The Wire: A Site for the MLA Commons Community
The PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature returns to New York from May 4 – May 10, this year with a focus on Africa. Co-curated by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who will deliver the closing address, the festival’s events—from readings and performances to interviews, workshops, and roundtables—will feature writers as varied as Angella…
Perhaps for reasons related to intellectual elitism or simply because of the lack of an effective means of analysis, African popular arts (Modern African music in particular) keep on being pushed to the margins of academic discourse on postcolonial cultural identities. To this day and more than not, in classroom…
Kenyan born and internationally acclaimed, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is the author of more major works of fiction, nonfiction, and drama than any African writer. His groundbreaking first novel Weep Not, Child recently celebrated fifty years, and he has since published over thirty works in English and his native language, Gikuyu….
And as long as critics and publishers frame African literature as always on the cusp, it will continue to be an emerging literature whose emergence is infinitely deferred. Aaron Bady, writing in the Chronicle.