Explore the vast range of titles available.

The recent racial reckoning has challenged scholars to recover Black voices that have been erased from historical accounts. This essay is my reflections on the challenges I faced in conducting research on African voices in politically and racially charged settings in Lesotho and South Africa over the past half century. After the political atmosphere began changing in South Africa in 1990, I served the individuals and communities I write about by rectifying historical injustices such as returning a holy relic to a religious group, the Israelites, and facilitating the return of remains of Nontetha Nkwenkwe from a pauper’s grave in Pretoria to her home.

Contemporary African creative writers have confidently taken strides which resonate all over the world. The daring diversities, stylistic innovations and enchanting audacities which characterize their works across many different genres resonate with readers beyond African geographic and linguistic boundaries. Writers in Africa and the diaspora seem to be speaking with collective and individual voices that compel world attention and admiration. And they are being read in numerous world languages. This volume's contributors recognize the foundations laid by the pioneer African writers as they point vigorously to contemporary writers who have moved African imaginative creativity forward with utmost integrity, and to the critics who continue to respond with unyielding tenacity. The founding Editor of ALT, Professor Eldred Durosimi Jones, recalls in an interview in this volume, the role ALT played in the evolution and stimulation of a wave of African literary studies and criticism in mid-20th century: \"The 1960s saw a good deal of activity among scholars teaching African Literature throughout Africa and the world, and this led to a series of conferences in African Literature in Dakar, Nairobi, and Freetown.around the idea of communication between the various English Departments which took an interest in African Literature. We decided on a bulletin, which was just a kind of newsletter between departments saying what was going on...it was that bulletin that showed the potential of this kind of communication... after that we started African Literature Today/> as a journal inviting articles on the works of African writers.\" Contributors to the series demonstrate the impact of the growth in studies and criticism of African Literature in the 50 years since its founding. Series Editor: Ernest N. Emenyonu is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint, USA. Reviews Editor: Obi Nwakanma

This position paper is written in reference to the recent extensive media coverage of the report of the Independent Panel describing Harassment, Including Sexual Harassment, Bullying and Abuse of Power at UNAIDS Secretariat by several newspapers and authoritative journals such as and . Unfortunately, none of these publications provide any clear evidence to support the accusations and merely repeat what are, in our view, unsubstantiated statements made in the report. Given the critical role that Africans have played in dealing with one of the most severe epidemics that the world has seen and the gravity of these charges, we believe it is essential to reaffirm that African voices and leadership is imperative for the global AIDS response.

Contemporary African creative writers have confidently taken strides which resonate all over the world. The daring diversities, stylistic innovations and enchanting audacities which characterize their works across many different genres resonate with readers beyond African geographic and linguistic boundaries. Writers in Africa and the diaspora seem to be speaking with collective and individual voices that compel world attention and admiration. And they arebeing read in numerous world languages. This volume's contributors recognize the foundations laid by the pioneer African writers as they point vigorously to contemporary writers who have moved African imaginative creativityforward with utmost integrity, and to the critics who continue to respond with unyielding tenacity. The founding Editor of ALT, Professor Eldred Durosimi Jones, recalls in an interview in this volume, the role ALT played in the evolution and stimulation of a wave of African literary studies and criticism in mid-20th century: \"The 1960s saw a good deal of activity among scholars teaching African Literature throughout Africa and the world, and this ledto a series of conferences in African Literature in Dakar, Nairobi, and Freetown.around the idea of communication between the various English Departments which took an interest in African Literature. We decided on a bulletin, which was just a kind of newsletter between departments saying what was going on...it was that bulletin that showed the potential of this kind of communication... after that we started African Literature Today as a journal inviting articles on the works of African writers.\" Contributors to the series demonstrate the impact of the growth in studies and criticism of African Literature in the 50 years since its founding. Series Editor: Ernest N. Emenyonu is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint, USA. Reviews Editor: Obi Nwakanma

This paper investigated Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s female character portrayal in her first short story effort, The Thing Around Your Neck, an anthology of 12 short stories. The study offered insights into the female protagonists from the author’s short stories who were contextualised within a patriarchal society/environment and analysed regarding gender subjugation and marginalisation to explore how Adichie equips and empowers them to fight and overcome subjugating situations and attain their liberation and freedom. Through the lenses of African/reformist feminism, the paper argued that Adichie’s portrayal of several emancipated and strong-willed women destroys the usual representation of Nigerian women under male domination in earlier literature where the images of women were neglected or presented in stereotypical roles. The paper further contended that Adichie’s protagonists are educated, conscientised, strong, self-sufficient and emancipated women. This analysis revealed that Adichie’s portrayal of the female protagonists justifies the author’s aim at reformist feminism, cooperation and complementarity – involving men as partners in women’s quest for freedom and emancipation in the development of Nigerian and African societies.

