This chapter reads the essay form as key to the consolidation of the Gold Coast intelligentsia in the early twentieth century, when Anglo-Fante public intellectuals including J.E. Casely Hayford, S.R.B. Attoh Ahuma, and J.W. de Graft Johnson sought to persuade their London audience of Africans’ capacity for self-determination. In using the essay form to negotiate the relationship between national and Christian leadership qualities, they also tested the boundary between neutral practices of observation and religious experience. Casely Hayford’s 1915 essay ‘William Waddy Harris’, on a prominent West African evangelist, is an especially rich case study in how to reconcile a premium on facticity with a new openness to direct communion with God. In this way, Gold Coast anti-colonial intellectuals introduce an anti-secularising vector to the history of the essay form as well as to the rise of the African nation state.

African writers often bemoan Western readers’ tendency to view their work “anthropologically,” which is to say as a transparent reflection of a culture of origin. This ethnographic approach partly derives from African literary studies’ relationship to African Studies, writ large, with its roots in the social sciences and area expertise. But it is also sustained by the difficulty of placing African writers within Western pedagogical frameworks. This challenge is most apparent when Africans – obviously the majority population on the continent – are minoritized by Western curricular categories. There are also subtler questions at stake. On what scale (regional, national, continental, or global) are contemporary African writers best read as negotiating the relationship of social affiliation to aesthetic representation? How does African literature register in a Western classroom comprising students from disparate and often culturally variegated backgrounds, some of which reflexively minoritize Black and Brown writers, and some of which do not? Finally, what are some interpretive and pedagogical alternatives to seeing literary representation by Africans as necessarily representative of broader African social and cultural dynamics? This chapter draws on my own experience teaching African writing in a US university context to propose a criterion of reading for “the weird” as an alternative to reading for culture. In prioritizing African texts that are boldly unrepresentative of broader literary and cultural trends – as in the chapter’s main example of Ghanaian writer Martin Egblewogbe’s wry and existential short fiction – this approach breaks free from the aesthetic limitations of “minority literature” while introducing truly novel forms and voices to the English literature curriculum. As a result, it urges students toward a sense of curricular decolonization as an essential tool for foregrounding radical aesthetic idiosyncrasy.

This chapter uses the #RhodesMust Fall movement as a point of entry into the debate on decolonization of English in South African universities. The chapter reads striking similarities in the workings of monuments like Rhodes’ statue in the context of the Empire and the English-language syllabus, which was an important purveyor of the English culture in the colonies and continues to shape postcolonial cultural experience. The chapter further argues that although the #Rhodes Must Fall movement provided a renewed impetus for the decolonisation of English in South Africa, it never was a watershed moment. Instead it argues that reform in the English departments has been gradual, and slow in coming, without anything startling. It makes the argument that to understand the real challenge to the English Literature syllabus one needs to have a long view of history and to absorb what has been taking place on the margins for years, way before the emergence of huge bursts of resistance that the “Fallist” movement represents. These include, among others, the work of translation of Western classics by some of Africa’s foundational writers; the role of African-language literatures, and indeed, the founding of the Department of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand in the 80s, which was dedicated to the teaching of African and Black diaspora literatures.

African literature courses offered in African universities are typically taught in a conventional classroom setting with a focus on written texts. This chapter reflects on a departure from this situation, as the undergraduate course ENGL 314: Introduction to African Literature, taught at the University of Ghana’s Department of English, was reworked between 2019 and 2022. By adopting and adapting Africanist interpretations of text and writing, theming the course on sound, inviting guest lecturers and practitioners, engaging in basic field research, and infusing orality and experiential learning; students reconceptualized their natural environments as sites for intellectual investigation. The course sought to provoke sustained critique of traditional modes of teaching by displacing agency to students, allowing for an interrogation of assumptions that underpin their lived experiences. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, there were opportunities to evolve further away from the traditional classroom setting, as the class harnessed the power of digital technology and social media by underlining their connections to oral tradition. Ultimately, the decolonizing perspectives engendered by the nature of the course pivoted toward a more Afrocentric offering of how such a course can be run at an African university.

What has the Black feminine body meant to literary study? What might it mean in the twenty-first century? This essay argues that African diaspora feminist literary study has often been contained by national boundaries and prescribed readings of the feminine subject “stuck” in masculinist routes and plots. Instead, this chapter turns to the materiality of the body in the work of African feminist writers and artists such as Theresa Ikoko, T. J. Dema, and Wangechi Mutu. The chapter shows how their work moves the labor of constructing, perceiving, and living through feminine embodied experience to the center of theories of diaspora. Focusing on poetry, drama, and visual art, this chapter pushes against the novel’s centrality in formulating theories of the self, nation, and diaspora identity in the field. This body of new writing and expressive culture that centers on the material body offers new routes for feminist diaspora literature and its futures across continents, genres, and contexts.

