1st Edition
African Identities Pan-Africanisms and Black Identities
This fascinating and well researched study explores the meaning generated by `Africa' and `Blackness' throughout the century.
Using literary texts, autobiography, ethnography, and historical documents, African Identities discusses how ideas of Africa as an origin, as a cultural whole, or as a complicated political problematic, emerge as signifiers for analysis of modernity, nationhood and racial difference.
Kanneh provides detailed readings of a range of literary texts, including novels by:
* Toni Morrison
* Alice Walker
* Gloria Naylor
* Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
* Chinua Achebe
* and V.S. Naipaul.
For anyone interested in literature, history, anthropology, political writing, feminist or cultural analysis, this book opens up new areas of thought across disciplines.
Biography
Kadiatu Kanneh
'African Identities is a study richly detailed and admirably sophisticated in its use of cultural theory and its engagement with the large number of writers it treats . . . The work's interdisciplinary nature will make it an invaluable resource in African studies, African-American studies, and cultural studies in general.' - Margo Hendricks, The Modern Language Review
'African Identities is a brilliant and sustained effort to deconstruct and reconstruct the varied conceptualisation of African identity, ...' - Contemporary Review
'Kanneh has given students of African and African-American literatures a useful tool to navigate successfully the difficult terrain of reading not only the literature of Africa and its Diaspora but also 'the meanings of African identities'without a doubt, this is a book worth reading.' - Margo Hendricks, University of California, Santa Cruz
