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This essay takes as its starting point the problem posed by the increasing number of literary archives of the papers of postcolonial writers that have been acquired by American and European academic institutions. After registering the ethical problems posed by this trend, I argue that the existence of such archives represents an opportunity for postcolonial studies to interrogate its own archival politics in relation to constructions of literary value. Using the Amos Tutuola Collection (located at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin) as a case study, I demonstrate that while this archive's form makes certain claims for its value, a study of the author's letters, manuscripts, and documents contained therein suggests that alternative values are latent within the Collection. I discuss how these values differ from those typically sought by postcolonial critics and conclude by considering how a hypothetical digitized Tutuola collection might allow for the realization of new values. Inquiry into forms of value—and not simply the identification of existing literary ones—is, I suggest, an important aspect of the continued relevance of writers' collections to postcolonial studies.

This essay explores the politics and aesthetics of the mouth in Amos Tutuola's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954) and argues that the novel reflects on the speculative logic of finance capitalism. The essay departs from the scholarly consensus that views My Life in the Bush of Ghosts as a novel about the slave trade and its traumas and instead argues that it engages with the capitalist economies generated by slavery. These economies are revealed in Tutuola's representation of the mouth as a site for the production of abstract value, a production enabled by the mouth's ability to mimic and enact the logic of destruction. Building on Ian Baucom's insightful readings of the slave trade and finance capitalism, in which he suggests that destruction is indispensible to the rise and success of finance capitalism and thus productive of more lasting and tangible benefits, the essay reads the recurring image of the mouth as an instrument that converts loss into gain. For this conversion to be possible, one needs to see consumption as a productive process I call \"mouthwork.\" Tutuola's novel renders the relationship between consumption and production more complex and less polarizing than it might initially seem and casts redemption as capitalism's underlying and galvanizing sentiment.

To date, much of the scholarship of the Bildungsroman has hewed close to national borders and conventional literary periods. This article offers a new methodology for reading the anglophone Bildungsroman through constellations of novels that share essential generic and formal features that are grafted onto the teleological plot of the Bildungsroman, warping its narrative form. Joseph Conrad and Amos Tutuola, although they are separated by time and distance, both introduce a constructed orality into the Bildungsroman, and with it a novel chronotopic arrangement that reorients the famously teleological Bildungsroman beyond the limits of conventional realism and the metropole.

What have been the meanings and meaningfulness of pleasure in Yorùbá thought, practice, and history over the past eight hundred years? Ogundiran draws from literary, archaeological, myth-historical, and ethnographic sources to answer this question in two parts. First, he examines the ontologies, materiality, and sociality of pleasure at the levels of ordinary experience and institutional culture. Second, he demonstrates how pleasurable experiences and things were used to construct social order, define social difference, and build community. Ogundiran concludes that pleasure is not an autonomous experience. Rather, it is embedded in other domains of social life.

The late Harry Garuba and Biodun Jeyifo are considered to be the most outspoken critics against the generational model of writing the history of Nigerian literature. These academics raised objections against the national-generational framework on the premises that it is ambiguous, unstable, temporally reductive, and uses a rudimentary age-grading system to explain away a complex literary history in which different writers are constantly churning out works of different genres and stylistic compositions at different times regardless of the generation to which they have been constricted. Drawing from their highly antagonistic outlooks, this article further criticizes the disadvantageous character of the generational model adopted in Nigerian literary history by critically examining how twenty-first-century literary developments disrupt historiographically constructed generations in Nigerian literature. The article also subtly proposes that a fourth generation be instituted or the generational model be altogether scrapped.

For both writers and scholars of African and diaspora literature, genre is a fraught concept. Western institutions, especially departments of English literature, have used the tool of genre to discipline Africana literatures and the people who create them, at once reducing conventional realism to a source of anthropological information and mischaracterizing realism with an indigenous or Nonwestern worldview as fantasy or \"Magical Realism.\" \"West African spiritual surrealism,\" as defined in this essay, offers a generic rubric that both attends to the literalization of Igbo and Yoruba cosmology in fiction as well as the ways these cosmologies can give rise to literary devices that resist hegemonic, Anglo-American centric literary interpretation. Through close readings of Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl (2005) and Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater (2018), this article historicizes West African spiritual surrealism as a geographically and ideologically diasporic genre that cannot be properly understood through frameworks of globalization alone. This genre and its writers require critics to read both deeply and widely in order to understand how West African spiritual surrealism places African cosmologies and people always already at the center of literary production.

The paper aims to explore Multimedia as a cognitive tool to enhance the study of appropriated texts of Nigeria and the sociolinguistic reasons behind appropriating the English language to carry the native's experiences. The writers of Nigeria deploy the strategies to reconstruct Africa's taunted imageries and cultures. An ethnographic study exposes the strategic method of representing authentic versions through abrogation. The article examines and re-evaluates, identified resistant strains that are consciously or unconsciously integrated in the texts, according to their level of contact with the English language to ensure their text's authenticity. The palm-wine Drinkard and Purple Hibiscus are the texts(novel) representing the first and third generation of Nigerian authors selected for the study. Bakhtin’s theory on Heteroglossia and dialogism also analyses the selected novels. The novelists resist the hegemonic speech pattern to incorporate indigenous practices within their utterances. Multimedia as a tool can enrich the cognitive process in comprehending the appropriated texts. A Quasi-experimental research design was used to evaluate the comprehensive capacity of tertiary learners before and after using Multimedia to capture the quintessence of an indigenised novel. While some may criticize Appropriation as a market-driven exoticism, it has successfully fashioned familiarization of Indigenized culture, rather than alienating the knowledge about it using multimedia.

Wole Soyinka’s seminal essay, “The Fourth Stage: Through the Mysteries of Ogun to the Origin of Yoruba Tragedy” which appears as appendix in his collection of critical essays, Myth, Literature and the African World (1976), has been read and critiqued as an important work of myth, mythopoesis, tragedy and the Yoruba pantheon. To date, no meta-critical study has yet treated the essay as essentially speculative fiction, or as an invented model or construct for variegated possible future applications, or even as an authentic African futuristic artistic invention. This is important in present times as a resurgence of earlier genres and trends populate the literary world, thereby raising the need for underpinnings, connections, projections, and conflations such as this article presents. With the application of archetypal author-, text-, and context-oriented theoretical modes alongside historicity, this essay navigates and re-interrogates “The Fourth Stage” and its numerous critiques in the contexts of Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism, finding it a practical model for African futuristic mytho-cultural and literary productions. I also through this essay expose the multiple areas of possible applications of such inventiveness in the reappraisal and re-interrogation of the problematics and maladies of the postcolony.

This paper is a literary re-interpretation of the African Renaissance. The post-World War II period witnessed an increasing scholarly interest in the African Renaissance. Yet, the emphasis has largely been on the political and economic aspects of the African Renaissance with no significant consideration of its aesthetic and ideological manifestations in contemporary African literature. This article will, however, reconsider the African Renaissance in a new light by studying its contribution in the production of a distinguished contemporary literary African output. I will, accordingly, use Amos Tutuola’s Feather Woman of the Jungle and Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons as two illustrative samples of this post-colonial early literary endeavour to partake in the revival process.