Best African Literary History & Criticism Books
Here you will get Best African Literary History & Criticism Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. Spiritual Self Care for Black Women: A Spiritual Journal for Self-Discovery. 12 Month Notebook & Guided Planner with Prompts & Self Reflection Activities
Author: by Stress Less Press
B08TQ4T6ZF
English
108 pages
What is your true purpose? What are your true values? What are your true desires? If you’re reading this and feeling unsure of the answers, then this book is a great place to start. Due to the societal challenges that Black women face, spiritual self care is not always a priority.
However, it’s these very challenges that make spiritual self care such a necessary support tool. Black women deserve the time and space to seek a life of meaning and purpose. Use the book to get your started on your journey of self discovery.
Utilize the tools and activities to connect with your inner self, then bring that person to life. What’s included in the book? Spiritual self assessments – find out where you’re at to understand where to go (and track your progress along the way)Self discovery questionnaire – gain clarity on your life’s path and apply creative solutions to get you where you want to beOther self discovery activities including, ‘Your Life Purpose’ (find out how your passions, values and gifts align to determine your purpose in life) and ‘Be You, For You’ exercise (understand your self identity and how you can live authentically) plus lots more!
2. Black Women Coloring Book: Adults Coloring Book With Gorgeous Black Women In Beautiful Hairstyles And Outfits
Author: by Coco Wyo
B091WFGM4W
English
66 pages
Black Women Coloring Book from Coco Wyo PublishingThis book contains 30 amazing illustrations paying full homage to the unique beauty of African-American women. Various hairstyles, outfits and different culture aspects are visually showcased in this book. Not only will it help you relax, reduce stress but it will take your imaginations to new heights and spark your creativity brilliantly.
Why You Will Love this Book:Relaxing Coloring Pages. Every page you color will pull you into a relaxing world where your responsibilities seem to fade away. Beautiful Illustrations. We’ve included 30 unique images for you to express your creativity and create masterpieces.Single-sided Pages.
Separately printed sheets to prevent bleed-through and allow you to easily remove and frame your favorite piece(s) of art. Great for All Skill Levels. You can color every page however you want and there is no wrong way to color.
3
Gilgamesh: A New English Version
Author: by Stephen Mitchell
English
290 pages
0743261690
Gilgamesh is considered one of the masterpieces of world literature, but until now there has not been a version that is a superlative literary text in its own right. Acclaimed by critics and scholars, Stephen Mitchell’s version allows us to enter an ancient masterpiece as if for the first time, to see how startlingly beautiful, intelligent, and alive it is.
4. The Epic of Gilgamesh (Norton Critical Editions)
Author: by Benjamin R. Foster
English
272 pages
0393643980
This scrupulous new translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh manages to convey much of the archaic power and even something of the occasional humor of the ancient Mesopotamian poem. What is especially valuable is that the translators, by collating passages from the different ancient versions of this epic that have survived only in fragments, have made available many vivid narrative episodes that will be new to most English readers of the poem.
Robert Alter, University of California, BerkeleyThis Norton Critical Edition includes:An expanded translation from the Akkadian by Benjamin R. Foster based on new discoveries, adding lines throughout the world’s oldest epic masterpiece.Benjamin R. Foster’s full introduction and expanded explanatory annotations.
Eleven illustrations. Analogues from the Sumerian and Hittite narrative traditions along with The Gilgamesh Letter, a parody of the epic enjoyed by Mesopotamian schoolchildren during the first millennium BCE. Essays by Thorkild Jacobsen, William L. Moran, Susan Ackerman, and Andrew R.
5. Season of Migration to the North (New York Review Books Classics)
Author: by Tayeb Salih
NYRB Classics
English
139 pages
After years of study in Europe, the young narrator of Season of Migration to the North returns to his village along the Nile in the Sudan. It is the 1960s, and he is eager to make a contribution to the new postcolonial life of his country.
Back home, he discovers a stranger among the familiar faces of childhoodthe enigmatic Mustafa Sa’eed. Mustafa takes the young man into his confidence, telling him the story of his own years in London, of his brilliant career as an economist, and of the series of fraught and deadly relationships with European women that led to a terrible public reckoning and his return to his native land.
