Routledge Handbook of Minority Discourses in African Literature

This handbook provides a critical overview of literature dealing with groups of people or regions that suffer marginalization within Africa. The contributors examine a multiplicity of minority discourses expressed in African literature, including those who are culturally, socially, politically, religiously, economically, and sexually marginalized in literary and artistic creations. Chapters and sections of the book are structured to identify major areas of minority articulation of their condition and strategies deployed against the repression, persecution, oppression, suppression, domination, and tyranny of the majority or dominant group. Bringing together diverse perspectives to give a holistic representation of the African reality, this handbook is an important read for scholars and students of comparative and postcolonial literature and African studies.

Table of Contents:
Part I: Background 1. Introduction 2. The Theory and Aesthetics of Minority Discourses in African Literature Part II: Political and Racial Forms of Marginalization 3. Amazigh/Berber literature and “literary space”: a contested minority situation in (North) African literatures 4. Negotiating the global literary market: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short fiction 5. Anglophone Cameroon Literature: Writing from the Margins of the Margin 6. Niger Delta and its Minority Condition in Nigerian Writing 7. Jola Verbal Arts of Cassamance, Senegal and The Gambia: A Question in Search of a Literature Part III: Culture and Language 8. Negating hegemony: linguistic and rhetorical formations as discursive praxis of resistance in Yulisa Amadu Maddy’s Obasai and Other Plays 9. Of Pidgin, Nigerian Pidgin Poetry, and Minority Discourses: The Pidgin Poems of Ezenwa-Ohaeto 10. Three Moments of Minor Afrikaans Expression 11. Swahili Literature as Minority Discourse in African Literatures 12. Becoming-minoritarian: constructions of coloured identities in creative writing projects at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa Part IV: Patriarchal Domination, Gender, Sexuality and Other Sociocultural "Minorities" 13. A Reflection on Gender and Sexuality as Transnational Archive of African Modernity 14. 'Who Do You Think You Are, Woman?': Wangari Maathai Answers the Patriarchal State in Unbowed 15. Representation of Women in Udje, an Urhobo Men's-Only Oral Poetic Performance Genre 16. Voices from the margin: female protagonists navigating power geometries 17. Responding from the Fringe: Women, Islam and Patriarchy in Nigerian Muslim Women's Novels Part V: Intranational, National and International Marginalization/Conflict 18. The Odds Against Eritrean Literature 19. Minority Discourses and the Construction of 'Illicit Versions' of Zimbabwean Nation-ness in Ndebele Fiction in English 20. The Muse of History and the Literature of the Nigeria-Biafra War Part VI: Literature and Disability 21. Children with Disabilities as Negotiatiors of Social Responsibility: A Critical Study of Meshak Asare's Sosu's Call 22. Beyond 'Harmless Lunacy': African Women Writers (W)riting Madness 23. Mental health, minority discourse and Tanure Ojaide’s short stories Part VII: Recent Trends of Marginalities: Timely and Timeless 24. Not Yet Season of Blossom: Writing Northern Nigeria into the Global Space 25. Afropolitan literature as a minority discourse in contemporary: African literature 26. Tanella Boni’s Matins de couvre-feu: environmentalism and ecocriticism in African literature 27. Futuristic themes and science fiction in modern African literature 28. Writing the Self: Indian Women Writers from South Africa

About the Author :
Joyce Ashuntantang is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Hartford, USA. Tanure Ojaide is the Frank Porter Graham Professor of Africana studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA.