Literature is yet another genre that Africa’s intellectual elites struggle to elucidate coherence for dissemination and consumption to ingrain within viable institutions. Modern African literature is considered a byproduct as well as an explicit goal engineered at the Berlin Conference (1884-5) by the imperialist nations of Europe. The challenge for African literature is to be incorporated in the ‘universal’ standards of literary canons without the demeaning criticisms of this controlled universalism by the very Westerners whom much of the literary positions African writers had adopted, yet rejected. According to Pius Adesanmi, third generation African writers are not contributing to theories manifested out of the colonial experience of their predecessors, and thus jeopardize the colonial discourse of earlier writers in favor of the ‘universal’ of Western academe. To better analyze the literary debates of African writers, this paper will answer two critical questions......
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Approximate Word Count: 538
Approximate Pages: 3 (260 words per double-spaced page) |