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F. Abiola Irele. The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. xviii + 296 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. No price reported. Paper.
Abiola Irele's critical examination of African literature is an interesting collection of essays written from 1981 to 1994. Published in 2001, these essays come across as a nice way to review some of the essential literary and cultural events that have influenced contemporary African literature. In other words, Irele is not breaking new ground, but rather refreshing one's memories. His intellectual insights, as always, are well worth the reading time.
In the preface and again in chapter 1, Irele informs us of his purpose in putting together The African Imagination. The work responds to two ways of looking at African literature. The first is to challenge the view of the African experience, both on the African continent and in the New World, as a collective experience, a type of cultural monolith. This position, he notes, has been taken by Europeans such as Janheinz Jahn and by those Africans who garner their literary experience from the négritude movement or who have at least been influenced by this Francophone phenomenon. The other cultural monolith he notes is the Black Aesthetic movement of the 1960s found primarily in the United States....