African Literature and Social Change

Olakunle George is Associate Professor at Brown University. He is author of Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters and coeditor of The Encyclopedia of the Novel.

"A new and welcome addition to the field of African literary studies, Olakunle George's African Literature and Social Change is dense where it needs to be and glories in productive close readings when its objects call for it."—Comparative Literature Studies"Olakunle George rethinks the entirety of African literature by considering texts from the 19th century and mid-20th century alongside canonical texts by Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and others, and thus expands the standard canon of African literature which begins roughly at independence in 1960."—Neil ten Kortenaar, author of Postcolonial Literature and the Impact of Literacy"This book is a bold exploration of the complexity of different modes of writing about Africa in the context of current debates on the nature of the literary in the production of African knowledge. Concerned with a rhetoric of self-writing as it has developed over two hundred years, Olakunle George attends to local details within the larger configurations of colonial discourse in this ambitious and timely work. It is a caution against the neglect of the conditions of possibility that made an African literature possible."—Simon Gikandi, author of Slavery and the Culture of Taste

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Missionary Moments1. Crossing Currents: Postcoloniality, Globalism, Diaspora2. Mission Tide: Bishop S. A. Crowther and the "Black Whitemen" 3. Decolonization Time: Abrahams, James, Wright 4. Globalization Time: Achebe, Soyinka, and BeyondEpilogue: GapsBibliographyIndex