African Literature Book List · 
African Literature titles sorted by book title (or by release date):
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Africa Writes Back
The African Writers Series & the Launch of African Literature
By James CurreyJune 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.…
After Tears
By Niq MhlongoBafana 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.…
Ayi Kwei Armah, Radical Iconoclast
Pitting the Imaginary Worlds against the Actual
By Ode OgedeGhanaian 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.…
Broken Lives and Other Stories
By Anthonia C. KaluIn 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.…
Colonization, Violence, and Narration in White South African Writing
André Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, and J. M. Coetzee
By Rosemary Jane JollyThe representation of pain and suffering in narrative form is an ongoing ethical issue in contemporary South African literature. Can violence be represented without sensationalistic effects, or, alternatively, without effects that tend to be conservative because they place the reader in a position of superiority over the victim or the perpetrator? Jolly looks at three primary South African authors—André Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, and J.…
The Conscript
A Novel of Libya’s Anticolonial War
By Gebreyesus HailuTranslated by Ghirmai Negash
Eloquent and thought-provoking, this classic novel by the Eritrean novelist Gebreyesus Hailu, written in Tigrinya in 1927 and published in 1950, is one of the earliest novels written in an African language and will have a major impact on the reception and critical appraisal of African literature.…
Dance of Life
The Novels of Zakes Mda in Post-apartheid South Africa
By Gail FinchamIn 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).…
Dog Eat Dog
A Novel
By Niq MhlongoDog 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.)
Echoes of the Sunbird
An Anthology of Contemporary African Poetry
Edited by Donald BurnessThis volume presents a broad overview of the work of seven of Africa’s leading poets. Five of them have received international recognition: Niyi Osundare and Chinua Achebe, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize; Osundare and Antonio Jacinto, the Noma Prize; and Jose Craveirinha, the Camoes Prize.…
Environment at the Margins
Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa
Edited by Byron Caminero-Santangelo and Garth MyersEnvironment 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.…
Es’kia Mphahlele
Themes of Alienation and African Humanism
By Ruth Obee“If you really want to understand South Africa, read black African writers. Read Es'kia Mphahlele,” is the advice proffered to diplomats and scholars by professor and publisher Donald Herdeck.…
Freedom in Our Lifetime
Collected Writings of Anton Muziwakhe Lembede
By Anton Muziwakhe LembedeEdited by Robert R. Edgar and Luyanda ka Msumza
When a group of young political activists met in 1944 to launch the African National Congress Youth League, it included the nucleus of a remarkable generation of leaders who forged the struggle for freedom and equality in South Africa for the next half century: Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu, Jordan Ngubane, Ellen Kuzwayo, Albertina Smith, A.…
From Sleep Unbound
By Andrée ChedidFrom Sleep Unbound portrays the life of Samya, an Egyptian woman who is taken at age 15 from her Catholic boarding school and forced into a loveless and humiliating marriage. Eventually sundered from every human attachment, Samya lapses into despair and despondence, and finally an emotionally caused paralysis.…
J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual
Edited by Jane PoynerIn 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.…
Metaphor and the Slave Trade in West African Literature
By Laura T. MurphyMetaphor 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.…
Nigerian Video Films
Revised and Expanded Edition
Edited by Jonathan HaynesNigerian 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.…
Nomadic Voices of Exile
Feminine Identity in the Francophone Literature of the Maghreb
By Valérie K. OrlandoContemporary 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.…
On Black Sisters Street
A Novel
By Chika UnigweOn Black Sisters Street tells the haunting story of four very different women who have left their African homeland for the riches of Europe—and who are thrown together by bad luck and big dreams into a sisterhood that will change their lives.…
Oral Literature and Performance in Southern Africa
Edited by Duncan BrownThis 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.…
Paper Sons and Daughters
Growing up Chinese in South Africa
By Ufrieda HoThis memoir attracted considerable attention when it was first published in South Africa in 2011, and it will resonate with anyone interested in the worldwide Chinese diaspora. It tells the story of a stowaway, Ho Sing Kee, who hid for long weeks aboard a ship crossing the Indian Ocean.…
Available August 2012 (est.)
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African Literature titles sorted by book title (or by release date):
