ABSTRACT

This book chronicles the rise and the development of postcolonial agency since Africa’s encounter with Western modernity through African and African diaspora literature and film.

Using African and African diasporic imaginaries (creative writings, autobiographies, polemical writings, and filmic media), the author shows how African subjects have resisted enslavement and colonial domination over the past centuries, and how they have sought to reshape "global modernity". Authors and film makers whose works are examined in detail include Olaudah Equiano, Haile Gerima, Amma Asante, George Washington Williams, William Sheppard, Wole Soyinka, Dani Kouyaté, Chris Abani, Chimamanda Adichie, and Leila Aboulela.

Providing a critical study of nativism, hybridity and post-hybrid conjunctive consciousness, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of African and African diasporic literature, history, and cultural studies.

chapter |7 pages

Introduction

part II|93 pages

The Black American stranger and postcolonial agency in Africa

chapter 2|17 pages

The anti-enslavement/-colonial activist

George Washington Williams (1849–1891)

chapter 3|53 pages

The postcolonial pragmatist

William Henry Sheppard (1865–1927)

chapter 4|21 pages

The other allies

part III|48 pages

Articulations of postcolonial agency in contemporary African literature

chapter 6|23 pages

Postcolonial conjunctive consciousness in the literature of the new African diaspora

Chris Abani's The Virgin of Flames, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah, Leila Aboulela's The Translator

chapter |7 pages

Coda

Francis Abiola Irele and the African imagination