Emerging African Voices: A Study of Contemporary African Literatu ...

younger writers, those who “indicate a more genuinely new direction in African fiction and a movement away from the mainstream social realism” (ix). However, his choice of texts by younger writers represents those from the end of the twentieth century, whereas the works under discussion in this volume are twenty-first century literary products. I was recently surprised to see one selection on Global Books in Print titled Africa Fresh! New Voices from the First Continent. I read further and learned that this is a collection of primary texts by eight authors originally published on the Internet and only in paperback format since 2006. No critical analysis is included. Other in-print and forthcoming texts provide critical analysis of a good number of recent books that are highly topical or thematic—books dealing with memory and history, madness, magical realism, and the like in African literature.

Emerging African Voices offers general analysis and critical evaluation of new writers' works in order to showcase their contributions to the body of African literature—a very useful book, as a recent teaching experience of mine indicates. In 2007 I taught an African literature course in which my students read and studied six novels, two by newer African writers. Students were enthralled by the novels, yet when some of them chose to focus the efforts of their research papers on these more recent texts there was absolutely no secondary material available for one of the authors and only a couple of brief journal articles on the work of the second author. It was after this experience that I decided to edit a volume of criticism that focuses on several of the most recent African authors. I set about constructing a call for contributors that included the purpose and vision of the project as well as a list of suggested new African writers. The potential contributors were asked to write a chapter on an emerging African writer, either from the list or of their own choosing. Contributors could approach the texts from any literary perspective or theory. Thus, chapters herein present primary texts from a variety of perspectives, from structuralist and deconstructionist readings to psychoanalytic and feminist readings. However contributors chose to theorize their analyses, the major component of each chapter had to be discussion about the ways in which the text(s) of a particular emerging writer