Frieda Ekotto, Kenneth W. Harrow, and an international group of scholars set forth new understandings of the conditions of contemporary African cultural production in this forward-looking volume. Arguing that it is impossible to understand African cultural productions without knowledge of the structures of production, distribution, and reception that surround them, the essays grapple with the shifting notion of what "African" means when many African authors and filmmakers no longer live or work in Africa. While the arts continue to flourish in Africa, addressing questions about marginalization, what is center and what periphery, what traditional or conservative, and what progressive or modern requires an expansive view of creative production.

Reputed to be a conservative group, the Nobel Prize committee astonished the world in 1985 by giving its prize to "Claude Simon," one of the most adventurous and challenging of modern authors whose writing defies easy classification. This study shows exactly how inventive and challenging he is. Simon's works run the gamut from first-person narratives to narratives without a stable perspective. His novels deal with minute details of the grand stages of history--world war, for instance--and with the historical dimensions of everyday life. Maria Minich Brewer demonstrates that Simon has reformulated the standard forms of fiction to expose the logic of narrative, a complex and powerful legacy populated with stereotypes too easily accepted as natural. Her book brings into focus the cultural legacies embedded in narrative as well as the narrative dimensions of culture and history. Simon has voiced suspicion of narrative order. He never underestimates, however, either its pervasiveness or its powers. In his novels, he never dismisses narrative order as being "merely" a matter of formal conventions. On the contrary, he reveals narrative representation to be a powerful agent of some of the most violent events to which an individual is subject.

Frieda Ekotto, Kenneth W. Harrow, and an international group of scholars set forth new understandings of the conditions of contemporary African cultural production in this forward-looking volume. Arguing that it is impossible to understand African cultural productions without knowledge of the structures of production, distribution, and reception that surround them, the essays grapple with the shifting notion of what "African" means when many African authors and filmmakers no longer live or work in Africa. While the arts continue to flourish in Africa, addressing questions about marginalization, what is center and what periphery, what traditional or conservative, and what progressive or modern requires an expansive view of creative production.