ABSTRACT

This fascinating and well researched study explores the meaning generated by `Africa' and `Blackness' throughout the century.
Using literary texts, autobiography, ethnography, and historical documents, African Identities discusses how ideas of Africa as an origin, as a cultural whole, or as a complicated political problematic, emerge as signifiers for analysis of modernity, nationhood and racial difference.
Kanneh provides detailed readings of a range of literary texts, including novels by:
* Toni Morrison
* Alice Walker
* Gloria Naylor
* Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
* Chinua Achebe
* and V.S. Naipaul.
For anyone interested in literature, history, anthropology, political writing, feminist or cultural analysis, this book opens up new areas of thought across disciplines.

chapter 1|47 pages

The Meaning of Africa

Texts and histories

chapter 2|61 pages

‘Coming Home’

Pan-Africanisms and national identities

chapter 3|27 pages

Remembered Landscapes

African-American appropriations of Africa

chapter 4|55 pages

Crossing Borders

Race, sexuality and the body

chapter |2 pages

Afterword