Why did the novel take such a long time to emerge in the colonial world? And, what cultural work did it come to perform in societies where subjects were not free and modes of social organization diverged from the European cultural centers where the novel gained its form and audience? Answering these questions and more, Volume 11, The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean since 1950 explores the institutions of cultural production that exerted influence in late colonialism, from missionary schools and metropolitan publishers to universities and small presses. How these structures provoke and respond to the literary trends and social peculiarities of Africa and the Caribbean impacts not only the writing and reading of novels in those regions, but also has a transformative effect on the novel as a global phenomenon. Together, the volume's 32 contributing experts tell a story about the close relationship between the novel and the project of decolonization, and explore the multiple ways in which novels enable readers to imagine communities beyond their own and thus made this form of literature a compelling catalyst for cultural transformation. The authors show that, even as the novel grows in Africa and the Caribbean as a mark of the elites' mastery of European form, it becomes the essential instrument for critiquing colonialism and for articulating the new horizons of cultural nationalism. Within this historical context, the volume examines works by authors such as Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, George Lamming, Jamaica Kincaid, V.S. Naipaul, Zoe Wicomb, J. M. Coetzee, and many others.

This book draws on the case of the Shona and other Bantu people of Africa to argue that names are not mere identity tags. Names are an important cultural symbol of the people who give and bear them. The book challenges linguists and other social scientists to pay particular attention to the significance of names in the study of language use in society. Equally, it demonstrates the importance of names as part of the distinctive repertoire of Shona cultural heritage. Each Shona sentential name is a statement about that reality of being Shona. Carried in each name are sentiments that reflect on prevalent social, economic and political relations. The book focuses in particular on social names, religious names and war names inspired by such events as Zimbabwe's war of liberation.

THIS IS AN NJR - NOT JACKET BLURB, DO NOT USE IT THIS RAW FORM -This new and original work is the only recent monographic treatment of the Zimbabwean novel and its political implications. An earlier one by Veit-Wild (1992) has not been updated, and other, such as that by Zhuwarara (2001), are not easily available outside Zimbabwe. The author resided in Zimbabwe for almost a decade and has visited the country regularly in the last five years. She has published extensively on Zimbabwean literature, and brings to her work a deep contextual richness as well as theoretical sophistication. Thoroughly up-to-date, the book examines all the published novels of the recently-deceased Yvonne Vera (d. April 2005) as well as major novels of five other internationally-acclaimed Zimbabwean writers, including Tsitsi Dangarembga and Chenjerai Hove. It does so against a political backdrop which goes right up to the March 2005 parliamentary elections. The book provides a modern and original historical account of post-independence Zimbabwean writing and its relationship to history and politics. The critical investigation focuses on fictional representations of space-time – which links the book the tragically topical Zimbabwean issue of land. Dr Primorac employs a form of literary and cultural theory reminiscent of Bakhtinian analysis, but drawn at length from East European theoretical sources. She investigates what the novels have to say about the Zimbabwean condition, and makes a sophisticated link between ideas about space-time and novelistic ideologies. More than that, drawing a parallel with the experience of Eastern Europe, she shows how the novel itself breaks out of the confines of the quasi-Marxist analysis which still holds sway in Zimbabwe. As such, the Zimbabwean novel is itself a source of hope in that troubled land. Ranka Primorac has degrees from the universities of Zagreb, Zimbabwe and Nottingham Trent. She has taught Africa-related courses at several institutions of higher learning in Britain, including the University of Cambridge and New York University in London. She is interested in non-western writing and cultures, theoretical approaches to the novel and the narrative production of space-time. Her co-edited volume, Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to Literature and Culture was published in 2005 by Weaver Press in Harare.

This book examines the complex and multifaceted nature of African Pentecostal engagements with genders and sexualities. In the last three decades, African Pentecostalism has emerged as one the most visible and profound aspects of religious change on the continent, and is a social force that straddles cultural, economic, and political spheres. Its conventional and selective literal interpretations of the Bible with respect to gender and sexualities are increasingly perceived as exhibiting a strong influence on many aspects of social and public institutions and their moral orientations. This collection features articles which examine sexualities and genders in African Pentecostalism using interdisciplinary methodological and theoretical approaches grounded within traditional African thought systems, with the goal of enabling a broader understanding of Pentecostalism and sexualities in Africa.

The book analyses how Africans and Africa relate to other parts of the multilateral world, and to the world in general, and how these relations stem from local, national and regional interactions in different parts of Africa, as well as Africa as a whole. The first part focuses on the assumptions that are necessary to understand the role of Africa on the global stage, especially from the perspectives of political philosophy and global and international studies. The second part of the book looks at both Afropolitan trends and the limits of Afropolitanism. In the third part the authors focus on specific African global tendencies stemming from the local conditions in several case studies. Traditional and modern politics is connected, problematically, with the current Jihadist organisations in the local African conditions related to unilateralism and global war on terror, for example. The fourth part deals with the relevance of the language ambivalence in relation to global interactions. It examines various views of African philosophy and lays bare the perception of earlier colonial languages in view of their current strength of global action. This book will be of interest to scholars of African studies, political philosophy, politics and global studies.