Contents -- Acknowledgements -- List of maps -- West African Timeline -- 1 Introduction: Where is 'West Africa'? -- 1.1 Defining the terms: 'post-colonial', 'postcolonial(ism)' and 'neocolonial' -- 1.2 West African '-scapes' -- 1.3 From slave-scape to African presence: West Africa in the world -- 1.4 The colonial-scape -- 1.5 Postcolonial West Africa: anglophone and francophone zones of culture -- 1.6 A note on terminology -- 2 Négritude -- 2.1 Négritude: a new humanism? -- 2.2 The feminist critique of négritude -- 3 Facing East: Islam and Identity in West African Literature -- 3.1 The Arabic language -- 3.2 Samuel Ajayi Crowther's Islamic encounters -- 3.3 The Islamic-scape -- 3.4 Ambiguity, experiment and faith in Islamic fiction -- 4 Oral Literatures -- 4.1 Griots -- 4.2 The song of abuse -- 4.3 Oral literature and the problem of truth -- 4.4 The bias of print -- 5 Lost and Found in Translation -- 5.1 Oral texts: transcription or translation? -- 5.2 West African translators and mistranslators -- 6 Things Fall Apart: Presence and Palimpsest in the Colonial-scape -- 6.1 The concept of 'presence' in Achebe's writing -- 6.2 From presence to palimpsest -- 6.3 The 'anthropological exotic' -- 6.4 What if Things Fall Apart had never been published? -- 7 Popular Literature -- 7.1 Popular literature in the 1950s and 1960s: 'Onitsha market literature' -- 7.2 The readers of Onitsha market literature -- 7.3 Contemporary popular literature: pentecostal and 'born-again' publications -- 7.4 Gender and popular literature -- 8 Griots with Pens in their Hands: Literary Experiments with Oral Genres, 1960s-1990s -- 8.1 Orality and the early writers -- 8.2 The 'AlterNative' poets of the 1980s and 1990s: Niyi Osundare and Kofi Anyidoho -- 9 Feminism and the Complex Space of Women's Writing -- 9.1 Theorizing African women's writing.

9.2 Women writers from Islamic West Africa -- 9.3 Feminism -- 9.4 Beyond feminism -- 9.5 The other Flora Nwapa: One is Enough -- 9.6 The Biafran War (1967-70) -- 10 Marxism and West African Literature -- 10.1 Soyinka and the Nigerian Left -- 10.2 Socialist creative writers: Ousmane Sembene and Femi Osofisan -- 10.3 Are West African readers 'natural' Marxists? -- 11 The Three 'Posts': Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, Postcolonialism -- 11.1 Humanism and poststructuralism -- 11.2 The rejection of 'postcolonialism' -- 12 Experimental Writing by the 'Third Generation' -- 13 'Queering' West African Literatures: Calixthe Beyala, Werewere Liking, and Véronique Tadjo -- 14 Conclusion: West Africa in Postcolonial Theory -- 14.1 Theories of planetarity and complementarity -- 14.2 Négritude: a return and a reassessment -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Primary texts -- Secondary material -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y.