Negritude and Literary Criticism The History and Theory of "Negro-African" Literature in French

Subjects:

• Literature » World Literature
• Multicultural Studies » Black Studies
• Multicultural Studies » African Studies

Reviews:

• Jack's well-researched and well-written book offers a probing historical analysis of the disparate secondary sources on the thematic development and characteristics of 'Negro-African' literature. The author offers a balanced view and raises legitimate questions about the validity of a homogrnous interpretation of Francophone black culture and nationalism. She examines thoroughly the conflicts and contradictions of the historiography and criticism that situate Negro African literature within a defined context... recommended for senior scholars and graduate students.
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  Choice
• Jack's book is a useful survey for anyone interested in the development not just of French-African literature, but of African literature or postcolonial literature in general, serving to show the long-standing nature of contemporary debates such as the problematic of writing in the language of the former colonizer. By historicizing the term Negritude and placing it within wider textual and cultural contexts, Jack's book serves as a corrective to the less generative and more typical approach of attempting to artificially fix the term in Paris in the 1930's.
  —Journal of Third World Studies
• ...this is an extremely ambitious work, one that is well documented and rich in observations....the study is extremely valuable and offers an interesting, comprehensive orientation of many of the primary texts in the discipline with special consideration for some key theoretical issues, especially the evolving nature of the concept of Negritude.
  —Research in African Literatures

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• Discourses Surrounding French Texts about Africa and Africans: The Ubiquity of "Les Sciences Coloniales"
• Critics of the African Diaspora and Their Contribution to Debates in Paris
• Negritude and Literary Criticism
• Nationalisms and Literary Criticism: The Nature of Literary "Engagement"
• Seminal Studies: Historiography and Criticism
• The Wider Debate
• Conclusion
• Bibliography