The Locations and Dislocations of African Literature: A Dialogue Between Humanities and Social Science Scholars brings together classic studies by some of the best known scholars in the field. It places these studies for the first time in disciplinary frameworks and alongside one another, as in the several conversations that gave rise to them. In essence, the book puts Africanist humanities and social science scholars in rigorous and productive dialogue with one another.

This Element explores the mechanisms through which 'African literature', as a market category, has been consecrated within the global literary field. Drawing on archival, textual and field-based research, it proposes that the normative story of African literary writing has functioned to efface a broader material history of African literary production located on and oriented to the continent itself.

Here is an introduction to the history of English writing from East and West Africa drawing on a range of texts from the slave diaspora to the post-war upsurge in African English language and literature from these regions.

This special issue focuses on literary texts by African writers in which the protagonist returns to his/her "original" or ancestral "home" in Africa from other parts of the world. Ideas of return - intentional and actual - have been a consistent feature of the literature of Africa and the African diaspora: from Equiano's autobiography in 1789 to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 2013 novel Americanah. African literature has represented returnees in a range of locations and dislocations including having a sense of belonging, being alienated in a country they can no longer recognize, or experiencing a multiple sense of place. Contributors, writing on literature from the 1970s to the present, examine the extent to which the original place can be reclaimed with or without renegotiations of "home" --

Explores intellectual currents in African prose and verse from sung or chanted lines to modern writings