But what is the meaning of Mustafa’s shocking confession? Mustafa disappears without explanation, leaving the young manwhom he has asked to look after his wifein an unsettled and violent no-man’s-land between Europe and Africa, tradition and innovation, holiness and defilement, and man and woman, from which no one will escape unaltered or unharmed.
Season of Migration to the North is a rich and sensual work of deep honesty and incandescent lyricism. In 2001 it was selected by a panel of Arab writers and critics as the most important Arab novel of the twentieth century.
6. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature
Author: by Ngugi wa Thiong'o
English
114 pages
0852555016
Ngugi describes this book as ‘a summary of some of the issues in which I have been passionately involved for the last twenty years of my practice in fiction, theatre, criticism and in teaching of literature.’East Africa [Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda]: EAEP
7. Heart of Darkness: Joseph Conrad: African History Classics (Deluxe Edition, 1)
Author: by Joseph Conrad
B08ZWFTDXV
English
108 pages
“How Conrad’s imperial horror story Heart of Darkness resonates with our globalized times.” The conversation Heart of Darkness is a short novel by Polish novelist Joseph Conrad, written as a frame narrative, about Charles Marlow’s experience as an ivory transporter down the Congo River in Central Africa.
The river is “a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land”.In the course of his travel in central Africa, Marlow becomes obsessed with Mr. Kurtz.
The story is a complex exploration of the attitudes people hold on what constitutes a barbarian versus a civilized societyand the attitudes on colonialism and racism that were part and parcel of European imperialism. Originally published as a three-part serial story, in Blackwood’s Magazine, the novella Heart of Darkness has been variously published and translated into many languages.
8
In the Presence of Absence
Author: by Mahmoud Darwish
Archipelago
English
200 pages
One of the most transcendent poets of his generation, Darwish composed this remarkable elegy at the apex of his creativity, but with the full knowledge that his death was imminent. Thinking it might be his final work, he summoned all his poetic genius to create a luminous work that defies categorization.
In stunning language, Darwish’s self-elegy inhabits a rare space where opposites bleed and blend into each other. Prose and poetry, life and death, home and exile are all sung by the poet and his other. On the threshold of im/mortality, the poet looks back at his own existence, intertwined with that of his people.
Through these lyrical meditations on love, longing, Palestine, history, friendship, family, and the ongoing conversation between life and death, the poet bids himself and his readers a poignant farewell.
9. Arabian Love Poems: Full Arabic and English Texts (Three Continents Press)
Author: by Nizar Qabbani
Three Continents Pr
English
225 pages
Nizar Kabbani s poetry has been described as more powerful than all the Arab regimes put together (Lebanese Daily Star). Reflecting on his death in 1998, Sulhi Al-Wadi wrote (in Tishreen), Qabbani is like water, bread, and the sun in every Arab heart and house.
In his poetry the harmony of the heart, and in his blood the melody of love. Arabian Love Poems is the first English-language collection of his work. Kabbani was a poet of great simplicity direct, spontaneous, musical, using the language of everyday life.
He was a ceaseless campaigner for women s rights, and his verses praise the beauty of the female body, and of love. He was an Arab nationalist, yet he criticized Arab dictators and the lack of freedom in the Arab world.
He was the poet of Damascus: I am the Damascene. If you dissect my body, grapes and apples will come out of it. If you open my veins with your knife, you will hear in my blood the voices of those who have departed.
Frangieh and Brown s elegant translations are accompanied by the Arabic texts of the poems, penned by Kabbani especially for this collection.
10. Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth A Novel
Author: by Naguib Mahfouz
Anchor
English
176 pages
From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and author of the Cairo Trilogy, comes Akhenaten, a fascinating work of fiction about the most infamous pharaoh of ancient Egypt. In this beguiling novel, originally published in Arabic in 1985, Mahfouz tells with extraordinary insight the story of the “heretic pharaoh,” or “sun king,”-the first known monotheistic ruler-whose iconoclastic and controversial reign during the 18th Dynasty (1540-1307 B.C.
Has uncanny resonance with modern sensibilities. Narrating the novel is a young man with a passion for the truth, who questions the pharaoh’s contemporaries after his horrible death-including Akhenaten’s closest friends, his most bitter enemies, and finally his enigmatic wife, Nefertiti-in an effort to discover what really happened in those strange, dark days at Akhenaten’s court.
