A New Generation of African Writers: Migration, Material Culture and Language

Brenda Cooper examines the work of the new generation of African writers who have placed migration as central to their writing.

There is a new interest among publishers in New York and London in books by writers of African origin. These authors have often grown up or passed their early adult years out of Africa. The Orange Prize for Fiction was awarded inLondon 2007 to Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, and the Caine Prize for African Writing has introduced new writers such as Leila Aboulela, Biyi Bandele and Chimamanda Adichie herself to agents and publishers.
This examination of the extraordinary work which has recently appeared is therefore very timely. Migration is a central theme of much African fiction written in English. Here, Brenda Cooper tracks the journeys undertakenby a new generation of African writers, their protagonists and the solid objects that populate their fiction, to depict the material realities of their multiple worlds and languages. The book explores the uses to which the Englishlanguage is put in order to understand these worlds. It demonstrates how these writers have contested the dominance of colonising metaphors. The writers' challenge is to find an English that can effectively express their many lives, languages and identities.

BRENDA COOPER is Director of the Centre for African Studies and a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Cape Town.

Southern Africa(South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Lesotho and Swaziland): University of KwaZulu-Natal Press (PB]