African Literatures as World Literature

This exciting volume provides an opportunity to recalibrate the study of world literature from the rich ensemble that is African letters. It is well researched, covers a broad range of themes and texts, and produces brilliant, innovative interpretations of literary texts and textual histories. Featuring the work of some of the leading scholars and practitioners of African literature, the volume is imaginatively progressive and conceptually ambitious.

* Cajetan Iheka, Professor of English, Yale University, US, and author of Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (2018) *
With its strong argumentation and concentrated analysis of African literary writing invested in worldliness, critical significance and aesthetics, this work disrupts and challenges monolithic definitions of the world-literature canopy. Readers and scholars will find this edited anthology positioning and rebooting dynamic discussions on African literary discourses, theoretical interventions and world literary space. * Shilpa Daithota Bhat, Assistant Professor of English, National Forensic Sciences University, Gandhinagar Campus, India *
African Literatures as World Literature brings together a series of essays that make visible the richness and complexity of world-making in literatures from across the African continent. Considering a plurality of literary forms and languages, as well as texts from a broad range of time periods, this invaluable collection challenges us to new understandings of both African literatures and world literature. Attuned to literary forms of world-making as well as the material networks in which literary practices are implicated, the essays open fresh and exciting perspectives on African literatures beyond conventionalized paradigms. Major achievements of this remarkable collection are its consideration of the variety of literary practices across different media as well as its rigorous engagement with literatures in non-Europhone African languages. Persistently ground-breaking, the volume presents a new archive and fresh, locally grounded categories for the study of world literature. The nuanced case studies and the bold conceptual interventions make this volume a must-read for anyone interested in world literature. * Birgit Neumann, Professor of English Literature and Anglophone Studies, Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf, Germany *
One of the achievements of this volume is presenting and naming global inequalities and power asymmetries in the creative, distribution, and circulation processes of literature itself, as well as in the academic visibility of certain literatures … Read together, the contributions in this anthology provide more than valuable impetus for overcoming global inequality in the field of literature. -- Martina Kopf, University of Vienna, Austria * World Literature Studi