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Chapter Six examines Heinemann Educational Book's African Writers Series, the preeminent literary institution of anglophone Africa. Critics have repeatedly asked whether the series is fundamentally imperialist - because of its links to the metropolitan publishing industry - or anti-imperialist - because it gave voice to so many politically engaged writers. This chapter, by contrast, places the series in the context of global changes in English studies. In the US and in metropolitan Britain, the series seemed to be participating in the fragmentation of the discipline: the breakup of Leavis's Great Tradition and the incorporation of minority writers into the canon. In Africa, however, it is possible to read the series as a part of an expansion and consolidation of English language and literary studies. How the series managed this apparent contradiction is the main topic of the chapter.

Chapter Three examines the influence of FR Leavis, architect of the Great Tradition, on the thinking of Kamau Brathwaite and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, two of the leading theorists of postcolonial literature. The chapter argues that Leavis's emphasis on a "living language," as he called it - that is, his belief that a robust spoken dialect is the basis of any great literary tradition - would be rearticulated by Brathwaite and Ngũgĩ in their calls for vernacular literature. The chapter goes on to discuss the close but fractious connections between the English department and postcolonial literature, arguing that Leavis's complex professional relationship with the discipline was one of his major bequests to postcolonial studies.

Chapter Five assesses the impact of development discourse on the literary institutions of the period. At midcentury, the idea of economic development was crucial for managing the transition from imperial governance to national autonomy, especially in Africa. A case study of Amos Tutuola and his experience at Faber and Faber illustrates that metropolitan publishers began the 1950s with high hopes for cultivating African talent and audiences along high modernist lines, only to be disappointed by the fact that colonial intellectuals had a different understanding of what development could accomplish. This treatment goes on to examine how the discourse of development frames Tutuola's first two novels, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which the chapter reads as implicit criticisms of late colonial development models.

Several South African novels written after 1994 explore questions of personal, cultural and political identity as characters test their inherited values and beliefs in different and often unfamiliar social contexts. The issue of belonging is poignantly focused in the insistent question, “Who are we?”— and it is through this question that each character confronts the contingency of his or her way of being in relation to others. This chapter explores questions of community during a time of political and social transition, and in the course of the discussion puts the African philosophy of Ubuntu into conversation with the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy. The chapter ends with a consideration of the performative capacity of a literary text to inaugurate a “community” of readers, and suggests ways in which South African culture has a contribution to make to contemporary European philosophical debates.

For the most part, when the topic of Faulkner and African American literature is discussed, the intellectual conversation is primarily concerned with the undeniable influence of Faulkner’s fiction on black novelists. However, this chapter focuses on the major impact of the African American migration novel in the early Jim Crow era on Faulkner’s work, particularly Light in August and Absolom, Absolom! While the peripatetic, rootless, and often mixed-race characters of such novels by black authors as Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces, Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Jean Toomer’s Cane, and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand informs the creation of the protagonists/speakers of much modernist U.S. fiction and poetry; it is in Faulkner’s work, with possible exception of Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha,” that one sees the clearest adaptation of the characters and cultural geography of the early black migration narrative.

This chapter culminates the book by revisiting emergent gendered themes from Campbell’s literary and activist work. A close look at her writing and life’s work evidences the continuation of black folk traditions, including themes of spirituality, mother/daughter relationships, and women’s relationships with one another. Additionally, she utilized preventative marital counseling, various support groups, spiritual practice, exercise, healthy eating, and other forms of self-care to sustain her activism over time. The black feminist/womanist strivings across various spheres of her life reveal her consistent “woman-identified” agenda. Campbell’s investment in the mutual support, spirituality, and wellness for black women are undertones of her writing and activism that should not be overlooked. Finally, by reviewing relationships between the two periods of activism and trends or shifts therein, we can see the impact of her early activism and consciousness on her later activism, writing and advocacy. The development or evolution of Bebe Moore Campbell’s approach to activism and the strategies she employed as a younger woman versus as an older woman offers insight on black women’s contemporary activism and sustaining activist involvement over a lifespan.

This article reflects on the memory of North-African immigration in twentieth-century France, and focuses more particularly on the fate of the chibanis, the first generation of immigrants who came from Algeria to work in France during the economic boom of the post WWII era. Grounded in the works of historians of memory Nora and Ricoeur, this chapter analyzes how Samuel Zaoui’s novel Saint Denis Bout du monde portrays first-generation immigrants in a new light. Indeed, moving away from the traditional, largely negative, stories of loss, the novel partakes of new narratives of regaining and repairing, what Susan Ireland calls ‘a kind of Narrative recovery.’ The novel can be read as the story of the forgotten generation, which repairs collective amnesia as it regains memory, in order to reconcile itself with the past. This article goes further to show how a new narrative of reconciliation is able to trigger the shift in the episteme of migrant literature.

By way of an extended engagement with Peter Fitzpatrick’s reading of Carl Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth, and with reference to South African writers J.M. Coetzee and Herman Charles Bosman, this chapter proposes a new field of enquiry: namely an aesthetics of law. If the primordial scene of the law (the nomos) is an act of drawing a line in both a literal and a metaphoric sense, then it becomes possible to think through what an aesthetics of law might entail. The chapter explores this possibility, putting Martin Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” into conversation with Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth.

This concluding chapter gives a final comment on Djebar’s development as a writer and her methods of writing. It focuses on her representation of the suffering felt by Algeria, and the ways in which war and loss can affect identity and belonging.

‘Feminism and Women’s Identity’ discusses Djebar’s representation of womanhood and femininity in her work. It attempts to locate her position on feminism by comparing the writer’s disassociation from women’s writing movements with the re-telling of the history of women in Algeria. The chapter also notes Djebar’s transcendence of conventional gender distinctions and labels, as well as her depiction of the political position of women in Algeria.

In this first chapter, Hiddleston comments on the significance of expatriation and the memory of native lands in Djebar’s work. The chapter also introduces the recurring themes present in the text, including discussion of colonialism, Islamism, and the attempt at tracing sense of identity.

‘Haunted Algeria’ studies Djebar’s expatriation from Algeria in her later works. The chapter describes loss felt by Algeria and foregrounds the country’s search for identity and belonging, as its remembrance of the horrors of its past by which it is still haunted.

‘War, Memory and Postcoloniality’ explores Djebar’s process of reflection that gave rise to alternative modes of writing and describes this course of withdrawal and renewal as a movement that went on to influence the form of many of her works.

‘Violence, Mourning and Singular Testimony’ explores the political influence in Djebar’s work from the 1990s. The chapter assesses the writer’s use of religious and political discourse in light of feminist discussion and the upsurge of Islamist terrorism.