Black Literary and Cultural Expressions – serie

This timely and expansive biography of Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian writer, Nobel laureate, and social activist, shows how the author’s early years influence his life’s work and how his writing, in turn, informs his political engagement. Three sections spanning his life, major texts, and place in history, connect Soyinka’s legacy with global issues beyond the borders of his own country, and indeed beyond the African continent. Covering his encounters with the widespread rise of kleptocratic rule and international corporate corruption, his reflection on the human condition of the North-South divide, and the consequences of postcolonialism, this comprehensive biography locates Wole Soyinka as a global figure whose life and works have made him a subject of conversation in the public sphere, as well as one of Africa’s most successful and popular authors. Looking at the different forms of Soyinka’s work--plays, novels, and memoirs, among others--this volume argues that Soyinka used writing to inform, mobilize, and sometimes incite civil action, in a decades-long attempt at literary social engineering.

This timely and expansive biography of Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian writer, Nobel laureate, and social activist, shows how the author’s early years influence his life’s work and how his writing, in turn, informs his political engagement. Three sections spanning his life, major texts, and place in history, connect Soyinka’s legacy with global issues beyond the borders of his own country, and indeed beyond the African continent. Covering his encounters with the widespread rise of kleptocratic rule and international corporate corruption, his reflection on the human condition of the North-South divide, and the consequences of postcolonialism, this comprehensive biography locates Wole Soyinka as a global figure whose life and works have made him a subject of conversation in the public sphere, as well as one of Africa’s most successful and popular authors. Looking at the different forms of Soyinka’s work--plays, novels, and memoirs, among others--this volume argues that Soyinka used writing to inform, mobilize, and sometimes incite civil action, in a decades-long attempt at literary social engineering.

The untold story of how breaking – one of the most widely practiced dance forms in the world today – began as a distinctly African American expression in the Bronx, New York, during the 1970s.Breaking is the first and most widely practiced hip-hop dance in the world, with around one million participants in this dynamic, multifaceted artform – and, as of 2024, Olympic sport. Yet, despite its global reach and nearly 50-year history, stories of breaking’s origins have largely neglected the African Americans who founded it. Dancer and scholar Serouj "Midus" Aprahamian offers, for the first time, a detailed look into the African American beginnings of breaking in the Bronx, New York.The Birth of Breaking challenges numerous myths and misconceptions that have permeated studies of hip-hop’s evolution, considering the influence breaking has had on hip-hop culture. Including previously unseen archival material, interviews, and detailed depictions of the dance at its outset, this book brings to life this buried history, with a particular focus on the early development of the dance, the institutional settings where hip-hop was conceived, and the movement’s impact on sociocultural conditions in New York City throughout the 1970s.By featuring the overlooked first-hand accounts of over 50 founding b-boys and b-girls alongside movement analysis informed by his embodied knowledge of the dance, Aprahamian reveals how indebted breaking is to African American culture, as well as the disturbing factors behind its historical erasure.

The untold story of how breaking – one of the most widely practiced dance forms in the world today – began as a distinctly African American expression in the Bronx, New York, during the 1970s.Breaking is the first and most widely practiced hip-hop dance in the world, with around one million participants in this dynamic, multifaceted artform – and, as of 2024, Olympic sport. Yet, despite its global reach and nearly 50-year history, stories of breaking’s origins have largely neglected the African Americans who founded it. Dancer and scholar Serouj "Midus" Aprahamian offers, for the first time, a detailed look into the African American beginnings of breaking in the Bronx, New York.The Birth of Breaking challenges numerous myths and misconceptions that have permeated studies of hip-hop’s evolution, considering the influence breaking has had on hip-hop culture. Including previously unseen archival material, interviews, and detailed depictions of the dance at its outset, this book brings to life this buried history, with a particular focus on the early development of the dance, the institutional settings where hip-hop was conceived, and the movement’s impact on sociocultural conditions in New York City throughout the 1970s.By featuring the overlooked first-hand accounts of over 50 founding b-boys and b-girls alongside movement analysis informed by his embodied knowledge of the dance, Aprahamian reveals how indebted breaking is to African American culture, as well as the disturbing factors behind its historical erasure.

