useful insights and metaphors for the processes explored within the framework of postcolonial studies. But translation itself is still an underexplored activity within this discipline. Intimate Enemies rights this wrong, weaving together reflections on translation by translators, authors, and academics working in regions of Africa, the Caribbean, and nations in the Indian Ocean. Moving beyond the traditional view of translation as betraying, at some level, original texts, the contributors instead highlight the potential for translation to counter the destructive effects of globalization, promote linguistic diversity, and reveal the dynamic political and economic contexts in which books are written, sold, and read.

Women Telling Nations highlights how, from the 16th to the 19th centuries, European women, as readers and writers, contributed to the construction of national identities. The book, which presents twenty countries, is divided into four parts. First, we examine how women belonged to nations: they represented territories and political or religious communities in their own style. Second, we deal with the ways in which women wrote the nation: the network of relationships in which they were involved that were not necessarily national or territorial. The legitimation that women writers succeeded in finding is emphasised in the third section, while in the fourth we analyse how and why women were open to the outside world, beyond the country’s borders. Women Telling Nations underlines the quantitative importance of the circulation of these women’s writings and demonstrates the extent as well as the impact of the international cross-fertilisation of nations, especially by and for women: focusing on routes rather than roots.

Moving Spaces: Creolisation and Mobility in Africa, the Atlantic and Indian Ocean addresses issues of creolisation, mobility, and migration of ideas, songs, stories, and people, as well as plants, in various parts of Africa, the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean worlds. It brings together Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone specialists from various fields – anthropology, geography, history, language & literary studies – from Africa, Brazil, Europe, and the Indo-Pacific. It is a book which, while opening new perspectives, also intriguingly suggests that languages are essential to all processes of creolisation, and that therefore the latter cannot be understood without reference to the former. Its strength therefore lies in bringing together studies from different language domains, particularly Afrikaans, Creole, English, French, Portuguese, and Sanskrit. Contributors include Andrea Acri, Joaze Bernardino, Marina Berthet, Alain Kaly, Uhuru Phalafala, Haripriya Rangan, Fernando Rosa, António Tomás and Shaun Viljoen.

C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins remains one of the great works of the twentieth century and the cornerstone of Haitian revolutionary studies. In Making The Black Jacobins, Rachel Douglas traces the genesis, transformation, and afterlives of James's landmark work across the decades from the 1930s on. Examining the 1938 and 1963 editions of The Black Jacobins, the 1967 play of the same name, and James's 1936 play, Toussaint Louverture—as well as manuscripts, notes, interviews, and other texts—Douglas shows how James continuously rewrote and revised his history of the Haitian Revolution as his politics and engagement with Marxism evolved. She also points to the vital significance theater played in James's work and how it influenced his views of history. Douglas shows The Black Jacobins to be a palimpsest, its successive layers of rewriting renewing its call to new generations.