The first international conference ever held in Africa on the works of author Joseph Conrad took place in 1998, to mark the centenary of the publication of heart of darkness. This book draws its title from Conrad's short story, `An Outpost of Progress' which represented the responses of a European to colonial settler assumptions about progress and backwardness, in the light of his first-hand experience of Europeans in Africa at the end of the nineteenth century. The 13 essays in this collection engage directly with the ways in which Conrad's fiction explores and problematises the notion of `progress', not only at the time when he was writing but now, more than a century later. Although the relationship between modernist and postcolonial literature has been theorised by critics in Britain, Europe and America since the late 1980s, for the first time, this book brings these debates to Africa.

In recent years, the work of Zakes Mda - novelist, painter, composer, theatre director and film-maker - has attracted worldwide critical attention. As a novelist he writes about social identity in the 'new' South Africa and it is the versions of this identity that Gail Fincham's title explores, examining the five novels Mda has written since South Africa's transition to democracy: Ways of dying (1995), The Heart of Redness (2000), The Madonna of Excelsior (2002), The Whale Caller (2005) and Cion (2007). His explorations of refigured identity are rooted in his strongly painterly imagination which teaches his readers how to see anew by creating changed spaces in memory and culture. His novels are hybrids equally composed of African responses to modernity deriving from an oral culture and European multi-generic responses to modernity. Through a combination of magic realism, African orature and intertextuality with a Western canon, Mda undermines the dualistic thinking characteristic of our Western heritage - whether between the past and the present, the human and the non-human, the living and the dead, the rural and the urban. He imbues his fictional characters with the power to orchestrate a reconfigured subjectivity that is simultaneously political, social and aesthetic.

In recent years, the work of Zakes Mda--novelist, painter, composer, theater director and filmmaker--has attracted worldwide critical attention. Gail Fincham's book examines the five novels Mda has written since South Africa's transition to democracy: "Ways of Dying" (1995), "The Heart of Redness" (2000), T"he Madonna of Excelsior" (2002), "The Whale Caller "(2005), and "Cion "(2007). "Dance of Life" explores how refigured identity is rooted in Mda's strongly painterly imagination that creates changed spaces in memory and culture. Through a combination of magic realism, African orature, and intertextuality with the Western canon, Mda rejects dualistic thinking of the past and the present, the human and the nonhuman, the living and the dead, the rural and the urban. He imbues his fictional characters with the power to orchestrate a reconfigured subjectivity that is simultaneously political, social, and aesthetic.