This compendium brings together, in one volume for the first time, Obumselu’s highly celebrated work on African literature. With the dialectic of cultures as the presiding preoccupation of his work, and appraising the place of African literature in the universal scheme of cultural interchange his critical speciality, Obumselu espoused a scholarship with a necessarily indispensable comparative dimension, as the articles anthologised in this volume as African literature reveal. The expertise with which he explores the oeuvres of many Western writers because of the light they shed on the creative endeavours of African writers is offset only by the rigour with which he explores the transformative impact of indigenous African literature on the craft of many distinguished African writers. Obumselu’s discovery of a tradition of the African novel almost entirely rooted in the poetics of African folklore, which began with Mofolo and Plaatje and blossomed in Camara Laye and Ben Okri, is a highlight of his incisive scholarship and reverberates through many of the works here. The originality of his insights, his analytic rigour, the catholicity of his tastes and competences, and the power and grace of his expression make this volume compelling.

Beyond the critical examination of Isidore Diala’s award-winning poetry and drama, the essays in this collection offer fresh insights on the complex methodological and theoretical patterns underlying the readings of African literary landscapes. This is the first book to devote considerable attention to the study of Diala’s creative works The Pyre (drama) and The Lure of Ash (poetry). The majority of the contributors here are selected from among the finest of Diala’s former teachers, colleagues and students who know him very closely. The collection addresses fertile areas of African literary expression, such as the relationship between literature and national history, African ritual aesthetics; affirmation, denial and ambivalence as products of social constructions; and exile, migration and home-coming. Contributions also explore poetry and poetic truths; semiotics; anticolonial revolutions and postcolonial implosions; oil politics; discontent and militancy; and feminism and gender politics. The book stands out among its peers, and offers great insights to scholars, researchers and teachers working in the fields of African literature, cultures and aesthetics.

Offering an insight into African culture that had not been portrayed before, Things Fall Apart is the tragic story of an individual set in the wider context of colonialism, as well as a powerful and complex political statement of cross-cultural encounters. This guide offers an accessible introduction to the text and contexts of Things Fall Apart, surveying the many interpretations of the text from publication to the present and the critical material that surrounds it.

In African studies, the “Echeruoan ideal” is understood as an intervention or intellectual engagement characterized by a broadness of vision as well as a depth of analysis. The essays gathered in this volume celebrate that ideal and honor Echeruo’s contribution to the African intellectual tradition. Editors Nwosu and Obiwu explore the driving forces in the literature of Africa and the African diaspora. Contributors examine such themes as migration and exile, trauma and repression, violence and rebellion, and gender and human rights. Showcasing a rich diversity of cultural and academic backgrounds, this volume inaugurates a new paradigm for further examination of African literature as world literature and for analysis of African literature through the lens of psychoanalytic semiotics. While varied in modes of inquiry, the essays are unified in their ambition to explore new theoretical directions, reinvigorating the conversation around how African literature is read and studied.

ALT 36 turns a queer eye on Africa, offering provocative (re-)readings of texts to position formerly erased sexualities and contemporary sexual expression among Africans on the continent, and abroad.