A powerful biography that presents analysis of a black working-class woman who rose from a tenement slum in intensely racialized British Guiana to become a leading anti-colonialism, workers’ rights and women’s liberation activist in Britain.Jessica Huntley's Pan-African Life celebrates Huntley's importance as a leading figure in the Windrush-era resistance to the multiple, racialized injustices faced by black settlers, children and communities in Britain. Claudia Tomlinson details how Huntley became the elder stateswoman of radical black activism of her era through participation in decolonization movements and actions such as the Black Parents Movement and the International Bookfair of Radical Black and Third World Books, as well as her foundational role at Bogle L’Ouverture Publications, the leading black-led, pan-African publishing house and its associated radical bookshop.Based on extensive archival research and over 40 interviews with Huntley’s closest family members, associates, comrades, authors, artists and friends, this book affords readers an opportunity to take a long-lensed view of the historical roots of the many contemporary racial injustices re-invigorated in recent debates. Tomlinson re-writes the history of a period and a struggle often told through a master discourse that is male, middle-class and privileged. In so doing, she shows how Jessica Huntley’s fight for justice and the rights of all black people in Britain provides a useful lens into UK-based, black literary and cultural expression in the 20th century.

A powerful biography that presents analysis of a black working-class woman who rose from a tenement slum in intensely racialized British Guiana to become a leading anti-colonialism, workers’ rights and women’s liberation activist in Britain.Jessica Huntley's Pan-African Life celebrates Huntley's importance as a leading figure in the Windrush-era resistance to the multiple, racialized injustices faced by black settlers, children and communities in Britain. Claudia Tomlinson details how Huntley became the elder stateswoman of radical black activism of her era through participation in decolonization movements and actions such as the Black Parents Movement and the International Bookfair of Radical Black and Third World Books, as well as her foundational role at Bogle L’Ouverture Publications, the leading black-led, pan-African publishing house and its associated radical bookshop.Based on extensive archival research and over 40 interviews with Huntley’s closest family members, associates, comrades, authors, artists and friends, this book affords readers an opportunity to take a long-lensed view of the historical roots of the many contemporary racial injustices re-invigorated in recent debates. Tomlinson re-writes the history of a period and a struggle often told through a master discourse that is male, middle-class and privileged. In so doing, she shows how Jessica Huntley’s fight for justice and the rights of all black people in Britain provides a useful lens into UK-based, black literary and cultural expression in the 20th century.

Social Ethics and Governance in Contemporary African Writing is the first book to bring rigorous literary, philosophical, and artistic discourse together to interrogate the ethics of governance and development in postcolonial Africa. It takes literature seriously as a context for philosophical reflection, vividly engaging the human agency, creativity, and resourcefulness of local Nigerians as political and social actors and shedding new light on the dynamics of human flourishing.Drawing on important secondary scholarship across several humanities disciplines, especially literature, philosophy, and the performing arts, Nimi Wariboko provides compelling and innovative analysis of the challenges and opportunities on governance and development in postcolonial Nigerian state and society. With a detailed introductory chapter and an authoritative analysis contained in six cohesive chapters, all anchored in political and social ethics and close readings of fascinating literary and artistic works—such as A. Igoni Barrett’s Blackass and the comedy skits of MC Edo Pikin—this is a landmark contribution to Nigerian cultural studies. Wariboko’s practical engagement between literature and philosophy also opens up new ways of seeing literary analysis as ethical methodology, beyond the specific contexts of Nigeria or Africa.

Social Ethics and Governance in Contemporary African Writing is the first book to bring rigorous literary, philosophical, and artistic discourse together to interrogate the ethics of governance and development in postcolonial Africa. It takes literature seriously as a context for philosophical reflection, vividly engaging the human agency, creativity, and resourcefulness of local Nigerians as political and social actors and shedding new light on the dynamics of human flourishing.Drawing on important secondary scholarship across several humanities disciplines, especially literature, philosophy, and the performing arts, Nimi Wariboko provides compelling and innovative analysis of the challenges and opportunities on governance and development in postcolonial Nigerian state and society. With a detailed introductory chapter and an authoritative analysis contained in six cohesive chapters, all anchored in political and social ethics and close readings of fascinating literary and artistic works—such as A. Igoni Barrett’s Blackass and the comedy skits of MC Edo Pikin—this is a landmark contribution to Nigerian cultural studies. Wariboko’s practical engagement between literature and philosophy also opens up new ways of seeing literary analysis as ethical methodology, beyond the specific contexts of Nigeria or Africa.

