Anglophone African Detective Fiction 1940-2020
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A01=Matthew J. Christensen
A01=Professor Matthew J. Christensen
African Crime Fiction
African Detective Literature
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Anglophone African Literature
Author_Matthew J. Christensen
Author_Professor Matthew J. Christensen
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DS
Category=JP
COP=United Kingdom
Crime Novel Studies
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
Detective Literature
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eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
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Language_English
Literature History
Neoliberal Noir
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Price_€50 to €100
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softlaunch
Product details
- ISBN 9781847013873
- Weight: 451g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 19 Mar 2024
- Publisher: James Currey
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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Providing a survey of Anglophone African detective fiction, from the late 1940s to the present day, this study traces its history both as a literary form and a mode of critical exploration of the fraught sovereignties of the African state and its citizens.
Since the late 1940s, African writers including Cyprian Ekwensi, Arthur Maimane, Adaora Lily Ulasi, Hilary Ng'weno, Unity Dow, Parker Bilal, and Angela Makholwa have published over 200 murder mysteries, police procedurals, spy thrillers, and other fictional narratives of investigation and discovery in English-language newspapers, magazines, and novels. Distributed widely across the continent's diverse cultural and political geographies, these texts share aesthetic characteristics and thematic preoccupations that reflect transnational networks of production, circulation, and influence.
Anglophone African Detective Fiction, 1940-2020 surveys this literary history and examines how African writers have repeatedly harnessed the detective story to interrogate postcolonial realities of selfhood and the state. It argues that African writers have turned the detective story into a highly productive, while at the same time suspense-filled and entertaining, mode of social and political critique, first of colonialism and the independence era and latterly of neoliberal governance. Offering an overview of paradigmatic texts, from Ghana to Kenya and Sudan to South Africa, the book traces the contours of the history of Anglophone African detective fiction that is at once a cultural history of a uniquely African assessment of the ongoing problematics of sovereignty and decolonization.
MATTHEW J. CHRISTENSEN is Professor, Department of Literatures and Cultural Studies, University of Texas. He is the author of Rebellious Histories: The Amistad Slave Revolt and the Cultures of Late Twentieth-Century Black Transnationalism (2012) and editor of Staging the Amistad: Three Sierra Leonean Plays (2019).
