Writing the Prison in African Literature
Series:
Rachel Knighton
This book examines a selection of prison memoirs by five renowned African writers: Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ruth First, Wole Soyinka, Nawal El Saadawi and Jack Mapanje. Detained across the continent from the 1960s onward due to their writing and political engagement, each writer’s memoir forms a crucial yet often overlooked part of their wider literary work. The author analyses the varied and unique narrative strategies used to portray the prison, formulating a theory of prison memoir as genre that reads the texts alongside postcolonial, trauma, life-writing and prison theory. The book also illustrates the importance of these memoirs in the telling of their historical moment, from apartheid South Africa to post-independence Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt and Malawi.
Series index
Extract
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
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