African Literature Book List · 
African Literature titles sorted by release date (or by book title):
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Dog Eat Dog
A Novel
By Niq Mhlongo
Dog Eat Dog is a remarkable record of being young in a nation undergoing tremendous turmoil, and provides a glimpse into South Africa’s pivotal kwaito (South African hip-hop) generation and life in Soweto.…
Available July 2012 (est.)
Metaphor and the Slave Trade in West African Literature
Metaphor and the Slave Trade provides compelling evidence of the hidden but unmistakable traces of the transatlantic slave trade that persist in West African discourse. Through an examination of metaphors that describe the trauma, loss, and suffering associated with the commerce in human lives, this book shows how the horrors of slavery are communicated from generation to generation.…
Available June 2012 (est.)
Dance of Life
The Novels of Zakes Mda in Post-apartheid South Africa
By Gail Fincham
In recent years, the work of Zakes Mda—novelist, painter, composer, theater director and filmmaker—has attracted worldwide critical attention. Gail Fincham’s book examines the five novels Mda has written since South Africa’s transition to democracy: Ways of Dying (1995), The Heart of Redness (2000), The Madonna of Excelsior (2002), The Whale Caller (2005), and Cion (2007).…
Available April 2012 (est.)
We Are All Zimbabweans Now
We Are All Zimbabweans Now is a political thriller set in Zimbabwe in the hopeful, early days of Robert Mugabe’s rise to power in the late 1980s. When Ben Dabney, a Wisconsin graduate student, arrives in the country, he is enamored with Mugabe and the promises of his government’s model of racial reconciliation.…
After Tears
By Niq Mhlongo
Bafana Kuzwayo is a young man with a weight on his shoulders. After flunking his law studies at the University of Cape Town, he returns home to Soweto, where he must decide how to break the news to his family.…
Environment at the Margins
Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa
Edited by Byron Caminero-Santangelo and Garth Myers
Environment at the Margins brings literary and environmental studies into a robust interdisciplinary dialogue, challenging dominant ideas about nature, conservation, and development in Africa and exploring alternative narratives offered by writers and environmental thinkers.…
Welcome to Our Hillbrow
A Novel of Postapartheid South Africa
By Phaswane Mpe
Welcome to Our Hillbrow is an exhilarating and disturbing ride through the chaotic and hyper-real zone of Hillbrow—microcosm of all that is contradictory, alluring, and painful in the postapartheid South African psyche.…
The Uncoiling Python
South African Storytellers and Resistance
There are many collections of African oral traditions, but few as carefully organized as The Uncoiling Python. Harold Scheub, one of the world’s leading scholars of African oral traditions and folklore, explores the ways in which oral traditions have served to combat and subvert colonial domination in South Africa.…
Twelve Best Books by African Women
Critical Readings
By Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi and Tuzyline Jita Allan
In 2002, at the annual Zimbabwe International Book Fair, twelve literary books by African women were included for the first time in the category of “Africa’s 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century.…
Africa Writes Back
The African Writers Series & the Launch of African Literature
By James Currey
June 17, 2008, is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart by Heinemann. This publication provided the impetus for the foundation of the African Writers Series in 1962 with Chinua Achebe as the editorial adviser.…
The Sacred Door and Other Stories
Cameroon Folktales of the Beba
By Makuchi
The Sacred Door and Other Stories: Cameroon Folktales of the Beba offers readers a selection of folktales infused with riddles, proverbs, songs, myths, and legends, using various narrative techniques that capture the vibrancy of Beba oral traditions.…
Swahili beyond the Boundaries
Literature, Language, and Identity
Africa is a marriage of cultures: African and Asian, Islamic and Euro-Christian. Nowhere is this fusion more evident than in the formation of Swahili, Eastern Africa’s lingua franca, and its cultures.…
Rewriting Modernity
Studies in Black South African Literary History
Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History connects the black literary archive in South Africa—from the nineteenth-century writing of Tiyo Soga to Zakes Mda in the twenty-first century—to international postcolonial studies via the theory of transculturation, a position adapted from the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz.…
J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual
Edited by Jane Poyner
In September 2003 the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, confirming his reputation as one of the most influential writers of our time. J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual addresses the contribution Coetzee has made to contemporary literature, not least for the contentious forays his work makes into South African political discourse and the field of postcolonial studies.…
Broken Lives and Other Stories
In her startling collection of short stories, Broken Lives and Other Stories, Anthonia C. Kalu creates a series of memorable characters who struggle to hold displaced but dynamic communities together in a country that is at war with itself.…
Voices from Madagascar/Voix de Madagascar
An Anthology of Contemporary Francophone Literature/Anthologie de littérature francophone contemporaine
Edited by Jacques Bourgeacq and Liliane Ramarosoa
There is currently in Madagascar a rich literary production (short stories, poetry, novels, plays) that has not yet reached the United States for lack of diffusion outside the country. Until recently, Madagascar suffered from political isolation resulting from its breakup with France in the 1970s and the eighteen years of Marxism that followed.…
Ayi Kwei Armah, Radical Iconoclast
Pitting the Imaginary Worlds against the Actual
By Ode Ogede
Ghanaian novelist, essayist, and short-story writer Ayi Kwei Armah has won international recognition as one of Africa’s most articulate writers. In this book, Ode Ogede argues that previous critics have misinterpreted the aesthetic and literary influences that have shaped Armah’s artistic vision and overlooked his most significant and valuable contribution to the problems of writing “outside the prison-house of conventional English.…
Nigerian Video Films
Revised and Expanded Edition
Edited by Jonathan Haynes
Nigerian video films—dramatic features shot on video and sold as cassettes—are being produced at the rate of nearly one a day, making them the major contemporary art form in Nigeria. The history of African film offers no precedent for such a huge, popularly based industry.…
Oral Literature and Performance in Southern Africa
Edited by Duncan Brown
This book draws together contributions from literary studies, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and African language studies to analyze the complex functioning of oral texts and models in differing contexts.…
Nomadic Voices of Exile
Feminine Identity in the Francophone Literature of the Maghreb
Contemporary French writing on the Maghreb—that part of Africa above the Sahara—is truly postmodern in scope, the rich product of multifaceted histories promoting the blending of two worlds, two identities, two cultures, and two languages.…
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African Literature titles sorted by release date (or by book title):
