This ground-breaking book focuses on the dynamic interplay between language and identity in postcolonial Anglophone African literature. It examines how African writers navigate and reshape linguistic/literary landscapes to articulate unique cultural experiences and resist neo-colonial legacies. The authors highlight the dynamics of sociolinguistic and cultural ecologies in the ever-evolving 21st century African and postcolonial contexts, and shed light on conceptions of African identities and humanity. The book contributes to postcolonial discourses and suggests new ways of reading changing textual practices, as well as providing important sites to rebuke differentiation politics at play between the Global South and North. The volume also illuminates intertextual conversations that will be insightful for other disciplines in the humanities. It will function as an important reference for scholars and students of languages, communication and media, Global South literatures, postcolonial African literary and cultural studies, and African philosophies and concepts. Whether one is an academic or a curious reader, this book promises to offer compelling insights and fascinating narratives that together enrich present-day understanding of the vibrant and evolving world of Anglophone African literature.
Chapter
1. Postcolonial Anxieties: Shifting Sociolinguistic and cultural
landscapes in Anglophone African Literary Writings.
Chapter
2.
Sociolinguistic intricacies: Reflections on matrices of coloniality and
current struggles in postcolonial African Anglophone literature.
Chapter
3.
Re(dis)covering postcolonial voices and audiences. [ Mis-]-Representation and
postcoloniality in Chenjerai Hoves experimentation with language in Bones
(1988).
Chapter
4. Reclaiming spiritual identity through Anglophone African
literature: A literary perspective.
Chapter
5. Traumatic Narrative of
Colonial Excesses in Ngugi wa Thiongos Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood
Memoir.
Chapter
6. Exploration of Language and Nationalism in The Lion and
the Jewel, Things Fall Apart and I Will Marry When I Want.
Chapter
7.
Problematising the Janus-faced nature of writing African literature in
English in contemporary Zimbabwean historical novels.
Chapter
8.
Transcending Borders in Postcolonial Anglophone Literature: Navigating the
Shifting Sociolinguistic Landscapes of Mbolo Mbues Behold the Dreamers.-
Chapter
9. Crossing Cultural, Borders: Language and Intercultural
Communication in Contemporary Anglophone African Literature.
Chapter
10.
Representation of identities and the Third Space of Enunciation in Mphuthumi
Ntabenis Transnational novel, The Wanderers.
Chapter
11. Transnational
lives, language complexities and displacement in the diaspora: A case of The
Eternal Audience of One by Remy Ngamije.
Chapter12. Linguistic politics and
nation-building in contemporary Ghana: Re-engaging the debate on African
literary writings.
Chapter
13. Language as Cartographic: How Petina Gappah
maps the city in Rotten Row.
Chapter
14. Alterity and Belonging: A Reading
of Bessie Heads Post-Colonial Short Fiction.
Chapter
15. (Re) construction
of Gender in Postcolonial literary writing: The Processes of Youth Identity
formation in the Contemporary Kenyan Society.
Esther Mavengano is a lecturer who teaches Linguistics and Literature in the Department of English and Media Studies, Faculty of Arts at Great Zimbabwe University in Masvingo, Zimbabwe. She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics and Literary studies obtained from North West University in South Africa. She is a Research Fellow at the Research Institute for Theology and Religion, College of Human Sciences, UNISA, South Africa and she is currently a Georg Forster/ Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at TU (Technische Universität Dresden) in the Department of English, Faculty of Linguistics, Literature and Cultural Studies, Institute of English and American Studies, Dresden, Germany.
Isaac Mhute is Associate Professor in the Department of Language, Literature and Culture Studies at Midlands State University, Zimbabwe and Senior Research Associate in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.
