African Literature

The son of a Tunisian Jewish family, Yetiv attempts to preserve some of the wisdom contained in a tradition that may be dying out. Each proverb is presented in transliterated Arabic, with    More >

Peters searches for themes about African self-identity by exploring images of the mask in the poetry of Senghor, the fiction of Achebe, and the drama of Soyinka. His focus is not on the mask    More >

Concentrating on issues of power and change, Annie Gagiano's close reading of literary texts by Chinua Achebe, Bessie Head, and Dambudzo Marechera teases out each author's view of    More >

Ntongela Masilela (1948–2020) is perhaps best known for collecting, archiving, and expounding on the works of South African and other African intellectuals—most notably members    More >

African Lives, a pioneering anthology of memoirs and autobiographical writings, lets the people of Africa speak for themselves—telling stories of struggle and achievement that have the    More >

Bored housewives, kept in seclusion, smuggling in Harlequin romances. Modish young men transformed into Islamic militants. A baker unwittingly caught in a web of intrigue, an imam whose    More >

The final volume in a trilogy that includes The Flutes of Death and Mother Spring, Birth at Dawn extends to the eighth century the story of the arrival of Islam in Morocco and Algeria. First    More >

A gentle novel about the enduring conflict between young and old, new and traditional, foreign and native. Badian tells the story of a village family in an African country under French    More >

A collection of essays and reviews, both favorable and negative, about the charismatic and popular Igbo poet who, at the age of 35, was killed by the advancing Nigerian army during the war    More >

Poet, activist, teacher, and scholar, Dennis Brutus is one of the foremost names in African literature—as a creative force, a cultural influence, and a personality. Exploring Brutus's    More >

Poet, storyteller, scholar, teacher, and statesman, Léon Gontran Damas, born in French Guiana, was a founding father of the negritude movement. This collection offers a wide range of    More >

The struggle for liberation from colonial rule in lusophone Africa, which culminated in the creation of several independent nations, has produced a vigorous body of works that are innovative    More >

Mongo Beti is the most prolific and widely read author from Cameroon, and his writings have called world attention to political corruption in his native country. These essays cover the three    More >

Eleven essays by Western and Middle Eastern scholars evaluate the work of Naguib Mahfouz, arguably Egypt's greatest novelist, and the winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature. The    More >

Yusuf Idris is considered by many to be the greatest contemporary short-story writer working in Arabic. The 17 critical essays in this collection—some by critics in the Arab world and    More >