Part I: Remapping and Rereading African Literature and Cultural Production. 1. Foundational Writers and the Making of African Literary Genealogy: Es'kia Mphahlele and Peter Abrahams -- 2. Foundational African Literary Discourse and Dimensions of Authority -- 3. Situating Sibusiso Nyembezi in African Literary History -- 4. A Footnote and a Pioneer: Noni Jabavu's Legacy -- 5. 'Navigations of Tyranny': Reconsidering Es'kia Mphahlele's Writing -- 6. Noni Jabavu and the Sensibilities of Early Black Educated Elites Part II: South Africa and Fugitive Imaginaries -- 7. (Un)Homing and the Uncanny: The (Auto) Biographical Es'kia Mphahlele -- 8. In the Shadows of the British Empire: Nyembezi's Inkinsela YaseMngungundlovu 9 Escaping Apartheid: Race, Education and Cultural Exchange, 1955-2003 -- 10. Photographing Home Life in Alexandra between the 1930s and the 1970s -- 11. Down Avenues of (Un)Learning: Reading, Writing and Being -- Part III: In the Eye of the Short Century: Diaspora and Pan-Africanism Reconsidered. 12. Es'kia Mphahlele and the Question of the Aesthetic -- 13. 'African Contrasts': Noni Jabavu's Travelogue as Kaleidoscope -- 14. Es'kia Mphahlele, Chemchemi and Pan-African Literary Publics -- 15. The 'Crossroads and Forkways' of Pan-Africanism between 1948 and 1968 -- 16. 'She Certainly Couldn't Be Conventional If She Tried': Noni Jabavu, the Editor of The New Strand Magazine in London -- 17. Anticolonial Romance and Tragedy in Peter Abrahams' A Wreath for Udomo -- 18. Mphahlele's Writing in the Whirlwind -- 19. From South Africa to Coyaba: Peter Abrahams' (New) World Geographies.
Summary:
The essays in this collection were crafted in celebration of the centenaries, in 2019, of Peter Abrahams, Noni Jabavu, Sibusiso Cyril Lincoln Nyembezi and Es'kia Mphahlele, all of whom were born in 1919. All four centenarians lived rich and diverse lives across several continents. In the years following the Second World War they produced more than half a century of foundational creative writing and literary criticism, and made stellar contributions to institutions and repertoires of African and black arts and letters in South Africa and internationally. As a result, their oeuvres present multifaceted engagements and generative insights into a wide range of issues, including precolonial existence, colonialism, empire, race, culture, identity, class, the language question, tradition, modernity, exile, Pan-Africanism, and decolonisation. The range of the centenarians' imaginations, critical analyses and social interventions spanned disciplinary divides. This volume, in the same spirit, draws on approaches that are equally transdisciplinary. Two aims thread through the contributors' reflections on the complexities of black existence and of intellectual and cultural life in the twentieth century. The first is the exploration of some of the centenarians' key texts and cultural projects that shaped their legacies. In doing so, the volume contributors trace a number of divergent intellectual and aesthetic lineages in their works and organisational activities. The second aim is a consideration of the ways in which these foundational writers' legacies continue to resonate today, confirming their status as crucial contributors to modern African and diasporic black arts and letters.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.