Literary Activism in 21st-Century Africa

Drawing on case studies from Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Senegal, Kenya and Uganda, this open access book explores the ways in which literary activism operates as an essential site of self-making and socio-political engagement in the 21st-century.

From the era of anti-colonial mobilization to the centrality of writers in liberationist struggles in Nigeria, South Africa and elsewhere, an apparent link has emerged between literature and literary production; political mobilisation and activism; and the various struggles to determine the imaginative horizons of social and political experience on the African continent. This book seeks to understand, in light of this, how cultural producers and literary collectives have leveraged creative practice to open sites for socio-political engagement against a backdrop of structural and material inequality.

Examining what is meant by terms such as ‘the literary’ and ‘activism’ from the standpoint of cultural production across regions of Africa today, it explores methodologies for practice-, field- and collective research which might enable ways of working beyond academia. It also highlights creative practice as knowledge production and critical inquiry as creative practice, and asserts the importance of literary cultures as spaces for world-making and social formations, even as some of these cultures and their associated publics remain less visible from a global or Northern perspective.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council.