In 1995, Thabo Mbeki’s keynote address at a G7 meeting, lauded by Tim Berners-Lee, underscored the Web’s potential to revolutionize global social and political landscapes, particularly emphasizing its significance for Africa. This chapter looks at the impact of digital technology on African literature. Using Chimamanda Adichie, Binyavanga Wainaina, and Brittle Paper as anchor points, it examines how digital technology and culture are reconstituting literary audiences, making space for the emergence of new knowledge domains and transforming the production infrastructures. It concludes that digital culture is the epistemic context in which twenty-first-century African literature exhibits some of its most defining characteristics.

This chapter examines some of the ways in which African literatures have interacted with and related to trends and turns in ecocriticism specifically and the environmental humanities more broadly. Reading a long history of environmental writing from the continent, the chapter aims to complicate how ecological thinking in African literatures – and by extension postcolonial literatures, more generally – has often become conflated with narratives of decolonization. Offering some examples of ecocritical work, including by Rob Nixon, Cajetan Iheka, and Byron Caminero-Santangelo, the chapter will also demonstrate that an African ecocritical perspective has indeed “not arrived belatedly.” However, rather than starting with the mid twentieth century, the chapter returns to authors from the beginning of the twentieth century for the ways in which earlier forms of anti-colonial politics can be seen to be articulated through an ecological imaginary that predates formal decolonization by almost half a century.

As postcolonialism turned its attention to African literature, culture, and intellectual history, a number of very productive alliances between postcolonial theory and theories of globalization, subaltern studies, decoloniality, and transnational cultural studies emerged, but the relationship to poststructuralism has always been an ambivalent one. Taking Sunday Anozie’s debt to structuralism as a point of departure, the shift from structuralist to poststructuralist readings – with specific reference to Homi Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, and Achille Mbembe – is seen as indicative of a general move from a relatively static model of analysis to a more dynamic one. Using the case studies of Sony Lab’ou Tansi and Abdelkebir Khatibi, the chapter argues that the theoretical richness and dynamism of poststructuralism, as evidenced by the proliferation of its tropes and strategic gestures, demonstrates clearly its value and potential for contemporary African contexts.

This chapter analyzes shifts in labor behavior in the context of institutional change. Focusing on the period of structural adjustment (1986–1997), it examines how austerity measures, such as spending cuts and increased labor market flexibility, fractured traditional state–labor alliances in Tunisia and Morocco. The chapter links unions’ responses to these reforms to differences in institutional practices. It argues that Tunisia’s innovations in collective bargaining moderated labor opposition and disrupted alliances between unions and political elites, while Morocco’s institutional stasis, combined with deteriorating economic conditions, generated new incentives for labor unions to mobilize against the regime.

This chapter examines the initial conditions underlying the book’s theory by analyzing authoritarian labor control policies and political developments in Tunisia and Morocco in the postindependence period. It explores how these control strategies shaped unions’ interests, capacities, and perceptions during the early stages of state formation and investigates how relationships between unions and other collective actors influenced the emergence of labor movements. The chapter shows how exclusionary corporatism provided Tunisian unions with organizational resources that strengthened their capacity for opposition, while inclusionary strategies and alliances with political elites weakened labor autonomy in Morocco.

This chapter explores the varied facets through which conceptions of materialism manifest across the larger ecologies of literary production bundled under the rubric “African literature.” It deliberately treats both of these terms – materialism and literature – in their broadest senses. The chapter begins with a brief consideration of the various manifestations of materialism which have emerged in studies of African literature, reading materialism variously as critique (in its Marxist/socialist guise), aesthetic (what Zimblar and Etherington call the “materials” of world literature), and context (material worlds and worldings). The chapter then expands on these ideas through a set of literary-focused readings which draw on anglophone, francophone, and other African literatures, largely emphasizing the global circulations of the novel form from 1960 to the present day. This chapter finally concludes by looking at materialism through the twinned concepts of circulation and mediation, exploring the ways in which the material structures which allow a literature to “emerge,” in market terms, simultaneously impact the constitution of the African literary text and its publics.

When does one genre become another? More precisely: When does the pressure that the descriptor “African” exerts on a form become sufficient for it to become another form in the global literary marketplace? This chapter underlines the role of genre theory in regulating the African continent’s literary field by scrutinizing how recent Afrofuturist fictions have intervened in critical debates about literary worlds and their genre-related meanings. The chapter interweaves discussions of three distinct strands of global theoretical thought: (1) the contestation (across decades) between the theorist Darko Suvin and the scholar/novelist China Miéville, on the definitions of science fiction and fantasy; (2) an outline of how a reconsecration of Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard worked in tandem with the writings of Wole Soyinka and Harry Garuba to reset the terms of that debate; and (3) an extended reading of how iconic twenty-first-century novels continue to “reprogram” the debate about the genres of African writing.

This chapter explores how political and economic institutions shaped labor mobilization during the early phase of neoliberal reform (1970–1985). It reviews the impact of these reforms on unions in Tunisia and Morocco and analyzes their divergent responses. The chapter examines how practices of institutional incorporation and/or exclusion affected the alliances that unions forged with authoritarian elites and opposition groups. The analysis reveals that labor exclusion perpetuated union militancy in Tunisia, while partisan alliances and incorporation into formal politics moderated labor opposition in Morocco.

The introduction offers a rationale for the book, historicizes both African literature’s development and progress and its critical/theoretical touchstones, and offers an overview of the volume’s three sections and chapters.

This chapter asks if there are specifically African varieties of what in the 1990s became known as postcolonialism. Sociologically, academic postcolonialism was a consequence of mobility between the North and the South. Perhaps because of this, it was often received hesitantly in Africa – hence the importance of looking more closely at its localized uptake. Taking Anthony Appiah’s seminal article on postmodernism and postcolonialism as one point of departure, the chapter traces this delicate balance between Africa-focused and outward-oriented thinking in work by David Attwell (South Africa), Inocência Mata (in relation to Angola), and Ana Mafalda Leite (Mozambique), among others. Of importance here is the alternative to Marxist analysis that postcolonialism provided at the time, as well as its critique of nationalism, but also how postcolonialism’s afterlife in Africanist thinking today is registered in the turn to popular and everyday aspects of culture.

Chapter 6 examines the lives, intellectual discourses, and working conditions of those who were supposed to build socialism in postindependent Africa. Workers embraced and subverted the socialist visions the state and its leftist supporters imagined. Despite the state and leftist intellectuals championing themselves as a worker’s party and embodying workers’ rights, laws were passed to handicap workers’ ability to unionize and strike outside of state channels. Despite these measures, workers used their voices, feet, and letters to highlight the contradictions and the limitations of a postcolonial, socialist African government that both championed workers’ rights and sought to put the means of production into their hands. The workers used ingenious techniques to resist and negotiate the power of the state and capital. Workers understood that their positions were tenuous and that true liberation was only possible in coordination and conjunction with each other. Black liberation was not a solo affair. For workers, they believed that their liberation was linked up with the survival and success of Black labor worldwide. Events and time would prove them right. The chapter complements histories highlighting African workers’ centrality – through their letters and feet – in articulating the contradictions and aspirations of postcolonial African states and socialism.