An interrogation of the poetry of Mazisi Kunene that places his work in the context of African literature and the richness of the oral tradition, as well as his political activism that connects him to the wider African diaspora. As Africa’s foremost epic poet, Mazisi Kunene occupies a unique place in history. In this study, Dike Okoro illuminates the penetrating insights found in Kunene's poetry and the reasons why his art has been considered as masterpieces grounded in geography, history, and culture. He situates Kunene as a theorist who embraces African tradition – including his adoption of izibongo, Zulu praise poetry – and the role of the artist as a chronicler of his people’s history, committed to art as a catalyst for change, not justd South Africa but for Africans around the globe. These essays and interviews address the post-apartheid reality of South Africa and draw from a repository of rich images found in Kunene's poetry to provide examples of depictions of colonial exploitation in Africa; the rootedness of traditional African culture; women and children who bring hope; and art as a way to effect change. They demonstrate Kunene’s profound influence on and in world literature, interrogating his work for its style and connections with poetry by Native Americans and other Indigenous literary traditions. The Epic Poetry of Mazisi Kunene argues that Mazisi Kunene's poetry centers non-human beings (animals and plants), the pristine environment of the olden days, and the cosmology of his Zulu ethnicity, asserting the relevance of his art – in this 21st-century moment of climate crisis – as both a form of activism and a political tool to the African creative writer.

The first study of Anglophone and Italian novels by Somali diasporic authors, offering a new critical framework for multilingual and transnational analysis of Somali literature.Building on the latest scholarship about multilingual contexts, diaspora studies and the rapidly expanding field of Italian postcolonial studies, Marco Medugno examines Somali diasporic literature with a comparative perspective. Considering works written in English and Italian, he argues that Somali diasporic authors share similar themes and aesthetics, thus creating an interliterary community within the diaspora space.By using multilingualism as a starting point, Medugno provides significant insights into how Somali national and individual identities are constructed in diasporic, global contexts through geography, style, form, language and the re-writing of national histories emerging out of colonization and independence. Analysing acclaimed Somali novels such as Nuruddin Farah’s Links and Crossbones, Igiaba Scego’s Adua and Cristina Ali Farah’s Little Mother, he questions any definition of ‘local’ as ‘provincial’, instead considering it a site for interrogating global concerns. Literature of the Somali Diaspora is organized around three themes: spatiality, language and resistance help to contextualize authors, forced by the decades-long Somali Civil War, to write outside Somalia and in different languages – including Somali, Italian, English, German, Dutch and Arabic – within global literary circuits. Their work thus creates a literature not confined within national borders but an interliterary global community, a transnational and multilingual space in which they share world aesthetic ideologies, challenge and engage with literary traditions in different languages and show an interplay between diverse cultures.

The first study of Anglophone and Italian novels by Somali diasporic authors, offering a new critical framework for multilingual and transnational analysis of Somali literature.Building on the latest scholarship about multilingual contexts, diaspora studies and the rapidly expanding field of Italian postcolonial studies, Marco Medugno examines Somali diasporic literature with a comparative perspective. Considering works written in English and Italian, he argues that Somali diasporic authors share similar themes and aesthetics, thus creating an interliterary community within the diaspora space.By using multilingualism as a starting point, Medugno provides significant insights into how Somali national and individual identities are constructed in diasporic, global contexts through geography, style, form, language and the re-writing of national histories emerging out of colonization and independence. Analysing acclaimed Somali novels such as Nuruddin Farah’s Links and Crossbones, Igiaba Scego’s Adua and Cristina Ali Farah’s Little Mother, he questions any definition of ‘local’ as ‘provincial’, instead considering it a site for interrogating global concerns. Literature of the Somali Diaspora is organized around three themes: spatiality, language and resistance help to contextualize authors, forced by the decades-long Somali Civil War, to write outside Somalia and in different languages – including Somali, Italian, English, German, Dutch and Arabic – within global literary circuits. Their work thus creates a literature not confined within national borders but an interliterary global community, a transnational and multilingual space in which they share world aesthetic ideologies, challenge and engage with literary traditions in different languages and show an interplay between diverse cultures.

