Ebook: Women, Literature and Development in Africa

Women, Literature and Development in Africa is a convincing example of and contribution to the claim, by African writers and literary critics, that African art has always been used to serve the people’s needs in all aspects of life rather than existing merely for its own sake. It raises, to a new and positive level, the ongoing discussions about viable change and development in Africa, insisting that both must come from within Africa itself. This book adapts the holistic aesthetics and critical approaches of African narrative traditions to advance African thought about African Knowledge.
It is a powerful exploration of contemporary African scholars’ efforts to re-chart and preserve, through literature, the evolution of African thought about development. Using a multidisciplinary framework, Anthonia Kalu argues that contemporary African literature continues an artistic tradition of maintaining identifiable cultural and traditional arts-based linkages between African ways of knowing and the African landscape. In this way, African literatures ensures continuity between Africa’s precolonial and contemporary development projects.

Women, Literature and Development in Africa uses a multidisciplinary approach to bring together various dominant theoretical and analytical perspectives that have been deployed in the exploration of Africa’s entry and participation in the international arena. It uses African verbal arts to bring women into ongoing discussions about the search for feasible paradigms for African development. Acknowledging the dynamism between history and culture, Kalu examines the conscious choices African writers made during the colonial encounter in their use of literature to explore and maintain African culture in a historical moment when African history-as-history was jeopardized by colonization and European influences. This is the case in contemporary African literature when female-based knowledge is mostly portrayed through the assertion of core statements about development in the contemporary African story.

Kalu’s careful examination of selected core statements from the African knowledge base illuminates their uses to foster participation, growth and development of the individual, the community and the landscape. Assumptions about the African world in general and African women in particular are brought to bear on contemporary development issues. Kalu argues that African literature allows conscious and systematic exploration, analyses and use of Africa’s contemporary cultural archives which result from encounters between African and colonists’ languages and narrative traditions. In this book, she shows how sustained intellectual excavation of Africa’s cultural archives facilitate the search for viable development projects and subsequent formation of lasting domestic policies.