Women, Literature and Development in Africa

This book contributes to the claim by African writers and literary critics that African art has always been used to serve the people’s needs in all aspects of life rather than existing merely for its own sake. It raises the ongoing discussions about viable change and development in Africa to a new level and insists that both must come from within Africa. This book adapts the holistic aesthetics and critical approaches of African narrative traditions to advance African thought about African knowledge. It also explores the contemporary African scholars’ efforts to re-chart and preserve the evolution of African thought about development through literature.
Using a multidisciplinary framework, Anthonia Kalu argues that contemporary African literature continues an artistic tradition of maintaining identifiable cultural and traditional arts-based linkages between African ways of knowing and the African landscape. In this way, African literatures ensures continuity between Africa’s pre-colonial and contemporary development projects. Acknowledging the dynamism between history and culture, Kalu examines the conscious choices African writers made during the colonial encounter in their use of literature to explore and maintain African culture in a historical moment when African history-as-history was jeopardized by colonization and European influences. This is the case in contemporary African literature when female-based knowledge is mostly portrayed through the assertion of core statements about development in the contemporary African story. Mainly, Kalu argues that African literature allows conscious and systematic exploration, analyses and use of Africa’s contemporary cultural archives which result from encounters between African and colonists’ languages and narrative traditions.
In this significant work, Kalu illustrates how sustained intellectual excavation of Africa’s cultural archives facilitate the search for viable development projects and subsequent formation of lasting domestic policies.