An examination of alternate imaginaries of ‘the global’ in post-millennium anglophone African literature and the differing forms of agency that these imaginaries produce.Irony, Agency and the Global Imaginary in Post-2000 Nigerian and Kenyan Literature provides deft and detailed readings of writers’ perspectives that theorize ‘the global’ as experienced through vectors of globality such as the tourism industry, development agencies, multinational media, NGOs and consumerism. Penny Cartwright develops a conceptual distinction between two types of global imaginaries: ‘territorial’ imaginaries that treat privileged spaces or locations as ‘global’, thus demanding strategies of physical access and mobility; and ‘orientational’ imaginaries that treat ‘globality’ as a disposition or attitude that individuals perform or embody. Drawing detailed case studies from the work of Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Binyavanga Wainaina (Kenya), Chris Abani, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani and A. Igoni Barrett (Nigeria), Cartwright shows how these different kinds of imaginaries are combined, contrasted and ironized in literary texts. By analyzing Africa-based representations of ‘the global’, from the millennium period onward, this book considers how global imaginaries are shaped by and inflect distinctive regional experiences, including of postcoloniality, Structural Adjustment, oil economics, multilingualism and humanitarianism. Departing from more extensive recent scholarship on migration narratives, the book contributes insights into literary engagements of ‘the global’ that arise from Nigerian and Kenyan national spaces and circumstances. It explores the narrative strategies through which alternate ideas of the global are represented, with particular emphasis on ironizing strategies, as well as the kinds of personal and political responses that the various imaginaries produce in characters.

· 2025 Locus Awards Winner, Non-Fiction· 2025 Ignyte Awards Winner, Outstanding Creative Nonfiction· 2025 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist, African American Non-Fiction· 2024 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Finalist· 2024 British Science Fiction Association Award (BSFA) Shortlist, Best Short Non-Fiction · 2024 BSFA Award Longlist, Best Long Non-Fiction· One of Brittle Paper's 100 Notable African Books of 2024· One of Open Country Mag's 60 Notable African Books of 2024In this vibrant and approachable book, award-winning writers of black speculative fiction bring together excerpts from their work and creative reflections on futurisms with original essays.Features an introduction by Suyi Okungbowa.Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction showcases creative-critical essays that negotiate genre bending and black speculative fiction with writerly practice. As Afrodecendant peoples with lived experience from the continent, award-winning authors use their intrinsic voices in critical conversations on Afrofuturism and Afro-centered futurisms. By engaging with difference, they present a new kind of African study that is an evaluative gaze at African history, African spirituality, Afrosurrealism, "becoming," black radical imagination, cultural identity, decolonizing queerness, myths, linguistic cosmologies, and more.Contributing authors – Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga, Cheryl S. Ntumy, Dilman Dila, Eugen Bacon, Nerine Dorman, Nuzo Onoh, Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Stephen Embleton, Suyi Okungbowa, Tobi Ogundiran and Xan van Rooyen – offer boldly hybrid chapters (both creative and scholarly) that interface Afrocentric artefacts and exegesis. Through ethnographic reflections and intense scrutinies of African fiction, these writers contribute open and diverse reflections of Afro-centered futurisms.The authors in Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction feature in major genre and literary awards, including the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, British Fantasy, Locus, Ignyte, Nommo, Philip K. Dick, Shirley Jackson and Otherwise Awards, among others. They are also intrinsic partners in a vital conversation on the rise of black speculative fiction that explores diversity and social (in)justice, charting poignant stories with black hero/ines who remake their worlds in color zones of their own image.

· 2025 Locus Awards Winner, Non-Fiction· 2025 Ignyte Awards Winner, Outstanding Creative Nonfiction· 2025 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist, African American Non-Fiction· 2024 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Finalist· 2024 British Science Fiction Association Award (BSFA) Shortlist, Best Short Non-Fiction · 2024 BSFA Award Longlist, Best Long Non-Fiction· One of Brittle Paper's 100 Notable African Books of 2024· One of Open Country Mag's 60 Notable African Books of 2024In this vibrant and approachable book, award-winning writers of black speculative fiction bring together excerpts from their work and creative reflections on futurisms with original essays.Features an introduction by Suyi Okungbowa.Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction showcases creative-critical essays that negotiate genre bending and black speculative fiction with writerly practice. As Afrodecendant peoples with lived experience from the continent, award-winning authors use their intrinsic voices in critical conversations on Afrofuturism and Afro-centered futurisms. By engaging with difference, they present a new kind of African study that is an evaluative gaze at African history, African spirituality, Afrosurrealism, "becoming," black radical imagination, cultural identity, decolonizing queerness, myths, linguistic cosmologies, and more.Contributing authors – Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga, Cheryl S. Ntumy, Dilman Dila, Eugen Bacon, Nerine Dorman, Nuzo Onoh, Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Stephen Embleton, Suyi Okungbowa, Tobi Ogundiran and Xan van Rooyen – offer boldly hybrid chapters (both creative and scholarly) that interface Afrocentric artefacts and exegesis. Through ethnographic reflections and intense scrutinies of African fiction, these writers contribute open and diverse reflections of Afro-centered futurisms.The authors in Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction feature in major genre and literary awards, including the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, British Fantasy, Locus, Ignyte, Nommo, Philip K. Dick, Shirley Jackson and Otherwise Awards, among others. They are also intrinsic partners in a vital conversation on the rise of black speculative fiction that explores diversity and social (in)justice, charting poignant stories with black hero/ines who remake their worlds in color zones of their own image.

