Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality

The profound effects of colonialism and its legacies on African cultures have led postcolonial scholars of recent African literature to characterize contemporary African novels as, first and foremost, responses to colonial domination by the West. In Africa Writes Back to Self, Evan Maina Mwangi argues instead that the novels are primarily engaged in conversation with each other, particularly over emergent gender issues such as the representation of homosexuality and the disenfranchisement of women by male-dominated governments.

Evan Maina Mwangi is Assistant Professor of English at Northwestern University and the coauthor (with Simon Gikandi) of The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English Since 1945.