Product Description: For nearly a decade, writers’ collectives such as Kwani Trust in Kenya and Femrite, the Ugandan women writers’ association, have dramatically reshaped the East African literary scene. Women’s Literature in Kenya and Uganda: The Trouble with Modernity extends the purview of postcolonial literary studies by providing the long overdue critical inquiry that these writers so urgently deserve...read more

If space is important in the realm of imagination and a key theme in feminist theory, cross-cultural studies of social maps reveal that men and women's spatial experiences differ; women rarely control physical or social space directly. Positing the thesis that women's writing of Francophone Africa and the Caribbean offers important perspectives on the relationship of gender to space,Writing from the Hearth proposes close readings of Francophone women writers of Africa (Aoua KZita, Mariama B%, Ken Bugul, Calixthe Beyala, and Aminata Sow Fall) and the Caribbean (Marie Chauvet, Simon Schwarz-Bart, Maryse CondZ, and Edwidge Danticat). As critical readings of postcolonial African and Caribbean literature show that tropes of confinement appear frequently in female-authored texts_where home is often depicted as a place of alienation_this critical study examines ambiguities associated with domestic space as enclosure as it explores the relationship between the female protagonist and the inner and outer spaces of her world: domestic, imaginative, and public space. Writing from the Hearth probes the hypothesis that the female protagonist can move toward empowerment by entering public space from which she has been excluded by indigenous patriarchs and European colonizers and by establishing a new relationship to domestic space or securing a liberating alternative space within it. Flexible and multipurpose, alternative space is a place of possibilities that can function as a refuge for meditation, recollection, or fantasy, an antechamber for action, and a site of resistance and performance. Here, by telling the tale, writing the creative work, a woman can affirm her sense of self.

This book contributes to the claim by African writers and literary critics that African art has always been used to serve the people’s needs in all aspects of life rather than existing merely for its own sake. It raises the ongoing discussions about viable change and development in Africa to a new level and insists that both must come from within Africa. This book adapts the holistic aesthetics and critical approaches of African narrative traditions to advance African thought about African knowledge. It also explores the contemporary African scholars’ efforts to re-chart and preserve the evolution of African thought about development through literature. Using a multidisciplinary framework, Anthonia Kalu argues that contemporary African literature continues an artistic tradition of maintaining identifiable cultural and traditional arts-based linkages between African ways of knowing and the African landscape. In this way, African literatures ensures continuity between Africa’s pre-colonial and contemporary development projects. Acknowledging the dynamism between history and culture, Kalu examines the conscious choices African writers made during the colonial encounter in their use of literature to explore and maintain African culture in a historical moment when African history-as-history was jeopardized by colonization and European influences. This is the case in contemporary African literature when female-based knowledge is mostly portrayed through the assertion of core statements about development in the contemporary African story. Mainly, Kalu argues that African literature allows conscious and systematic exploration, analyses and use of Africa’s contemporary cultural archives which result from encounters between African and colonists’ languages and narrative traditions. In this significant work, Kalu illustrates how sustained intellectual excavation of Africa’s cultural archives facilitate the search for viable development projects and subsequent formation of lasting domestic policies. (view table of contents)

Harrow's provocative book introduces a psychoanalytic dimension to the study of African women's writing. In so doing, he opens up relatively uncharted terrain in African literary studies. Comprehensive, nuanced, occasionally lyrical, the book covers an impressive range of hitherto neglected francophone novels that are examined alongside canonical anglophone texts. The author places these texts in their colonial and postcolonial contexts, developing upon, and linking, structuralist theories of colonialism and patriarchy. This study offers a radical new position for those scholars who have long sought alternatives to the liberal humanist bias pervading many studies of African women's writing.Students often struggle with the models employed by feminist and postcolonial theorists such as Judith Butler and Homi Bhabha. The clarity with which Harrow explains the positions of such theorists makes his book an essential companion to, and commentary upon, their publications. Kenneth Harrow's study will be of interest not only to African literature specialists, but also to non-literary scholars concerned with questions about feminism, gender construction, colonialism, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial theory. (view table of contents)

Product Description: This book investigates the convergence of feminist literary projects in the Latin American and West African contexts and demonstrates how the authors examined here employ similar writing strategies to (re)constitute feminine subjects...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)