An imaginative, narratological reading of Chinua Achebe's novels, stories, poetry, and essays through a literary and historical framework.Toyin Falola analyzes fictional and historical cartographies of Africa in Achebe’s literary works to offer a critical representation of Africa's present and future. In particular, he focuses on the historical valuation of a full range of the writer's works – novels including Things Fall Apart, but also short stories, poems, and essays – as important materials that have contributed to the political events in Nigeria and, by extension, Africa. The raw creativity found in Achebe’s stories and his ability to tell the Nigerian story – precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial – have endeared him to many, including readers and those critical of him and his works. Chinua Achebe: Narrating Africa in Fictions and History analyzes all of the writer’s works, dwelling on the Nigerian political context upon which many, if not all, of his narratives lie. As a result, it examines methodologies of narration and ideologies that allow his works to resonate with the imagination of Africa.

An imaginative, narratological reading of Chinua Achebe's novels, stories, poetry, and essays through a literary and historical framework.Toyin Falola analyzes fictional and historical cartographies of Africa in Achebe’s literary works to offer a critical representation of Africa's present and future. In particular, he focuses on the historical valuation of a full range of the writer's works – novels including Things Fall Apart, but also short stories, poems, and essays – as important materials that have contributed to the political events in Nigeria and, by extension, Africa. The raw creativity found in Achebe’s stories and his ability to tell the Nigerian story – precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial – have endeared him to many, including readers and those critical of him and his works. Chinua Achebe: Narrating Africa in Fictions and History analyzes all of the writer’s works, dwelling on the Nigerian political context upon which many, if not all, of his narratives lie. As a result, it examines methodologies of narration and ideologies that allow his works to resonate with the imagination of Africa.

Ferreira da Silva's own words, in interviews and an original essay, frame this collection of interdisciplinary scholars and artists engaging with her influential work at the intersections of global race, ethnic, and feminist studies.As a decolonial feminist philosopher, Denise Ferreira da Silva has pushed the fields of ethnic and feminist studies beyond traditional stakes in US-centered formulations of difference and inclusion. In Conversation with Denise Ferreira da Silva is an interdisciplinary reading companion of Silva’s work – and its reckoning with the persistence of global racial violence – designed to help scholars, students, artists, and activists better engage in a global idea of race. While traditional scholarship around difference has often focused on describing difference as separation, segregation, and subjugation, Ferreira da Silva's art practice and philosophical writings attempt to think and teach "difference without separatability."The book is framed by original interviews with Ferreira da Silva on topics including Black Brazilian thought and feminist studies, disorder and Afro-pessimism, citation politics and decoloniality, and Spinoza and physics. Contributors from a broad range of disciplines – such as comparative literature, creative writing, criminology, gender studies, and global studies – provide short reflections on Ferreira da Silva’s methods and arguments on these topics.By providing a way to enter into dialogue with Ferreira da Silva’s works, this volume brings one of the most distinguished and consistent recent voices on the nature of the human to those interested in engaging questions of racial power and difference within their own disciplines.

Ferreira da Silva's own words, in interviews and an original essay, frame this collection of interdisciplinary scholars and artists engaging with her influential work at the intersections of global race, ethnic, and feminist studies.As a decolonial feminist philosopher, Denise Ferreira da Silva has pushed the fields of ethnic and feminist studies beyond traditional stakes in US-centered formulations of difference and inclusion. In Conversation with Denise Ferreira da Silva is an interdisciplinary reading companion of Silva’s work – and its reckoning with the persistence of global racial violence – designed to help scholars, students, artists, and activists better engage in a global idea of race. While traditional scholarship around difference has often focused on describing difference as separation, segregation, and subjugation, Ferreira da Silva's art practice and philosophical writings attempt to think and teach "difference without separatability."The book is framed by original interviews with Ferreira da Silva on topics including Black Brazilian thought and feminist studies, disorder and Afro-pessimism, citation politics and decoloniality, and Spinoza and physics. Contributors from a broad range of disciplines – such as comparative literature, creative writing, criminology, gender studies, and global studies – provide short reflections on Ferreira da Silva’s methods and arguments on these topics.By providing a way to enter into dialogue with Ferreira da Silva’s works, this volume brings one of the most distinguished and consistent recent voices on the nature of the human to those interested in engaging questions of racial power and difference within their own disciplines.

