The Africas in the World and the World in the Africas: African Literatures and Comparativism

Continuing recent efforts in the field of African literary studies that were guided by a comparative perspective, this book seeks to observe implicit or explicit textual relations of two or more works produced in different languages and to provide a picture of the confluences and divergences of aesthetic use, historical contexts and ideological dynamics put into circulation, in the present and in the past, beyond the forms of institutional dependence and resistance enacted by African and Afro-diasporic authors in their works. Thus, The Africas in the World and the World in the Africas aims at a better understanding both from those Africas that spread across the world and from those that, reinvented in the interior of a continent marked by diversity, face the paradoxes that the old and new forms of domination impose. Without disregarding the effects of the western expansion in the world, still underway, and the role that the languages of the former imperial powers play in the literary fields of a large part of the continent, fundamentally stimulating comparative study of works produced in the same language, this book follows another kind of path: to identify through of a contrastive analysis the way in which African literatures, from the mid-twentieth century to the present day, have been positioned facing the challenges and presented new horizons of reading for the world.