Call for Articles: African Literature Today

Special Issue ‘African Returns in African Fiction’

This special issue will focus on literary texts by African writers in which the protagonist returns to his/her ‘original’ or ancestral ‘home’ in Africa from other parts of the world. Oxfeld and Long, writing on the ethnography of return suggest that it differs from globalization and transnationalism since ‘it is situated in particular events and experiences’ reflecting ‘particular historical, social, and personal contexts’ (2004: 3). Nevertheless, they go on to state that returns do have an effect not only on the communities the returnee leaves or joins but also on ‘global ways of relating and interacting with one another’ (2004: 3-4). Ideas of return—intentional and actual—have been a consistent feature of the literature of Africa and the African diaspora: from Equiano’s autobiography to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s latest novel, Americanah (2013).