Ayi Kwei Armah, Radical Iconoclast: Pitting Imaginary Worlds Against the Actual

Ghanaian novelist, essayist, and short-story writer Ayi Kwei Armah has won international recognition as one of Africa’s most articulate writers. In this book, Ode Ogede argues that previous critics have misinterpreted the aesthetic and literary influences that have shaped Armah’s artistic vision and overlooked his most significant and valuable contribution to the problems of writing “outside the prison-house of conventional English.”

Professor Ogede situates Armah’s writing within its cultural, historical, and political contexts and examines Armah’s ability to create new literary forms based on his masterful manipulation of African oral traditions. Armah is presented here as a writer who looks beyond the corruption that would seem to have engulfed Africa and who successfully bridges the concerns of first- and second-generation postcolonial African writers.