This chapter argues for the need to view Paris unexceptionally. It acknowledges and moves beyond universalising or celebratory tendencies of Paris-centric theories of world literature. Exploring the literary expression of what I term migrant-flânerie, the chapter analyses forms of epistemic encounter and intimacy found in three novels of migration to Paris by Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Mbella Sonne Dipoko and Gauz. These texts reinvent and recycle the nineteenth-centuryflâneurand his leisured navigation of the city. The writing engages themes of alienation,ennui, and freedom in relation to racialised, masculine experiences of the city. In contrasting ways, these African-centred narratives of Paris ‘unworld’ the city space by giving literary form to encounters that disrupt resilient critical claims to aesthetic or epistemic universalism. They present experiences of migrant-flâneriecompressed into specific everyday spaces (the bourgeois apartment; student digs; the department store; the café; a boat on the Seine; security checkpoints) and delineated narrative temporalities (diary form; coming-of-age narrative; ‘a few nights and days’). These formal devices evoke recurrent tensions between abstract, aestheticised promises of freedom and everyday experiences of racism and coloniality.

This chapter reconsiders chattel slavery’s legacy in contemporary stories of migration, highlighting the inadequacies of reading these works through memories of the Middle passage alone, while analyzing the insidious new forms of enslavement that African boat narratives expose. When read through the prescient work of Frantz Fanon, these stories present us with nothing less than revolutionaries of the crossing; those whose resounding “yes to life,” in the words of Frantz Fanon, is a deafening rejection of European anti-blackness, challenging border logic and the political machinations of inhospitality for a world in crisis. Migration, especially in today’s climate crisis, is above all else a human impulse that challenges the logic of inequality that slavery and colonialism have cast upon black lives, offering up movement as the dynamic imperative of life today.

Since the turn of this century, science fiction, fantasy, and horror have become cornerstones of African literature. This chapter looks at speculative fiction from across the continent that radically reimagines slavery, examining the ways writers have sutured questions of subjection and desired freedom into cyberpunk worlds, revisionist histories, invented mysticisms, and alien encounters. What, this chapter asks, is the function of the sizable body of African speculative fiction that imagines slaveries removed from the middle passage and chattel slavery in the Americas, including works with no clear historical analogue?

African authors have been skeptical of the term ‘magical realism’, as it suggests that their texts are derivative of Latin American writing. This chapter proposes that such concerns over categorization underestimate the shaping force that African magical realist texts have on the concept of magical realism. Further, criticism of magical realism often suggests that the ‘magic’ in magical realism comes from irrational indigenous belief systems and the ‘real’ from the rational West. However, this suggests that Western capitalist modernity is more rational than it really is. Through an analysis of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow (2006) and Mia Couto’s Sleepwalking Land (2006), this chapter argues that these texts use a combination of written and oral forms to question the rationality of capitalism and in so doing reshape our understanding of magical realism.

This chapter examines contemporary African fiction through the lens of food and foodways, highlighting the ways that recent writers have deployed agriculture, cooking, and eating to highlight the traumas of history, the emptiness of displacement, and the power of community. In We Need New Names (2013) NoViolet Bulawayo uses a piece of half-eaten discarded pizza to indicate the cultural and economic distance between those Zimbabweans with access to America and Europe and those without. Rosa’s District 6 (2004) by Rozena Maart shows the way food acts to bring people of different faiths and races together in a community facing erasure under apartheid. In Aminatta Forna’s Ancestor Stones (2006), the revival of a coffee plantation serves as a metaphor for the rebuilding of Sierra Leone after decades of military coups and a civil war. In all three novels, food is used to chart political and social history unique to each region. Foodways and food security can serve as important markers in ascertaining how liberation is proceeding because access to food is a basic human necessity and foodways serve as cultural and social markers that speak to a community’s comfort with its access to food.

Since the 1990s, black British writers have increasingly re-focused on Africa, either taking recourse to specific African contexts, or raising questions about the relevance of Africa to their work. In Some Kind of Black, Diran Adebayo’s protagonist Dele intermittently dons a patterned Agbada, self-consciously stylizing himself as an African Briton. Brian Chikwava’s novel dubs London Harare North, large-scale emigration from Zimbabwe having turned the capital into an extension of the former Rhodesia. Whilst the term ‘Afropolitan’ does not befit all black British authors, some openly embrace the tag. As these examples indicate, this chapter focuses on texts that resist easy categorisation but which nevertheless explore Africa’s historical, contextual, genealogical, and cultural connections to Britain.