Re-writing Pasts, Imagining Futures

The papers in this volume focus on fiction and theatre in their
traditional forms as well as in their encounters with novel and
innovative forms and avenues of dissemination. As a cultural practice
that emerged from a process of protest and contestation of hegemony, it
is understandable that one main concern in African literature and
literary criticism is the resistance against the emergence of
marginalizing centers in formerly or currently marginalized societies
with regard to discourses, aesthetics and media of creation. These new
centers that sometimes undermine the strategic/tactical exploitation of
the relative advantage procured by each medium run the risk of leading
to new forms of stratification that mitigate the import of African and
African diasporic literatures. The collection of essays therefore seeks
to analyze the representation of pertinent socio-political and
historical questions in a variety of postcolonial texts from Africa and
the African diasporas, notably the Caribbean islands and the United
States of America. However, far from re-writing of history in a way that
cedes to conservative worldviews, creative writers and critics
simultaneously attempt to chart ways forward for socially all-inclusive
futures. In the context of colonial and neo-colonial legacies that seem
to forestall any sense of individual and collective self-fulfillment,
contributors to this volume examine the pertinence of African fiction
and theatre in imagining new vistas of re-conceptualizing the
postcolonial condition in ways that re-galvanize the belief in an
enabling future.