WHEN I WAS ASKED by the editors of Victorian Literature and Culture to write a review essay assessing current trends in what they called the field of Anglo-African literature, I was delighted but I was also a little skeptical. First, I wondered how they or I would define such a field. Second, I wondered whether the field was in fact so well-established as to embody its own set of trends as opposed to merely consisting of a bunch of people plugging away at their different pieces of work.