| Chapter : | Introduction |
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responsibility related to African child soldiers and globalization. Pauline Ada Uwakweh reads the child narrator of Chimamanda Adichie's Purple Hibiscus (2004) as revelator and critic of the twenty-first century expression of the postcolonial condition—an essential update of similar, more established analyses. Finally, in the last chapter of Part I, Veronica Hendrick evaluates Chris Abani's GraceLand (2004) for its utility in tracing past iterations of postcolonial literature and theory to present varieties. Hendrick argues that Abani's novel demonstrates through its perspectives on social degradation the postcolonial state of twenty-first century Africa.
In many cases, the troubles and predicaments depicted in the literature about children mentioned above are direct effects of globalization and the phenomenon of transculturation. According to Mary Louise Pratt, this phenomenon occurs in specific “contact zones” where “disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of dominance and subordination…” (4). African writers have long dealt with notions of culture clashes, but the works of new African writers tend, not surprisingly, to deal with twenty-first century realities. In Part II, Katherine Galvagni delves into the facets of globalization in Black Paris as she examines texts—La préférence nationale (2001), The Belly of the Atlantic (2003), and Kétala (2006)—by Senegalese author Fatou Diome. This is the age of electronic information, “the interconnectedness of media, culture, and police and information services…” (Sautman 109). Similarly, David Cockley investigates the political manipulations related to the oil industry in Nigeria as presented in Helon Habila's Waiting for an Angel (2002). Cockley exposes the dilemmas of emerging economies to highlight the corruption and greed inherent in neocolonial societies. In the last chapter of Part II, Timothy Johns reads Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001) in an effort to explore how the literary representations of this movement of people from the country to the city is reshaped and updated since such representations appeared in the works of R. R. R. Dhlomo, Peter Abrahams, and Alan Paton in the mid-twentieth century. Furthermore, Johns traces an interesting connection between the architecture of the city—urban geography—and the upheaval related to the renewal of urban spaces.