Name: African Languages, Literatures, and Postcolonial Modernity
SKU: 1-5275-5899-1
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African Languages, Literatures, and Postcolonial Modernity

Edited By: Samba Camara, Mohamed Mwamzandi

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This book offers a fresh look into the “languages of postcolonial modernity” in Africa. It investigates how African languages and literatures—in novels, film, poetry, and music—have embodied and mediated modernity while documenting the legacies of colonialism.

This book offers a fresh look into the “languages of postcolonial modernity” in Africa and, to a lesser degree, its diaspora. It foregrounds the notion…

This book offers a fresh look into the “languages of postcolonial modernity” in Africa and, to a lesser degree, its diaspora. It foregrounds the notion of postcolonial modernity in reference to modernization as experienced in the postcolony and its contemporary legacies, and investigates how African languages and literatures, both as means of communication and as instruments of cultural agency, have embodied and mediated modernity. Each chapter grapples with the literary or linguistic dimensions of postcolonial modernity as portrayed in African novels, film, poetry or popular music or as embodied in African and Afro-diasporic languages and dialects. The chapters also reveal how literature and language, respectively, document and embody discourses, phenomena, histories, ideologies, and beliefs that resulted from the legacies of colonialism.

Samba Camara is a teaching assistant professor of African, African American and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. He has published articles and book chapters on Senegalese popular music, literature, and West African Muslim modernity. He is the Co-Principal Investigator of a major manuscript project, funded by the British Library, and which digitized over 6,000 pages of endangered Pulaar literature.

Mohamed Mwamzandi holds a PhD in linguistics and is currently a teaching associate professor in the Department of African, African American and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. Mohamed has multidimensional teaching and research interests in linguistics, African literature and religious extremism. He is the Co-Principal Investigator of a major digitization grant awarded by the Endangered Archive Program, British Library that created a digital repository of endangered Pulaar Islamic texts in Senegal and Mali.

Martha Michieka, Aisha Umar Adamu, Esther Mukewa Lisanza, Giwa Omolola, Raphael Birya, Carolina Maria Almeida de Azevedo , Mohamed Mwamzandi, Guillaume Coly, Samba Camara, Leonard Muaka