The recent upsurge of interest in restitution and repatriation debates by practitioners and scholars might ofer appropriate chances for true interdisciplinary research. Not only should historical, anthropological and legal studies take part in such a conversation, but also, political science, archaeology and heritage studies. Resolutely and systematically giving voice to both African stakeholders and African researchers is an imperative. In this introduction, the fresh start of a rich debate is traced, providing the framework for processing and understanding current debates and practices of restitution. Essential and neglected questions are formulated. Detected voids call for the mainstreaming of a new discourse on restitution and repatriation to play a pivotal role in the epistemology of these allied disciplines and training.

Regarding at least half of the nine stories of “Wife of His Youth” by Charles Chesnutt, including five of the most artfully crafted, I propose that the interaction between the story and undergraduate reader benefits substantially from a comic alteration of the Arthurian romance at the text’s core. In exemplary stories such as the title work and “The Passing of Grandison,” the references are obvious. Yet elsewhere the connections prove subtler according to the provocative controversies that Arthurian romance bequeaths indirectly to the present, a consequential and eventual transformation of identity and existence, a signification of racial aesthetics and ideologies, and finally even a hierarchy of political power embedded within English (pun intended) texts. Therefore, the unifying metaphor of Arthur exists at once as reference and allusion—in other words, as figure and idea. In fact, the suggestion even recurs as loosely related themes: a dishonorable Southern chivalry and eventually an emblem of public power. Such figuration appears in “Wife” initially as a European text intruding on a black woman’s story (“Wife,” “Cicely”) and then as comic strategies that re-enliven our sense of Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King” (1859–1885; “Grandison”). While the Arthurian figure would seem to disappear finally from Chesnutt’s finishing tales (“Bouquet,” “Web”), the scenes complete a call for revolutionary power on the student’s part. The most useful pedagogical strategies for teaching the stories then is to explore initially the degree to which the European American and African American texts provide contesting representations of American beauty. During the second stage of the learner’s developing cognition would appear the writer’s brilliant adaptation of English texts. In the final step, the learner must recognize that a nonwhite’s mastery of Standard English, both literally and figuratively, is indeed cultural power.

Female \"circumcision\" or, more precisely, female genital cutting (FGC), remains an important cultural practice in many African countries, often serving as a coming-of-age ritual. It is also a practice that has generated international dispute and continues to be at the center of debates over women's rights, the limits of cultural pluralism, the balance of power between local cultures, international human rights, and feminist activism. In our increasingly globalized world, these practices have also begun immigrating to other nations, where transnational complexities vex debates about how to resolve the issue. Bringing together thirteen essays,Transcultural Bodiesprovides an ethnographically rich exploration of FGC among African diasporas in the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. Contributors analyze changes in ideologies of gender and sexuality in immigrant communities, the frequent marginalization of African women's voices in debates over FGC, and controversies over legislation restricting the practice in immigrant populations.

This chapter sheds some light into the gatekeeping practices of African diasporic press and its effects on framing African conflicts. The theoretical approach of gatekeeping enables the author to elicit how diaspora journalists develop an inclination to give prominence to African conflict news, and the framing approach gives an insight into their preferred framing devices. These were empirically grounded through an interview with the editors of the African Voice and the Nigerian Watch newspapers and textual analysis of their content. Hence, the data reveals that they are sceptical of reproducing African conflict stories from western news agency and that they also have a tendency to prioritise ‘conflict’, ‘human interest’ and ‘responsibility’ angles.

American performance traditions and music industry trends have historically denigrated religious practices and spaces that African descended people considered sacred or worthy of regard. This legacy of sacrilege is an extension of colonialism wherein the cultural traditions of those conquered are marked primitive, strange, or laughable. Mahalia Jackson resisted such colonial systems of meaning through her discursive song and narratives incorporating both sacred and vernacular Black American traditions across the United States of America and Europe. It was her European success in the early 1950s that boosted her domestic career and distinguished her from peers with equal or greater talent. This critical hearing of her performance, together with a brief archeology of the term \"gospel,\" reveals how Jackson's decolonial song labor disrupted structures that had previously excluded the African descended practices and people, and Negro women in particular, from the realm of the sacred.