Reviewed by Kanavillil Rajagopalan, State University at Campinas, Brazil

This book is a collection of twelve essays on Africa, the diasporic experience, politics of postcolonialism and globalization, and cultural identity. The contributors can all trace their cultural roots to Africa, and many of them draw on their own experiences of diaspora and prolonged contact with the world at large. The result is a volume of articles at once well grounded theoretically and highly thought-provoking.

In his introduction, Ch. 1, ‘Of origins, politics and the place of the postcolonial text in black history/culture’, James Tar Tsaaior sets the tone of the entire volume with the claim that politics is of the very essence of postcolonial cultures. That politics is counter-hegemonic to the postcolonial narrative and takes a perspective of subversion vis-à-vis the Western canon. But, even while stating the importance of ‘dismantling … the architecture of imperial knowledge inscribed in the labyrinthine matrices of the master text’ (6), he also accuses ‘the decadent and indulgent political and business elite’ (10) for the predicaments in which Africa finds itself.

The eleven texts that follow amply illustrate strategies for the arduous task of dismantling the canonical readings of works by up-and-coming and classic African writers, as well as writers like Alex Haley, author of Roots. Several contributors undertake interesting forays into Ben Okri’s novels, Tanure Ojaide and Odia Ofeimun’s exilic poetry, Rebecca Njau’s Ripples in the pool, and Chinua Achebe’s Things fall apart and Anthills of the Savannah.

Some of the authors use a wide-angle interpretive lens to look at recent Nigerian popular music as counter-narratives, reconfiguring black musical genealogies in the context of the African Diaspora, the politics of representation in the postcolonial African writing, and the politics of postcolonial becoming in the Caribbean novel.

‘History and the politics of representation in the postcolonial African text’ by Gboyega Kolawole and Sule E. Egya is representative of the overall tone adopted by most of the contributors to this volume. The authors point out that ‘[p]olitical poetry, that is, poetry that thematizes sociopolitical, economic, cultural, and other issues affecting the well being of the society, has existed since the beginning of written poetry in Nigerian literature’ (105). The reference to threnody underscores Nigeria’s agonizing trials and tribulations during the 1980s and 1990s when the military took over the reins of power and brutally suppressed civil rights.

Ultimately, the contributors are all interested in discovering their true identities, unrecognizably obscured by discourses alien to their cultures and long beyond their powers to challenge.