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New Releases

Masculinities in African Literary and Cultural Texts

Editors Helen Nabasuta Mugambi and Tuzyline Jita Allan

Publication Date: January 2010.
ISBN: 978-0-9555079-5-3
Price: £16.99

Masculinities in African Literary and Cultural Texts represents an invaluable contribution to the emerging body of African masculinity studies drawing on epic, folk tales, proverbs and song genres. The book explores the pervasive influence of orality on patterns of thought, underlying notions of masculinity in African societies through the work of writers such as Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ahmadou Kourouma, Nuruddin Farah, Nawal El Saadawi et al. The collection’s multi-genre approach and wide geographical breadth reflects the effort of the editors in expanding the boundaries of masculinity discourse in Africa literary and cultural studies.

Barack Obama and African Diasporas: Dialogues and Dissensions

Author Paul Tiyambe Zeleza

Publication Date: November 2009.
ISBN: 978-0-9555079-6-0
Price: £16.99

This engaging and erudite collection of essays offers fascinating commentaries and critiques of contemporary events as seen by a leading African public intellectual. Framed around the extraordinary election of President Barack Obama, a member of Africa's rapidly growing new Diasporas in the global North. The book provides insightful reflections on the changing dynamics of African Diaspora histories and politics, the complex relations between Africa and its Diasporas. Written with elegance and passion, the thread that runs through all these fascinating essays is the question of Africa's place in the world and the place of the world in Africa, a challenge in which the Diaspora has a crucial role to play.

Queen Pokou: Concerto for a Sacrifice

Author Véronique Tadjo; translated from the French by Amy Baram Reid

Publication Date: November 2009.
ISBN: 978-0-9555079-9-1
Price: £8.99

Tadjo uses her powerful and fertile imagination to rekindle an ancient Akan myth and deliberately sets it ablaze! In deceptively simple but poetically elegant prose, she revisits the legend of the Baoulé female ancestor, Queen Abraha Pokou – presenting it not as one authoritative, impermeable text, but as a series of self-regenerating narratives; each version just as colourful, persuasive and compelling as the others. Through this process, Tadjo shows the received texts of history and tradition as they truly are – as subjective fictions capaciously vulnerable to interpretations and reinterpretations.Femi Osofisan, Professor of Drama, Department of Theatre Arts, University of Ibadan, Nigeria.

A Fine Madness

Author Mashingaidze Gomo

Publication Date: April 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9562401-3-2
Price: £9.99

A Fine Madness is a brilliant work of great poignancy and a powerful narrative shedding fresh light on the struggle for Zimbabwean independence and the effects of colonialism on the progress of postcolonial Zimbabwe as a metaphor for African progress. Gomo’s language has the urgency of an ex-soldier, deploying a combination of powerful prose and evocative poetry to create a novel of great beauty that will appeal to enquiring minds probing the fate of African identities in a 21st century globalized world. The novel’s unique style and thematic concerns has been compared to classics in the African literary canon including Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Aime Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism and Okot  p’Bitek’s Son of Lawino and Song of Ocol. This novel has the makings of a modern classic.

The Other Crucifix

Author Benjamin Kwakye

Publication Date: April 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9562401-2-5
Price: £9.99

The Other Crucifix is a unique epic novel and a welcome addition to the existing genre on the African immigrant experience in America. The novel chronicles the minutiae of the American college experience by one of the most accomplished new generation of African novelists to emerge from Ghana.  The writer reveals how the most intimate details of the recollection of the protagonist’s immersion in that culture leads to his alienation from home and as the years pass by, memories of Africa fade until his Uncle Kusi’s death in a coup d’état. Kwakye is an award-winning writer who has been described as possibly the most important Ghanaian novelist since Ayi Kwei Armah, establishing him as a prominent African literary voice.

 

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Ayebia would like to acknowledge
the help of the Arts Council Funding.