Crossing Borders in African Literature
From the African Library of Critical Writing
Available from African Books Collective
‘Crossing Borders’ showcases intellectual attempts to commit the process of African interrogation of postcoloniality and postmodernity to multidimensional exploration of perspectives on black identity and the interaction of contemporary black cultural expressions beyond the borders of Africa and across the Atlantic.
This is coming against a rampant tendency for corruption and devaluation of African world legacies and traditions by imperial and monolithic cultures in their world domination agenda.
Crossing Borders therefore implies African literature crossing nation state boundaries to engage creatively, and often unpredictably, in psychological and genealogical relations with other strains of a heritage that spawns several generations and millennia across the African Diaspora.
According to editors Smith and Ce, this volume of Critical Writing in ten chapter readings has particularised on theoretical and critical perspectives which show how the controversial Westernisation of Africa has demanded remedial visions and counteracting propositions to the cycle of abuse and fragmentation of the continent.
These studies of emergent and older canons of African literature also reveal how the African experience in modernity associated with the western paradigm is fraught with tension at various political, social, economic and psychological stages of existence within individuals and nationalities.
The editors have consequently distilled some highly significant historic and informative insights on modern African and Black literary traditions, methodically articulating a greater unity amid the diversity, the fusions and hybrids, that have been embedded in the subjective and external realities of an African multivariate universe.
‘Crossing Borders’ thus pays tribute, ultimately, to an all out heritage within and beyond regional or national groupings built upon a franchise of twentieth century black cultural unanimity.
Such nationalism might almost be deemed the sole consistent element of Africa centered modernity in contemporary writing, say the editors.
