Nafissatou Dia Diouf’s Critical Look at a “Senegal in the Midst of Transformation”

by Molly Krueger Enz Abstract Nafissatou Dia Diouf is a Senegalese author who has garnered recognition both in her home country and internationally since she began publishing in the 1990s. Her work, including fiction, poetry, children’s literature, and philosophical essays, portrays diverse topics as they relate to her country such as education, marriage, polygamy, maternity/paternity, […]

Africa Versus the West in the Court of Reparations

by ‘Muyiwa Falaiye Introduction When Alex Haley’s Roots was first serialized on Nigerian television in the 1970’s, I was too young to appreciate it beyond seeing it as the story of slave trade. On the one side were the whitemen on a savage mission of capturing as many slaves as possible to work their ever expanding plantations. […]

The Crisis of Cultural Memory in Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”

by F. Abiola Irele Introduction If there is any single work that can be considered central to the evolving canon of modern African literature, it is, without question, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. The novel owes this distinction to the innovative significance it assumed as soon as it was published, a significance that was manifested in […]

Reading As A Woman: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart And Feminist Criticism

by Linda Strong-Leek Introduction Does “reading as a woman” change one’s perspective on a text? Can a woman read as a woman after being conditioned, generally, to read as a man? In his On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, Jonathan Culler (1982) addresses these issues and forms several interesting conclusions. What does it mean to […]

African Studies Quarterly

Tag: Literature