Most contemporary literature of Africa have been aided by thematic specificity on war, conflict, discord, and the resultant tension wrought upon individual and family on national and continental spaces.

The Dark Edge of African Literature

From the African Library of Critical Writing.

‘The Dark Edge of African Literature’ proposes arguments and theories for exposition and interpretation of such fictions of war and conflict irrespective of the peculiarities of history and language of narrative.

It attempts to discern how collective interpretations of contemporary history may be heralded into an African cultural epistemology.

Each of the chapters is tailored to offer a wholistic perspective that answers the poser of what further implications for African cultures abound with the historical and transformative experiences in pervasive conflict, violence and warfare.

The starting point engages reader attention with a writer’s profiling of twentieth century African dictatorships and their historical confrontations with African writers who purport to assist in the exposure of villainy and the subversion of state dictatorships upon the African landscape through the art of creative writing.

These critical approaches have dwelt on Somali, Nigerian, Kenyan, Angolan, Sudanese literatures, presenting many different, though often not fully cognised, materials on uprising and resistance as embedded in frequent readings of African literature.

The physical and psychological dislocation by war, the controversy about the relational quality and dependent nature of texts on contexts, and the exigencies that inform the deliberate distortions of certain figures and images by contemporary African writers, are some of the significant exegesis of this volume of African Library of Critical Writing edited by Smith and Ce.

Available Now at the African Books Collective