Abstract
This study intercedes in the ongoing articulation of “African” literature and its criteria by exploring the fiction of three authors from a particular cultural sphere: the eastern African coast. This rearticulation is not about nomenclature, castes, and categories, but about the assumptions and paradigms that envelop the study of African literature. There are convergences in the novels of Abdulrazak Gurnah (b. 1948, Zanzibar, Tanzania), Nuruddin Farah (b. 1951, Baidoa, Somalia), and Moyez Gulamhussein Vassanji (b. 1950, Nairobi, Kenya) that generate very peculiar analytic and conceptual challenges. While literatures from all regions of “the continent” renew definitional conversations about the contours of African literature, the literary texts at the heart of this study are born of experiential and historical factors that have no real analogue elsewhere in Africa. This literature does not just offer new answers; it retools the questions.
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Notes
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© 2011 Emad Mirmotahari
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Mirmotahari, E. (2011). Introduction. In: Islam in the Eastern African Novel. Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119291_1
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