Situates the Black dancing body as a locus of intellectual labor, historical memory, and resistance, challenging logocentric paradigms that marginalize embodied knowledge.1963 marked a pivotal moment in Ghanaian intellectual history with the inauguration of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, accompanied by Kwame Nkrumah’s “African Genius” speech, in which he extolled the African Personality. Revitalizing Decolonization through Dance Scholarship revisits this moment to theorize the African Personality not as rhetoric but as an epistemological framework enacted through performance.Critically engaging with the Ghana Dance Ensemble’s neo-traditional experimentations, Eric Awuah shows how African dance-musicking operates as archive, pedagogy, and theory. Awuah extends his taxonomy of Ghanaian movement culture to Traditional, Professional, Academic, and the Amateur, arguing that these categories function as a kinetic continuum rather than fixed hierarchies. This framework underscores dance as a site of cultural sovereignty where African Genius is realized in ways that resist the fragmentation of body, mind, and spirit. And extending beyond Ghana, the study interrogates West African higher education institutions of dance-music and diaspora associations as arenas where decolonization is negotiated in motion. Case studies of diasporic practices illustrate both resilience and transformation of heritage across transnational contexts.While African Genius may be regarded as the culmination of excellence rooted in creative freedom, African Personality functions as the conduit through which that excellence is embodied in dance-music. This book argues that African dance-music is a vital decolonial practice safeguarding heritage, empowering communities, and envisioning freedom across generations.

Situates the Black dancing body as a locus of intellectual labor, historical memory, and resistance, challenging logocentric paradigms that marginalize embodied knowledge.1963 marked a pivotal moment in Ghanaian intellectual history with the inauguration of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, accompanied by Kwame Nkrumah’s “African Genius” speech, in which he extolled the African Personality. Revitalizing Decolonization through Dance Scholarship revisits this moment to theorize the African Personality not as rhetoric but as an epistemological framework enacted through performance.Critically engaging with the Ghana Dance Ensemble’s neo-traditional experimentations, Eric Awuah shows how African dance-musicking operates as archive, pedagogy, and theory. Awuah extends his taxonomy of Ghanaian movement culture to Traditional, Professional, Academic, and the Amateur, arguing that these categories function as a kinetic continuum rather than fixed hierarchies. This framework underscores dance as a site of cultural sovereignty where African Genius is realized in ways that resist the fragmentation of body, mind, and spirit. And extending beyond Ghana, the study interrogates West African higher education institutions of dance-music and diaspora associations as arenas where decolonization is negotiated in motion. Case studies of diasporic practices illustrate both resilience and transformation of heritage across transnational contexts.While African Genius may be regarded as the culmination of excellence rooted in creative freedom, African Personality functions as the conduit through which that excellence is embodied in dance-music. This book argues that African dance-music is a vital decolonial practice safeguarding heritage, empowering communities, and envisioning freedom across generations.

A timely look at contemporary African American creative works through the lens of Ta-Nehisi Coates's ground-breaking entry into the comic book industry. Writing Black Panther traces Ta-Nehisi Coates’s presence in comic books from 2015-2023, focusing on his contributions as the writer for Black Panther. His ambitious 50-issue run of the Marvel comic coincided with ongoing and multifaceted debates concerning diversity and inclusion – what we might call representation struggles – at a key moment in the history of comics with respect to Black writers. Howard Rambsy II locates Coates’s contributions at the intersection of African American literary studies and comic book studies, showing a dynamic convergence that redefines both fields and broadens the scope of Black creativity. Writing Black Panther demonstrates key aspects of Coates’s comics narratives that overlap with major themes and topics in African American literature. These include the depiction of multiple Black characters, exploration of intra-racial and interracial conflicts, excavations of Black histories, displays of Afrofuturist aesthetics, and attention to cultural geography. As a prominent essayist, bestselling author, and popular comic book writer, Coates stands out as a notable gateway figure who bridges multiple genres. His time as a comics writer constitutes an important, defining phase of his professional career. And as this book shows, Coates’s work on Black Panther went a long way to dispelling the myth that “diversity doesn’t sell” in the comic book industry.