Conventions & Conversions

By convention, African literature has been seen as a genre of its own kind, a genre configured as anti- or postcolonial, as littérature engagée, as exclusively concerned with social and political struggles. As such, it has traditionally been relegated to being mimetic and obliged to rewrite genres of the Western canon or to stick to so called ‘traditional’ oral forms. By conversion, African literary texts liberate themselves from such generic prescriptions and categorisations. Not only do they participate in the innovations and renovations of literature instigated, inspired and facilitated through multifarious possibilities of crisscrossing literary domains, they rummage in formerly foreign and forbidden fields, daring miscegenation and misalliances. The contributions in this book show that generic innovation in contemporary African literatures embraces a wide scope of intermedial, intertextual and cross-genre writing and performing strategies across the continent and in the Diaspora. The analyses of generic hybridization, the invention of new forms and languages beyond binary oppositions such as the oral and the written, prose and poetry, fact and fiction, African-language and Europhone literatures, prove the vitality of creative conversions of former conventions. The essays dig into the textual aesthetics as well as in the context and the causes of the transformations that are taking place in the multi-fold connections of modernisation and globalisation. With contributions by Philip Amangoua Atcha, Viviane Azarian, Marie-Françoise Bidault, Cécile Bishop, Jane Bryce, Ibrahima Diagne, Susanne Gehrmann, Mikhail D. Gromov, Olga Hél-Bongo, Rusell Kaschula, Kathrin Lachman, Bernard de Meyer, Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger, Ksenia Robbe, Fabrice Schurmans, Valentina Tarquini, Dominique Traoré, Flora Veit-Wild and Antje Ziethen.