Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book considers historical, fictional, contextual, sociological, environmental, and cultural perspectives in representations of atrocity thereby bringing together multiple generic ways of interrogating artistic interpellations of atrocity in Kenya. It focuses on representations of atrocity in the contemporary Kenyan novel. The book deals with how the Kenyan novelist grapples with atrocity in the contemporary novel written either in English or Kiswahili. It explores the innumerable atrocities which characterize prison life. The book examines Benjamin Garth Bundeh’s Birds of Kamiti, and avers that the police torture suspects to deride and coerce them to confess and then prosecute them. It also focuses on violence and horror as a result of political activities in Kenya. The book also examines how gender-based atrocity spreads far beyond the domestic sphere in the Kenyan urban women’s novel after 2000.