...Something New for the Academics

"Something New out of Twenty-First-Century Africa?

The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies announces a special issue on new writing from Africa, to be guest-edited by Simon Lewis (College of Charleston) and Lindsey Green-Simms (American University), and published in spring 2013. The editors are looking for articles that address the ways in which the economic, political, and technological changes of the early 21st century have affected the modes of writing on the African continent.

While this theme may be broadly interpreted, the editors are especially interested in articles that engage the following types of questions:

-How is 21st-century African writing reconfiguring the debates about tradition vs. modernity?

-How are new media and communication technologies affecting literary expression and readerships?

-Has the internet created space for the vernacular, the original, and the local?

-How are new geopolitical formations shaping literary production and distribution?

- How are new political alignments within the Global South affecting the production of African literature?

-Are new strands of nationalism and/or pan-Africanism emerging, or is African literature more profoundly marked by cosmopolitanism, and narratives of migration and/or entrapment?

-Does it make sense any more to think of African writing as postcolonial?

-How are new trends in environmentalism and new biotechnologies affecting understanding of (human) nature, sustainability, and individual and collective right-living?

-What is the relationship between the African novel and modes of popular culture such as Nollywood, hip-hop, or self-help manuals?

Please send substantial, completed essays of 5,000 to 8,000 words to Lindsey Green-Simms and Simon Lewis at lewiss@cofc.edu before November 30th, 2011. Essays must be written in English, using MLA format for style and citations. In order to facilitate blind review, please do not include your name or affiliation in the body of the essay, but provide a separate cover-sheet with that information.

The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies publishes interdisciplinary and cross-cultural articles, interviews, and creative writings on the literatures, the histories, the politics, and the arts whose focus, locales, or subjects involve Britain and other European countries and their former colonies, the now decolonized, independent nations in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, and also Australia, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand.

Contact Information:

For inquiries: lewiss@cofc.edu

For submissions: lewiss@cofc.edu

Website: http://class.georgiasouthern.edu/litphi/jcps/jcps.htm 

Interesting topic but I am just here wondering, why Africa? Just wondering aloud...