CRITICISM

Booker, M Keith. “African Literature and the World System: Dystopian Fiction, Collective Experience, and the Postcolonial Condition.” Research in African Literatures 26, no. 4 (winter 1995): 58-75.

Discusses the differences between Western and African dystopian visions, focusing on the difficulties faced by African authors who are attempting to create cultural identities while trying to escape the dominance of bourgeois ideology.

Ingersoll, Earl G. “Reconstructing Masculinity in the Postcolonial World of Bessie Head.” Ariel 29, no. 3 (July 1998): 95-116.

Proposes that Bessie Head's writing reflected her concerns about the need for a redefinition of both masculine and feminine identities in Botswana as one of the first and most significant steps towards establishing a postcolonial national identity.

Kruger, Loren. “‘That Fluctuating Movement of National Consciousness’: Protest, Publicity, and Postcolonial Theatre in South Africa.” In Imperialism and Theatre: Essays on World Theatre, Drama, and Performance, J. Ellen Gainor, pp. 148-63. London, England: Routledge, 1995.

Speculates on the creation of a new world of cultural and literary identity following the end of apartheid in South Africa. According to the critic, the hybrid nature of the South African community necessitates the acknowledgement of the differences between its different ethnic populations, and a need to understand that power and participation in the public sphere still remains the domain of a few, intellectual elite in that country.

Kruger, Loren. “The Premodern Postcolonial? The Drama of the Autochonous Settler.” In (Post)Colonial Stages: Critical & Creative Views on Drama, Theatre, & Performance, pp. 26-39. West Yorkshire, England: Dangaroo Press, 1999.

Explains the contradictions inherent in South African postcolonial culture, which aspires to modern models of governance and society while still trying to maintain the traditional boundaries of land, ethnicity, and language.

Stiebel, Lindy. “Imagining Empire's Margins: Land in Rider Haggard's African Romances.” In Being/s in Transit: Travelling, Migration, Dislocation, pp. 126-40. Netherlands: Rodopi, 1994.

Focuses on the use of land imagery in Haggard's romance stories and novels.

Wehrs, Donald R. “The Site of Western Modernism in Postcolonial African Identity: Nanga, Gide, Kristeva, and the Overcoming of Betrayal.” The Comparatist 25 (May 2001): 22-49.

Theorizes that Nanga's 1984 novel about an African student illustrates how some tenets of Western modernity are not only worthwhile but also necessary for the survival of Nanga's protagonist.