Chinua Achebe is Africa's most prominent writer, and Things Fall Apart (1958) is the most renowned and widely-read African novel in the global literary canon. The essays collected in this casebook explore the work's artistic, multicultural, and global significance from a variety of critical perspectives.

In Africa the past and the present live very much side by side. African thinkers and intellectuals see their people's culture as rooted in time-honoured oral traditions and many African writers today use symbols, images and motifs from these traditions in their works. In this innovative study Dr Okpewho explores what he considers the essence of these traditions - myth - and examines its place in African life, literature and thought. Focusing on a number of tales from a selection of African countries, he shows myth to be the basic imaginative resource from which the larger cultural values derive. An established novelist as well as critic, Dr Okpewho discusses the narrative traditions of Africa - of which he continues to be a part - with balanced sympathy and objectivity. In this work he not only reasserts the pride in African traditions but also gives students of myth a fresh look at an old problem.

..". its pages come alive with wonderful illustrative material coupled with sensitve and insightful commentary." Reviews in Anthropology

..". the scope, breadth, and lucidity of this excellent study confirm that Okpewho is undoubtedly the most important authority writing on African oral literature right now... " Research in African Literatures

"Truly a tour de force of individual scholarship... " World Literature Today

..". excellent... " African Affairs

..". a thorough synthesis of the main issues of oral literature criticism, as well as a grounding in experienced fieldwork, a wide-ranging theoretical base, and a clarity of argument rare among academics." Multicultural Review

"This is a breathtakingly ambitious project... " Harold Scheub

..". a definitive accounting of the evidence of living oral traditions in Africa today. Professor Okpewho s authority as an expert in this important new field is unrivaled." Gregory Nagy

"Isidore Okpewho s African Oral Literature is a marvelous piece of scholarship and wide-ranging research. It presents the most comprehensive survey of the field of oral literature in Africa." Emmanuel Obiechina

..". a tour de force of scholarship in which Okpewho casts his net across the African continent, searching for its verbal forms through voluminous recent writings and presents African oral literature in a new voice, proclaiming the literariness of African folklore." Dan Ben-Amos

"This is an outstanding book by a scholar whose work has already influenced how African literature should be conceived.... Professor Okpewho is a scholar with a special talent to nurture scholarship in others. After this work, African literature will never be the same." Mazisi Kunene

Isidore Okpewho, for many years Professor of English at the University of Ibadan, is one of the handful of African scholars who has facilitated the growth of African oral literature to its status today as a literary enterprise concerned with the artistic foundations of human culture. This comprehensive critical work firmly establishes oral literature as a landmark of high artistic achievement and situates it within the broader framework of contemporary African culture."

The New York Times reports that since 1990 more Africans have voluntarily relocated to the United States and Canada than had been forcibly brought here before the slave trade ended in 1807. The key reason for these migrations has been the collapse of social, political, economic, and educational structures in their home countries, which has driven Africans to seek security and self-realization in the West. This lively and timely collection of essays takes a look at the new immigrant experience. It traces the immigrants' progress from expatriation to arrival and covers the successes as well as problems they have encountered as they establish their lives in a new country. The contributors, most immigrants themselves, use their firsthand experiences to add clarity, honesty, and sensitivity to their discussions of the new African diaspora.

Chinua Achebe is Africa's most prominent writer, and Things Fall Apart (1958) is the most renowned and widely-read African novel in the global literary canon. The essays collected in this casebook explore the work's artistic, multicultural, and global significance from a variety of critical perspectives.

These essays contribute to the debate between those who believe that the African origin of blacks in western society is central to their identity and outlook and those who deny that proposition. The contributors ponder the key questions underlying that controversy. Their 33 essays are divided into five main parts which cover questions such as: What is the character of New World black cultures and what are their relationships with the plural societies within which they function? How did Africans manage to create viable lives for themselves in a new place? How were they able to negotiate the complex social, political and cultural spaces they encountered? How has their ancestral heritage co-existed with that of other peoples with whom they have been forced to live?;The volume seeks to take a balanced look at the fate of the African presence in Western society as well as insights into the sources of periodic conflict between blacks and others.;The contributors include: Niyi Afolabi, Adetayo Alabi, Celia M. Azevedo, Antonio Benitez-Rojo, Eliana Guerreiro Ramos Bennett, LeGrace Benson, Ira Kincade Blake, Jack S. Blocker Jr., Sharon Aneta Bryant, Patience Elabor-Idemudia, Michael J.C. Ech

PAPERBACK FOR SALE IN AFRICA ONLY Examines the Ozidi Saga -- one of Africa's best-known epics -- as an example of oral literature and as a reflection of the specific social and political concerns of the Niger Delta. The Ozidi Saga is one of Africa's best known prosimetric epics, set in the Delta region of Nigeria. Blood on the Tides examines the epic -- a tale of a warrior and his sorcerer grandmother's revenge upon the assassins who killed her son -- both as an example of oral literature and as a reflection of the specific social and political concerns of the Nigerian Delta and the country as a whole. In addition the book considers various iterations ofthe saga, including a performance of the entire saga in 1963 in Ibadan by the folk artist Okabou Okobolo, which was subsequently transcribed, translated, and edited by the renowned Nigerian poet, playwright, and scholar John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo. The study concludes with a look at the work of contemporary Nigerian creative writers and their connection to the powerful literary and historical currents of the Ozidi story. Isidore Okpewho is Distinguished Professor of Africana Studies, English, and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University (SUNY). He is the author of The Epic in Africa, Myth in Africa, African Oral Literature, and Once Upona Kingdom. An award-winning novelist, he has published four titles: The Victims, The Last Duty, Tides, and Call Me By My Rightful Name.

"The Sacred Door and Other Stories: Cameroon Folktales of the Beba" offers readers a selection of folktales infused with riddles, proverbs, songs, myths, and legends, using various narrative techniques that capture the vibrancy of Beba oral traditions. Makuchi retells the stories that she heard at home when she was growing up in her native
Cameroon.
The collection of thirty-three folktales of the Beba showcases a wide variety of stories that capture the richness and complexities of an agrarian society's oral literature and traditions. Revenge, greed, and deception are among the themes that frame the story lines in both new and familiar ways. In the title story, a poor man finds himself elevated to king. The condition for his continued success is that he not open the sacred door. This tale of temptation, similar to the story of Pandora's box, concludes with the question, "What would you have done?"
Makuchi relates the stories her mother told her so that readers can make connections
between African and North American oral narrative traditions. These tales reinforce the commonalities of our human experiences without discounting our differences.