Madhu Krishnan – författare

This Element explores the mechanisms through which 'African literature', as a market category, has been consecrated within the global literary field. Drawing on archival, textual and field-based research, it proposes that the normative story of African literary writing has functioned to efface a broader material history of African literary production located on and oriented to the continent itself.

This open access book critically reflects on what it has meant to embark on a process of decolonising higher education at a Global North institution – namely the University of Bristol - and the real-world possibilities for realising change from this vantage point. The book brings together a diverse team of writers representing academic staff, students and professional services staff engaged in decolonising activities at the University of Bristol. The chapters have been co-created and this process itself has generated a series of critical conversations that have highlighted tensions and contradictions involved in attempting to decolonise within the university. Through this process, the team have critiqued the concepts of “our university” and “our curriculum” and they argue that understanding these tensions and contradictions is crucial if we are to understand decolonisation as an active process. Each chapter offers examples of practice from the university, the city of Bristol and elsewhere, and implications are drawn that are of relevance for activists around the world who are engaged in decolonising their institutions.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The University of Bristol.

This open access book critically reflects on what it has meant to embark on a process of decolonising higher education at a Global North institution – namely the University of Bristol - and the real-world possibilities for realising change from this vantage point. The book brings together a diverse team of writers representing academic staff, students and professional services staff engaged in decolonising activities at the University of Bristol. The chapters have been co-created and this process itself has generated a series of critical conversations that have highlighted tensions and contradictions involved in attempting to decolonise within the university. Through this process, the team have critiqued the concepts of “our university” and “our curriculum” and they argue that understanding these tensions and contradictions is crucial if we are to understand decolonisation as an active process. Each chapter offers examples of practice from the university, the city of Bristol and elsewhere, and implications are drawn that are of relevance for activists around the world who are engaged in decolonising their institutions.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by The University of Bristol.

Drawing on case studies from Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Senegal, Kenya and Uganda, this open access book explores the ways in which literary activism operates as an essential site of self-making and socio-political engagement in the 21st-century.From the era of anti-colonial mobilization to the centrality of writers in liberationist struggles in Nigeria, South Africa and elsewhere, an apparent link has emerged between literature and literary production; political mobilisation and activism; and the various struggles to determine the imaginative horizons of social and political experience on the African continent. This book seeks to understand, in light of this, how cultural producers and literary collectives have leveraged creative practice to open sites for socio-political engagement against a backdrop of structural and material inequality.Examining what is meant by terms such as ‘the literary’ and ‘activism’ from the standpoint of cultural production across regions of Africa today, it explores methodologies for practice-, field- and collective research which might enable ways of working beyond academia. It also highlights creative practice as knowledge production and critical inquiry as creative practice, and asserts the importance of literary cultures as spaces for world-making and social formations, even as some of these cultures and their associated publics remain less visible from a global or Northern perspective. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council.

The enormous success of writers such as Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie demonstrates that African literatures are now an international phenomenon. But the apparent global legibility of a small number of (mostly Anglophone) writers in the diaspora raises the question of how literary producers from the continent, both past and present, have situated their work in relation to the world and the kinds of material networks to which this corresponds. This collection shows how literatures from across the African continent engage with conceptualizations of 'the world' in relation to local social and political issues. Focusing on a wide variety of geographic, historical and linguistic contexts, the essays in this volume seek answers to the following questions: What are the topographies of 'the world' in different literary texts and traditions? What are that world’s limits, boundaries and possibilities? How do literary modes and forms such as realism, narrative poetry or the political essay affect the presentation of worldliness? What are the material networks of circulation that allow African literatures to become world literature? African literatures, it emerges, do important theoretical work that speaks to the very core of world literary studies today.

The enormous success of writers such as Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie demonstrates that African literatures are now an international phenomenon. But the apparent global legibility of a small number of (mostly Anglophone) writers in the diaspora raises the question of how literary producers from the continent, both past and present, have situated their work in relation to the world and the kinds of material networks to which this corresponds. This collection shows how literatures from across the African continent engage with conceptualizations of 'the world' in relation to local social and political issues. Focusing on a wide variety of geographic, historical and linguistic contexts, the essays in this volume seek answers to the following questions: What are the topographies of 'the world' in different literary texts and traditions? What are that world’s limits, boundaries and possibilities? How do literary modes and forms such as realism, narrative poetry or the political essay affect the presentation of worldliness? What are the material networks of circulation that allow African literatures to become world literature? African literatures, it emerges, do important theoretical work that speaks to the very core of world literary studies today.

Winner of the 2020 ALA Book of the Year Award - ScholarshipExamines the ways in which space and spatial structures have been constituted, contested and re-imagined in Francophone and Anglophone West African literature since the early 1950s.From the "imaginative geographies" of conquest identified by Edward Said to the very real and material institution of territorial borders, regions and geographical amalgamations, the control, administration and integration of space are known to have played a central and essential role in the creation of contemporary "Africa". Space continues to be a site of conflict, from separatist struggles to the distribution of resources to the continued absorption ofAfrican territories into the uneven geographies of global capitalism.In this book, Madhu Krishnan examines the ways in which the anxieties and conflicts engendered by these phenomena are registered in a broad set of literarytexts from British and French West Africa. By placing these novels in dialogue with a range of archival material such as territorial planning documents, legislative papers, records of liberation movements and development projects, this book reveals the submerged articulations between spatial planning and literary expression, generating new readings of canonical West African texts as well as analyses of otherwise under-researched material.MadhuKrishnan is a Senior Lecturer in 20th/21st Century Postcolonial Writing in the Department of English at the University of Bristol. She is author of Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications(2014) and Contingent Canons: African Literature and the Politics of Location (2018)

Winner of the 2020 ALA Book of the Year Award - ScholarshipExamines the ways in which space and spatial structures have been constituted, contested and re-imagined in Francophone and Anglophone West African literature since the early 1950s.From the "imaginative geographies" of conquest identified by Edward Said to the very real and material institution of territorial borders, regions and geographical amalgamations, the control, administration and integration of space are known to have played a central and essential role in the creation of contemporary "Africa". Space continues to be a site of conflict, from separatist struggles to the distribution of resources to the continued absorption ofAfrican territories into the uneven geographies of global capitalism.In this book, Madhu Krishnan examines the ways in which the anxieties and conflicts engendered by these phenomena are registered in a broad set of literarytexts from British and French West Africa. By placing these novels in dialogue with a range of archival material such as territorial planning documents, legislative papers, records of liberation movements and development projects, this book reveals the submerged articulations between spatial planning and literary expression, generating new readings of canonical West African texts as well as analyses of otherwise under-researched material.