Contributors
- Contributors
Annie Gagiano is an emeritus professor in the Department of English of the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, where she received her D.Litt. in 1999. Her books Achebe, Head, Marechera: On Power and Change in Africa (Rienner, 2000) and Dealing with Evils: Essays on Writing from Africa (Verlag, 2008) focus mainly on African prose fiction and aesthetics, as well as social and political analyses provided by such texts. She has published articles on a range of African authors and on postcolonial issues such as gender and power; the relevance of folk narratives; and concerns around the fictional and autobiographical representations of African subjects and situations. More recently, her interests have moved toward employing comparative reading practices while juxtaposing African and other postcolonial texts and toward the problems and urgencies of textual representations of children at risk. Besides acting as reader and reviewer for several scholarly journals, she writes the two-monthly column The African Library for the electronic journal Litnet. She may be contacted by e-mail at: ahg@sun.ac.za
George Ogola is a senior lecturer in journalism at the School of Journalism, Media and Communication, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, U.K. He holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He has published widely on popular and media cultures in Africa. He is currently working on a co-edited manuscript on the future of journalism in developed and developing economies. He may be contacted by e-mail at: GOOgola@uclan.ac.uk.
James Ogude is Professor of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He received his Ph.D. in African Literature from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1996. He is the author of Ngugi’s Novels and African History: Narrating the Nation (Pluto Press, 1999), and co-editor (with Joyce Nyairo) of Urban Legends, Colonial Myths: Popular Culture and Literature in East Africa (Africa World Press, 2007). He has published numerous journal articles and book chapters. His initial research thrust centerd around the works of Ngugi, especially in relation to questions of memory, historical reconstruction, and nation formation in African fiction. His recent research focus is in the area of popular culture and literature in East Africa. He may be contacted by e-mail at: james.ogude@wits.ac.za.
Dan Ojwang is Senior Lecturer of African Literature and Deputy Head of the School of Literature and Language Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where he received his Ph.D. He has published widely on East African Indian literatures, especially on works by M. G. Vassanji, Peter Nazareth, Bahadur Tejani, Jameela Siddiqi, and Yasmin [End Page 115] Alibhai-Brown. His research interests include literary cultures of the Indian Ocean world and contemporary African fiction. He may be contacted by e-mail at: Dan.Ojwang@wits.ac.za.
Joseph Basil Okong’o is a senior lecturer of African oral literature and theatre in the Department of Literature, Theatre and Film at Moi University in Kenya. He holds a D.Phil. degree in Anthropology from Moi University. He has published several articles in journals. His research interests include indigenous theater practices among communities in East Africa. He may be contacted by e-mail at: ojoseph4@gmail.com
Maria Suriano is a Lecturer in African history at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She received her Ph.D. in African history from the University of Naples “L’Orientale” in 2007. Her research interests include urban history, intellectual history, past and present leisure, and popular culture in Tanzania, from fashion and muziki wa dansi in the colonial period to contemporary bongo flavour music and youth culture. She may be contacted by e-mail at: maria.suriano@wits.ac.za. [End Page 116]
