Literary Activism in 21st-Century Africa: Methodology, Practice and Social Production
(Hardback)
Publishing Details
Literary Activism in 21st-Century Africa: Methodology, Practice and Social Production
By (Author) Madhu Krishnan
By (author) Doseline Kiguru
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Bloomsbury Academic
30th April 2026
United Kingdom
Classifications
Professional and Scholarly
Non Fiction
Literary studies: postcolonial literature
Literary studies: poetry and poets
Literary studies: plays and playwrights
Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers
Comparative literature
Physical Properties
Hardback
224
Width 156mm, Height 234mm
Description
Drawing on case studies from Cameroon, Cte dIvoire, Nigeria, Senegal, Kenya and Uganda, this open access book explores the ways in which literary activism operates as an essential site of self-making and socio-political engagement in the 21st-century.
From the era of anti-colonial mobilization to the centrality of writers in liberationist struggles in Nigeria, South Africa and elsewhere, an apparent link has emerged between literature and literary production; political mobilisation and activism; and the various struggles to determine the imaginative horizons of social and political experience on the African continent. This book seeks to understand, in light of this, how cultural producers and literary collectives have leveraged creative practice to open sites for socio-political engagement against a backdrop of structural and material inequality.
Examining what is meant by terms such as the literary and activism from the standpoint of cultural production across regions of Africa today, it explores methodologies for practice-, field- and collective research which might enable ways of working beyond academia. It also highlights creative practice as knowledge production and critical inquiry as creative practice, and asserts the importance of literary cultures as spaces for world-making and social formations, even as some of these cultures and their associated publics remain less visible from a global or Northern perspective.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council.
Author Bio
Madhu Krishnan is Professor of African, World and Comparative Literatures in the Department of English at the University of Bristol, UK.
Dima Barakat Chami is Postdoctoral Research Associate in West African Literary Cultures at the Unviersity of Bristol, UK.
Doseline Kiguru is Lecturer in World Literatures at the University of Bristol, UK.
