A Companion to African Literatures - Группа авторов

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and Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora, she is completing a book on eighteenth‐century British and French implication in India as it pertains to the southern kingdom of Mysore. Her articles and essays have appeared in journals such as Cinema Journal, French Forum, Diacritics, PMLA, International Journal of French and Francophone Studies, Research in African Literatures, Levinas Studies, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, and Comparative Literature Studies. An active member of the Modern Language Association, she has served the organization in numerous elected and nominated capacities, including on the Editorial Board of PMLA and the Program Committee. She is currently a member of the Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee and the Executive Council.

      Stephanie Bosch Santana is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work, which has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, focuses on Anglophone and African‐language fiction from Malawi, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Her current book project traces an alternative history of African literary production from the mid‐twentieth century to the present by considering the way that writers have developed a range of new literary forms in periodical print and digital publications, from magazines and newspapers to Facebook. Bosch Santana’s work has been published in the Routledge Handbook to African Literatures, Research in African Literatures, the Journal of African Cultural Studies, Wasafiri, and the Johannesburg Salon. She is also an editor of the blog Africa in Words.

      Neil ten Kortenaar teaches African and Caribbean literature at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Postcolonial Literature and the Impact of Literacy: Reading and Writing in African and Caribbean Fiction (2011), which examines Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka among others. His current project looks at how Nigerian novelists imagined the state and its institutions at the moment of independence.

      Hélène Tissières is guest researcher at the Global Studies Institute in Geneva. She taught at the University of Texas at Austin and was Associate Professor of African Literature and Cinema (from North and sub‐Saharan Africa). She left her position in 2016 to settle back in Geneva. In 2011, she taught at Kwara State University in Nigeria and from 2003 to 2005 at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar thanks to a Fulbright grant. She is the author of Transmigrational Writings between the Maghreb and Sub‐Saharan Africa: Literature, Orality, Visual Arts (2007/2012) and Créations et défis au Sénégal: Sembène, Diop, Diadji et Awadi (2013). Having followed the Dakar Biennale of Contemporary African Art since 2004, she curated an homage to this event in Switzerland during the summer of 2016, exhibiting the work of some thirty established artists at the Manoir in Martigny and throughout its city. She also edited the accompanying 150‐page catalogue. She presently is working on a book that is investigating literature, film, and contemporary art from the Sahel region.

      Brian Valente‐Quinn is Assistant Professor of Francophone African Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Specialized in Theater and Performance Studies as well as in Francophone African literature, he is currently working on a book project exploring histories of stage performance in Senegal.

      Hein Willemse is Professor of Literature and former Head of the Department of Afrikaans at the University of Pretoria. He has published widely on South African Literature with special reference to Black Afrikaans writers, writers of the Black Consciousness era in the 1970s and 1980s, and Afrikaans orature. His books include Aan die ander kant: Swart skrywers in die Afrikaanse letterkunde (“On the other side: Black writers in Afrikaans literature,” 2007), and he co‐edited texts such as More than Brothers: James Matthews and Peter Clarke at 70 (2000) and Achmat Davids’ The Afrikaans of the Cape Muslims (2011). His current research includes projects on the South African poet‐dramatist‐philosopher Adam Small, and the Afrikaans orature of Namibia and South Africa. He is a former Editor‐in‐Chief of Tydskrif vir Letterkunde (Journal of Literature) and a former President of the International Society for the Oral Literatures of Africa (ISOLA).

      Chantal Zabus is Professor of Comparative Postcolonial and Gender Studies at the University Sorbonne Paris Nord. She is the author of over a hundred articles in peer‐reviewed journals and numerous books, including The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the African Europhone Novel (1991; 2nd ed. 2007; French trans. 2018); Out in Africa: Same‐Sex Desire in Sub‐Saharan Literatures and Cultures (2014); Between Rites and Rights: Excision in Women’s Experiential Texts and Human Contexts (2007; French trans. 2016); and Tempests after Shakespeare (2002). Her last two edited books are Transgender Experience: Place, Ethnicity, and Visibility (co‐edited with David Coad, 2014) and The Future of Postcolonial Studies (2015). She is currently working on transgender and transsexualism in African contexts. She is the Editor‐in‐Chief of one of the first journals on postcolonial studies online, Postcolonial Text (www.postcolonial.org).

      A Companion to African Literatures is designed to serve as research resource for critics, teachers, and students of African literature and related fields like world literature, comparative literary studies, and postcolonial studies. In contemporary literary and cultural criticism, notions of “world literature” and “globalism” have become central and influential. Here, the notion of world literature is to be understood as a set of theoretical perspectives and protocols of interpretation, rather than simply a corpus of literary works. In the turn to broad transnational perspectives, however, there is always a risk of de‐emphasizing the specific backgrounds, thematic concerns, and significant transformations that characterize African literatures. This Companion addresses the need for richly contextualized accounts of the diversity of literary production on the African continent.

      The book contains twenty‐eight historically grounded and theoretically informed chapters, written by an international team of distinguished as well as emerging leaders in the diverse subfields of the study of African literatures. One chapter has previously been published as a journal article. Taken as discrete individual chapters or as a whole, the volume will be useful to both advanced students and beginners in the academic study of modern African literatures. It will likewise be useful to teachers who seek rigorous and lucid essays that can be assigned in college courses.

      A Companion to African Literatures is divided into five sections. The first four concentrate on the geographical regions into which Africa is conventionally divided: namely, East and Central Africa, North Africa, Southern Africa, and West Africa. Each of these sections begins with an introductory chapter that offers an overview of the region’s literary landscape and explores pertinent conceptual or historical questions. Chapters in the fifth section take up theoretical issues and material that range across the regions, or concentrate on film and digital media. With regard to genres and forms, the chapters discuss novels, poetry, dramatic literature, nonfiction, digital media, visual art, and film. The focus is mainly on modern African literatures from the nineteenth century to the present. Even though literatures in Amharic, Arabic, and Swahili date much farther back, in order to make the volume manageable the focus is on the historical span that extends from the nineteenth century to the twenty‐first.

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