New Black & African writing

de Charles Smith, Gloria Monica T. Emezue

The celebration of Black writing in the Fifties and sixties had seen her writers turning from old problems of colonialism and racial discrimination to new issues of political independence as scholars had earlier noted. Yet this trend has survived twenty-first century African writing in its concern with the historical and political experiences of modern African republics. Today there has emerged a new tenor led by an avant garde of younger energies envisioning and rewriting postcolonial power relations in various individual, national and cultural environments. Conflicts of citizenship, gender relations and of minority ethnicities within an exploitative majority structure have trailed the new discourse. These volumes of Black African Writing offer contemporary perspectives on Aftrican and Black lit6erature as tributaries of the Renaissance that had stirred early black and African traditions. The emerging body of writing is still grounded on the historical and cultural need for balck emancipation but intrersely directed at the reconnaissance of past and present temporalities in a fluid and progressive sense of wholeness. Here in these volumes are the evidence of modern critical traditions in which the challenges of globalization and international cooperation give new meanings and new relations to older concepts. Questions of realism or fantasy, ethnicity or universalism, terrorism or pacifism, feminism, womanhood and the interrogation of power as they affect the whole planet of Black literary traditons are conseqently redefined for wholesome aesthetic and didactic purpose of Black art. All these are corroborated by prevalent historical forces Which lie at the heart of the emerging literary dialogues from Africa and the Black world. It is most apparent that this critical volume on new writings is not just intended to encapsulate the proud zest of Pan African idealism and black racial legacy: Its anchor on individual concerns within an all-inclusivist continental heritage is rather the core of its historical relevance. --Book Jacket.