The Changing Faces of African Literature/Les nouveaux visages de la littérature africaine (review)

This volume is part of a series on Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures in English, edited by Gordon Collier, Geoffrey Davis, and the late Hena Maes Jelinek. It covers the proceedings of a conference held at the Center for African Literary Studies at the University of Kwazulu-Natal (CALS), in Pietermaritzburg, in 2005, to celebrate the opening of the Center, which has as its objective the diffusion and promotion of African literatures. The center is also a resource center building on the collection of Bernth Lindfors, founder of Research in African Literatures—and not Literature, in the singular, as is erroneously written on page 211. A series of fifteen papers, divided in three sections (new visages, new themes, and diversity) in a bilingual volume (French and English), cannot do justice to this “changing face.” The combination of interesting general papers (for instance on Mozambican literature by Stefan Helgesson) and on Afrikaans literature (by Jaco Alant) combined with monographic studies on single authors, often not known by this reviewer, creates at times a sense of imbalance. The Center (the CALS) aspires “to become a world resource for the study of African Literature” (212). We wish them the best of luck: may we also recommend the plural to be maintained. . . .