"Like its companion volume Palavers of African Literature, African Writers and their Readers is a magnificent and monumental tribute to Bernth Lindfors, the scholar who transformed African literary studies in North America. But his second volume is more than a tribute to a distinguished scholar-- it is a high powered exercise in critical scholarship, which in its choice of issues and methodologies, takes up many of the questions that Lindfors put at the forefront of scholarship on Africa and its literary traditions. As in the first volume, the essays collected in this antholoy bear testimony to Lindfors' influence on two generations of scholars of African literature and his imprint on the literary history of the continent. In their treatment of subjects ranging from autobiography and performance, the construction of heroes in Yoruba literature, African language literatures, post-Apartheid culture to cinema, the essays in this collection represent the coming of age of African literary criticism. They are all bound to influence the study and teaching of African literature as it moves from the crisis of postcolonialism to the long awaited moment in which it is acknowledged as one of the most important cultural phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century. The quality of scholarship that has gone into these essays and their range of cultural and historical reference is perhaps one of the most vocal testaments to the significance of the Lindfors factor in African literary scholarship." -Simon Gikandi, Robert Schirmer Professor of English, Princeton University

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TOYIN FALOLA is the Frances Higginbothom Nalle Centennial Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. A leading Africanist, he is the author of many books, including Yoruba Gurus: Indigenous Production of Kowledge in Africa (AWP, 2000), and the co-author of Yoruba Warlords of the 19th Century (AWP, 2001). He is also the editor of the Journal of African Economic History and the editor of two series in African Studies, the Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora and Classic Authors and Texts on Africa.

BARBARA HARLOW is the Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor of English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Resistance Literature, Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention, and After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing, and the co-author of Imperialism and Orientalism: A Documentary Sourcebook. She is working on an intellectual biography of the South African activist Ruth First.

CATEGORY
Literature, Literary Criticism/AFRICA