A Companion to African Literatures

Peter Blairstudied at the Universities of Oxford and York, completing some of his doctoral research at the University of KwaZulu‐Natal, Durban. He is now Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Chester. He has two main research interests: South African literature, particularly the liberal and postliberal Anglophone novel, and flash fiction (very short stories). These have recently come together in a project on post‐apartheid flash. His publications include contributions to The Cambridge History of South African Literature (2012), The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies (Wiley‐Blackwell, 2016), and the journals Modern Fiction Studies , Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa , Commonwealth Essays and Studies , and the Journal of Commonwealth Literature . He is founding co‐editor of Flash: The International Short‐Short Story Magazine .

Eleni Coundouriotisis Professor of English and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut. Her scholarship focuses on the engagement of literature with history in the postcolonial novel and human rights narratives. She is the author of Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography and the Novel (1999) and The People’s Right to the Novel: War Fiction in the Postcolony (2014). She is currently completing a monograph on “Narrating Human Rights in Africa.”

yasser elhariryis Associate Professor at Dartmouth College, where he teaches courses in French, Comparative Literature, Middle Eastern Studies, and Creative Writing. The recipient of the William Riley Parker Prize, he is the author of Pacifist Invasions: Arabic, Translation and the Postfrancophone Lyric (2017), co‐editor of Critically Mediterranean: Temporalities, Aesthetics and Deployments of a Sea in Crisis (2018), and guest editor of the special issue of Expressions maghrébines on Cultures du mysticisme (2017). His writing appears in PMLA , New Literary History , Yale French Studies , French Forum , Parade sauvage , Contemporary French Civilization , Francosphères , and in several edited volumes.

Tewodros Gebreis Associate Professor of Ethiopian Literature at Addis Ababa University. He is the author of Interdisciplinary Reading of Literature ( Beyne‐Disiplinawi YeSine Tshuf Nibab in Amharic, 2009). His essays have appeared in several publications, including Callaloo , North East Africa Studies , and Journal of Ethiopian Studies . He is currently working on medical humanities and the interpenetration of verbal and visual arts.

Olakunle Georgeis Professor of English and Africana Studies at Brown University. His academic interests are in African Literary and Cultural Studies, Black Atlantic Internationalism, and Anglophone Postcolonial Studies. He was Associate Editor of Wiley‐Blackwell’s Encyclopedia of the Novel (2011; paperback 2014), with Susan Hegeman, Efraín Kristal, and Peter M. Logan, General Editor. He is author of African Literature and Social Change: Tribe, Nation, Race (2017) and Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters (2003).

Stefan Helgessonis Professor of English at Stockholm University. His research interests include Southern African literature in English and Portuguese, Brazilian literature, postcolonial theory, translation theory, and theories of world literature. He is the author of Transnationalism in Southern African Literature (2009), co‐author (with Mads Rosendahl Thomsen) of Literature and the World (2020), and co‐editor of The De Gruyter Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures (2020).

Jeanne‐Marie Jacksonis Assistant Professor of World Anglophone Literature at Johns Hopkins and received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale. Her first book is South African Literature’s Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation (2015), and her second, The African Novel of Ideas , is currently in press. In addition to her publications in a wide range of academic and public‐facing venues, she is also editor of Modernism/modernity ’s “Field Reports” blog.

Cilas Kemedjiois Frederick Douglass Professor at the University of Rochester, NY, where he is Professor of French and Francophone Studies. His contributions in the fields of Caribbean and African literature and culture, postcolonial theory, and transnational black studies have earned him both national and international recognition. He is the author of two monographs, one edited volume, and over sixty articles. He is author of Maryse Condé, Édouard Glissant et la malédiction de la théorie (1999) and Mongo Beti: le combattant fatigué. Une biographie intellectuelle (2013). His edited volume is entitled Mémoires des années de braise. La grève estudiantine de 1991 expliquée/Remember the Flame: White Papers from the 1991 Yaoundé University Strikes (2013). His current project seeks to unearth the genealogies of humanitarian interventions in Africa, and their attendant uneasy connections with the multilayered sites of power. The provisional title of this project is “Ota Benga and the Fictions of Humanitarianism.”

Lokangaka Losambeis the Frederick M. and Fannie C. P. Corse Professor of English and a former Chair of the University of Vermont Department of English. He previously taught African, African Diaspora, and English literatures at universities in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Swaziland, and South Africa. His numerous publications include Borderline Movements in African Fiction ; An Introduction to the African Prose Narrative Literature ; Literature, the Visual Arts and Globalization in Africa and Its Diaspora (edited with Maureen Eke); and Pre‐colonial and Post‐colonial Drama and Theatre in Africa (edited with Devi Sarinjeive). He is currently working on a book entitled Postcolonial Constellations within the Imperial Order: The Congo Narrative . Dr. Losambe also served as President of the African Literature Association (ALA) in 2012–2013.

Luís Madureirais Professor in the Department of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His areas of research include Luso‐Brazilian colonial and postcolonial studies, modernism and modernity in Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean, early modern and colonial studies, and theater and performance in Africa. He is author of Imaginary Geographies in Portuguese and Lusophone African Literature ( 2007) and Cannibal Modernities: Postcoloniality and the Avant‐garde in Brazilian and Caribbean Literature (2005). He is currently at work on two book‐length projects: one centers on Mozambican drama, the other on Luso‐African historical novels.

Katwiwa Muleis Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Smith College, Massachusetts, where he teaches various courses on World Literatures. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and Women’s Studies from Pennsylvania State University. His research and teaching interests include contemporary African and African Diaspora literatures, human rights in world literature, and African theater. He is currently working on a book project on Fatima Dike’s Theater. He is the author of Women’s Spaces, Women’s Visions: Politics, Poetics and Resistance in African Women’s Drama (2007). His works include essays and book chapters that have appeared in numerous collections including Meridians , Kiswahili: Journal of the Institute of Kiswahili Research , and Mapping Africa in the English‐Speaking World: Issues in Language and Literature . He was also the Guest Editor of the Special Issue of Metamorphoses: Journal of the Five College Seminar on Literary Translation focusing on translation in Africa.