Fictions of African Dictatorship
Cultural Representations of Postcolonial Power
Series:
Edited By Charlotte Baker and Hannah Grayson
Fictions of African Dictatorship examines the fictional representation of the African dictator and the performance of dictatorship across genres. The volume includes contributions focusing on literature, theatre and film, all of which examine the relationship between the fictional and the political. Among the questions the contributors ask: what are the implications of reading a novel for its historical content or accuracy? How does the dictator novel interrogate ideas of veracity? How is power performed and ridiculed? How do different writers reflect on questions of authority in the postcolony, and what are the effects on their stories and modes of narration? This volume untangles some of the intricate workings of dictatorial power in the postcolony, through twelve close readings of works of fiction. It interrogates the intersections between real and literary space, exploring censorship, political critique and creative resistance. Insights into a wide range of lesser known texts and contexts make this volume an original and insightful contribution to scholarship on representations of dictatorship.
Series index
RACE AND RESISTANCE ACROSS BORDERS
IN THE LONG TWENTIETH CENTURY
Series Editors:
Tessa Roynon, University of Oxford (Executive Editor)
Elleke Boehmer, University of Oxford
Victoria Collis-Buthelezi, University of the Witwatersrand
Patricia Daley, University of Oxford
Aaron Kamugisha, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill
Minkah Makalani, University of Texas, Austin
Hélène Neveu Kringelbach, University College London
Stephen Tuck, University of Oxford
This series focuses on the history and culture of activists, artists and intellectuals who have worked within and against racially oppressive hierarchies in the first half of the twentieth century and beyond, and who have then sought to define and to achieve full equality once those formal hierarchies have been overturned. It explores the ways in which such individuals – writers, scholars, campaigners and organizers, ministers, and artists and performers of all kinds – located their resistance within a global context and forged connections with each other across national, linguistic, regional and imperial borders.
Disseminating the latest interdisciplinary scholarship on the history, literature and culture of anti-racist movements in Africa, the Caribbean, the United States, Europe, Asia and Latin America, the series foregrounds, through a cross-disciplinary approach, the transnational and intercultural nature of these resistance movements. The series embraces a range of themes, including but not limited to antislavery, intellectual and literary networks, emigration and immigration, anti-imperialism, church-based and religious movements, civil rights, citizenship and identity, Black Power, resistance strategies, women’s movements, cultural transfer, white supremacy and anti-immigration, hip hop and global justice movements
The series is affiliated with the Race and Resistance Research Programme at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), University of Oxford. Proposals are invited for sole- and joint-authored monographs as well as edited collections.
Editorial Advisory Board:
Funmi Adewole (DeMontfort University), Joan Anim-Addo (Goldsmiths, University of London), Celeste-Marie Bernier (University of Edinburgh), Alan Cobley (University of the West Indies, Cave Hill), Carolyn Cooper (University of the West Indies, Mona), Zaire Dinzey-Flores (Rutgers, State University of New Jersey), Tanisha Ford (University of Delaware), Maryemma Graham (University of Kansas), Christopher J. Lee (Lafayette College), Justine McConnell (King’s College London), Pap Ndiaye (Sciences Po), David Scott (Columbia University), Hortense Spillers (Vanderbilt University), Imaobong Umoren (London School of Economics), Harvey Young (Boston University)
Published volumes:
Dominic Davies, Erica Lombard and Benjamin Mountford (eds):
Fighting Words: Fifteen Books that Shaped the Postcolonial World
2017. ISBN 978-1-906165-55-0.
Dominic Davies: Imperial Infrastructure and Spatial Resistance in
Colonial Literature, 1880–1930
2017. ISBN 978-1-906165-88-8.
Claudia Gualtieri (ed.): Migration and the Contemporary Mediterranean:
Shifting Cultures in Twenty-First-Century Italy and Beyond
2018. ISBN 978-1-78707-351-7.
Charlotte Baker and Hannah Grayson (eds): Fictions of African Dictatorship:
Cultural Representations of Postcolonial Power
2018. ISBN 978-1-78707-681-5.2017.