A companion to African literatures This book is designed to serve as research resource for scholars teachers and students of African literature and related fields like world literature comparative literary studies and postcolonial studies. A Companion to African Literatures contains twenty eight historically grounded and theoretically informed essays written by experts in the diverse subfields in the study of African literatures. The intended audience includes specialists teachers and students of modern African literature as well as non specialists in ancillary fields. In contemporary literary studies notions of world literature and globalism have become central and influential. Here the notion of world literature is to be understood as a set of theoretical perspectives and protocols of interpretation rather than simply a corpus of literary works. In the turn to broad transnational perspectives there is always a risk of de emphasizing the specific backgrounds thematic concerns and significant transformations that characterize African literatures. This volume addresses the need for richly contextualized accounts of the diversity of literary production on the African continent. Taken as discrete individual chapters or as a whole the volume will be useful to specialists and non specialists in their research; it will likewise be useful to teachers who seek rigorous and lucid essays that can be assigned in college courses. With regard to genres and forms A Companion to African Literatures covers novels poetry dramatic literature nonfiction and film. The focus is mainly on modern African literatures from around the nineteenth century. Even though literatures in Amharic Arabic and Swahili date much farther back in order to make the volume manageable the focus is on the historical span that extends from the nineteenth century to the twenty first