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Contemporary African Literatures in English. Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications By Krishnan Madhu. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 222 pp.
Madhu Krishnan’s book offers an attention-grabbing investigation into the representation of Africa in contemporary African literature in English. Organized in five chapters, this concise volume explores questions of ethics, race, gender, mythopoetics, and address in internationally published works from the African continent. In her introduction, Krishnan notes that globally published African authors work both with and against the conventions of representation usually associated with postcolonial literatures, giving shape to an idea of Africa that “remains caught in a critical schism between authenticity and cosmopolitan detachment.” Investigating the global Africa created and disseminated in novels requires a multilayered study of form, content, and context. By focusing on the intersection of the aesthetic and the political, Krishnan sets out to interrogate what she calls “the complex and often contradictory workings of identification” at play in a reciprocal interaction with larger discourses about Africa. Following a thematic approach and combining close reading with socio-historical and material contextualization, the volume contributes to the framing of a nuanced and deeper understanding of the representations and significations of Africa in a global context.
Chapter One provides some introductory material around the interaction between aesthetic and...