The African imagination: Postcolonial studies, canons, and stigmatization

In the prefatory remarks to his new book, The African Imagination, Abiola Irele traces the trajectory of his professional career from his initial location in Africa to his present base in an American university. The Africa phase of his career, he emphasizes, was marked by an awareness that he was involved in the definition and mapping of a distinctive terrain of imaginative expression and a new academic field known as African literature within the context of a local community of scholars and students mutually engaged in a cultural activity that they felt was central to the needs of an evolving national community. In relocating to the center of the Western academy in the United States, he continues, he now pursues his professional career in an environment within which this literature is marginal. Indeed, the literature is not only marginal, it is more often secondary, serving only to provide validating material for other disciplines and/or evidence for consolidating the paradigms of dominant discourses or epistemologies

Border crossings in the African travel narratives of Ibn Battuta, Richard Burton and Paul Theroux

This article compares the representation of African borders in the 14th-century travelogue of Ibn Battuta, the 19th-century travel narrative of Richard Burton and the 21st-century travel writing of Paul Theroux. It examines the mutually constitutive relationship between conceptions of literal territorial boundaries and the figurative boundaries of the subject that ventures across borders in Africa. The border is seen as a liminal zone which paradoxically separates and joins spaces. Accounts of border crossings in travel writing from different periods suggest the historicity and cultural specificity of conceptions of geographical borders, and the way they index the “boundaries” of the subjects who cross them. Tracing the transformations in these conceptions of literal and metaphorical borders allows one to chart the emergence of the dominant contemporary idea of “Africa” as the inscrutable, savage continent