The goal of this book is to initiate theoretical discussions on the popular subject of African literary language, and the thrust of the contribution, apart from theory-building, is the introduction of the Post-indiginist concept next to the well known essentialist and hybrid concepts. The study outlines a set of criteria for each aesthetic concept, so that literary analysis based on the criteria will verify whether or not they are adequate for understanding, explaining and describing African writers' language usage. It is expected that a language aesthetic theory in the African context may help in the study of individual writers' styles and equally address a neglect of descriptive studies in African literary scholarship.

This book presents a contour of the literary theories and critical approaches in modern African drama. Theories are discussed against the backdrop of modern African drama and include Symbolism, Naturalism, Nativism, the quest for Indigenous Aesthetics, Oral Narratives, Narratology, Marxism, Cultural Materialism, Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Psycho-analytic criticism, New Historicism, Ecocriticism, Feminism, Postcolonialism and Intertextuality. The objective is to offer researchers and scholars of modern African drama a comprehensive approach of the discipline of African drama from theoretical perspective. Critical debates on the possibility of reading African drama with the lenses of contemporary literary theories have been controversial among critics of African literature. Some critics have been asserting that African drama should be theory-free in its intellectual and scholarly interpretation. Others opine that modern African drama should be analyzed within the mainstream of African literature alongside the novel and poetry. This book seeks to revert these views by pointing out the importance of theories in the interpretation and understanding of African drama.

Presents eight twentieth-century plays from seven African countries, along with explanatory notes and over thirty background writings and works of criticism.

Ngugi wrote his first novels and plays in English but was determined, even before his detention without trial in 1978, to move to writing in Gikuyu.

This ambitious publication centers indigenous perspectives on traditional artworks from Africa by focusing on the judgments and vocabularies of members of the communities who created and used them. It explores cross-cultural affinities spanning the African continent while respecting local contexts; it also documents an exhibition that is extraordinary in scope and scale. The project's overriding goal is to reconsider Western evaluations of these arts in both aesthetic and financial terms. The volume features nearly 300 works from collections around the world and from the important holdings of the Art Institute of Chicago. Although it emphasizes the sculptural legacy of sub-Saharan cultures from West and Central Africa, it also includes examples of artistic traditions associated with eastern and southern Africa as well as textiles and objects designed for domestic, ritual, and decorative functions.00Exhibition: Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX, USA (03.04. - 31.07.2022) / Art Institute of Chicago, USA (20.11.2022 - 27.02.2023).

The papers in this volume focus on fiction and theatre in their traditional forms as well as in their encounters with novel and innovative forms and avenues of dissemination. As a cultural practice that emerged from a process of protest and contestation of hegemony, it is understandable that one main concern in African literature and literary criticism is the resistance against the emergence of marginalizing centers in formerly or currently marginalized societies with regard to discourses, aesthetics and media of creation. These new centers that sometimes undermine the strategic/tactical exploitation of the relative advantage procured by each medium run the risk of leading to new forms of stratification that mitigate the import of African and African diasporic literatures. The collection of essays therefore seeks to analyze the representation of pertinent socio-political and historical questions in a variety of postcolonial texts from Africa and the African diasporas, notably the Caribbean islands and the United States of America. However, far from re-writing of history in a way that cedes to conservative worldviews, creative writers and critics simultaneously attempt to chart ways forward for socially all-inclusive futures. In the context of colonial and neo-colonial legacies that seem to forestall any sense of individual and collective self-fulfillment, contributors to this volume examine the pertinence of African fiction and theatre in imagining new vistas of re-conceptualizing the postcolonial condition in ways that re-galvanize the belief in an enabling future.