As our narrator and each of the subjects he interviews contribute their version of Akhenaten, “the truth” becomes increasingly evanescent. Akhenaten encompasses all of the contradictions his subjects see in him: at once cruel and empathic, feminine and barbaric, mad and divinely inspired, his character, as Mahfouz imagines him, is eerily modern, and fascinatingly ethereal.
11. Dark Psychology: This Book Includes: Manipulation and Dark Psychology; Persuasion and Dark Psychology; Dark NLP. The Definitive Guide to Detect and … Secrets (The Dark Psychology Series)
Author: by Jonathan Mind
English
342 pages
1692354469
English
176 pages
Price:
$24.99
as of Jul 13, 2021
(6:03 pm)
Novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o has been a force in African literature for decades: Since the 1970s, when he gave up the English language to commit himself to writing in African languages, his foremost concern has been the critical importance of language to culture.
In Something Torn and New, Ngugi explores Africa’s historical, economic, and cultural fragmentation by slavery, colonialism, and globalization. Throughout this tragic history, a constant and irrepressible force was Europhonism: the replacement of native names, languages, and identities with European ones.
The result was the dismemberment of African memory. Seeking to remember language in order to revitalize it, Ngugi’s quest is for wholeness. Wide-ranging, erudite, and hopeful, Something Torn and New is a cri de coeur to save Africa’s cultural future.
13. The Kebra Negast (the Book of the Glory of Kings), with 15 original illustrations (Aziloth Books)
Author: by E. A. Wallis Budge
Aziloth Books
English
212 pages
The ‘Kebra Nagast’ (Glory of Kings) was written at least one thousand years ago, and takes its theme from much older sources, some going back to the first century AD. Written originally in the African classical language Ge’ez, the book tells the history of a Davidic line of African monarchs, descended from King Solomon of Israel and Maqeda, Queen of Sheba (Saba), who journeyed to the Levant specifically to visit the wise and far-famed monarch.
It was a successful meeting of minds, and Maqeda proved the equal of Solomon the Wise in a series of long philosophical discussions. But the Hebrew monarch was not merely attracted to the African Queen’s intellect – by means of a ploy, he seduced Maqeda, who gave birth to a son, Ebna-Lahakim.
But this seduction proved to be Solomon’s undoing. While in Israel, Prince Ebna-Lahakim gathered around him a group of royal nobles and together they seized the two most powerful symbols of Israel’s compact with the Almighty – the Ark of the Covenant and the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments.
14. African Spiritual Traditions in the Novels of Toni Morrison
Author: by K. Zauditu-Selassie
English
264 pages
0813049520
“Makes a valuable contribution to the ever-widening field of Morrison studies by exploring the intricacies of Morrison’s African references, giving critics the ability to make more informed readings of the novels.”-Canadian Review of American Studies “A study of African cosmology and epistemology in Morrison’s writings that draws on the academic author’s experience in the Kongo and Yoruba traditions.”-Chronicle Review “Addresses a real need: a scholarly and ritually informed reading of spirituality in the work of a major African American author.
No other work catalogues so thoroughly the grounding of Morrison’s work in African cosmogonies. Zauditu-Selassie’s many readings of Ba Kongo and Yoruba spiritual presence in Morrison’s work are incomparably detailed and generally convincing.”-Keith Cartwright, University of North Florida While others have studied the African spiritual ideas and values encoded in Morrison’s work, African Spiritual Traditions in the Novels of Toni Morrison is the most comprehensive.In this volume, K.
15. African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction: Threaded Visions of Memory, Community, Nature and Being
Author: by Elizabeth J. West
B007IVL5G2
December 16, 2011
English
African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction: Threaded Visions of Memory, Community, Nature and Being is the nexus to scholarship on manifestations of Africanisms in black art and culture, particularly the scant critical works focusing on African metaphysical retentions. This study examines New World African spirituality as a syncretic dynamic of spiritual retentions and transformations that have played prominently in the literary imagination of black women writers.
Beginning with the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, African Spiritualityin Black Women’s Fiction traces applications and transformations of African spirituality in black women’s writings that culminate in the conscious and deliberate celebration of Africanity in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.
The journey from Wheatley’s veiled remembrances to Hurston’s explicit gaze of continental Africa represents the literary journey of black women writers to represent Africa as not only a very real creative resource but also a liberating one. Hurston’s icon of black female autonomy and self realization is woven from the threadwork of African spiritual principles that date back to early black women’s writings.
