One of the most interesting developments in recent years in the field
of African American studies has been the expansion of its horizons beyond
the North American theater of Black life and expression that has for so
long been featured as its principal focus, and often, in many academic
departments, as the only one. Yet, as the early scholarship which serves
as the foundation for the field demonstrated, the Black experience in the
New World has always presented a continental dimension that provides the
concrete grounding for the historical perspective from which that
experience must be viewed and understood. This was the methodological
premise underlying the work of scholars such as Melville Herskovits (1941) and Roger Bastide (1967), who ranged throughout the Black world in quest
of the lived connections that gave an original African imprint to the
Black experience, while providing theoretical validity to the very concept
of a Black world. In the works of such scholars, the
consciousness of a continuum that connects Africa to the Black experience
in the New World underlies the effort to comprehend the Black diaspora
itself in its manifold wholeness.
Africa's strong tradition of storytelling has long been an expression of an oral narrative culture. African writers such as Amos Tutuola, Naguib Mahfouz, Wole Soyinka, and J.M. Coetzee have adapted these older forms to develop and enhance the genre of the novel, in a shift from the oral mode to print. Comprehensive in scope, these new essays cover the fiction in the European languages from North Africa and Africa South of the Sahara, as well as in Arabic. They highlight the themes and styles of the African novel through an examination of the works that have either attained canonical statusan entire chapter is devoted to the work of Chinua Achebeor can be expected to do so. Including a guide to further reading and a chronology, this is the ideal starting-point for students of African and world literatures. f. abiola irele is Visiting Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies and the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. His recent publications include The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature, edited with Simon Gikandi (Cambridge, 2004).
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