Teaching the African Novel (In the MLA Series Options for Teaching)

What is the African novel, and how should it be taught?

The twenty-three essays of this volume address these two questions and in the process convey a wealth of information and ideas about the diverse regions, peoples, nations, languages, and writers of the African continent. Topics include

• Ngugi wa Thiong'o's favoring of indigenous languages and literary traditions over European
• the special place of Marxism in African letters
• the influence of Frantz Fanon
• women writers and the sub-Saharan novel
• the Maghrebian novel
• the novel and the griot epic in the Sahel
• Islam in the West African novel
• novels in Spanish from Equatorial Guinea
• apartheid and postapartheid fiction
• African writers in the diaspora
• globalization in East African fiction
• teaching Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart to students in different countries
• the Onitsha market romance

The volume editor, Gaurav Desai, writes, "The point of the volume is to encourage a reading of Africa that is sensitive to its history of colonization but at the same time responsive to its present multiracial and multicultural condition."