This issue of African Literature Today focuses on new novels by emerging
as well as established African novelists.
This is a seminal work that discusses the validity of the perception
that the new generation of African novelists is remarkably different in
vision, style, and worldview from the older generation. The contention
is that the oldergeneration novelists who were too close to the colonial
period in Africa had invariably made culture-conflict and little else
their dominant thematic concern while the younger generation novelists
are more versatile in their thematic preoccupations, and are more global
in their vision and style. Do the facts in the novels justify and
validate these claims? The 13 papers in this volume have been carefully
selected to consider these issues.
Brenda Cooper a renowned literary scholar from Cape Town writes on
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus, while Charles Nnolim writes
about Adichie's more recent novel Half of a Yellow Sun; Omar Sougou of
Universite GastonBerger, Senegal discusses 'ambivalent inscriptions' in
Buchi Emecheta's later novels; Clement Okafor of the University of
Maryland, addresses the theme of 'racial memory' in Isidore Okpewho's
Call Me By My Rightful Name, juxtaposed between the world of the old and
the realities of the present. Joseph McLaren, Hofstra University, New
York, discusses Ngugi's latest novel, Wizard of the Crow, while Machiko
Oike, Hiroshima University, Japan looksat a new theme in African
adolescent literature, 'youth in an era of HIV/AIDS'. There is abundant
evidence of the contrasts and diversities which characterize the African
novel not only geographically, but also ideologically andgenerationally.
ERNEST EMENYONU is Professor of the Department of Africana Studies
University of Michigan-Flint.
Nigeria: HEBN
