Ordering the African Imagination: Essays on Culture and Literature

Tanure Ojaide is an award-winning writer, both creative and academic. This collection of his essays and lectures from over the past decade, addresses issues of culture and literature from a personal African perspective. The focus of this book is African culture and its imaginative productions in the arts, especially in literature. The author also examines the direction of African culture and its artistic creations in a global age. The titles of the essays and lectures are: the challenges of the African writer today; African culture and the New World Order; nativity and the creative process: the Niger Delta in my poetry; African culture today; divine mentoring in poetry and its performance; self, myth and historical consciousness: an African writer's reflection; Nigerian literature in the 21st century: what direction?; whose English?: the African writer and the language issue; countering terror in the literary world: the example of activism; and anxieties and hopes: recent African poetry. Tanure Ojaide's awards include the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Africa Region (1987), the All-Africa Okigbo Prize for Poetry (1988, 1997), the BBC Arts and Africa Poetry Award (1988), and the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Award (1988, 1994, and 2003). He is also the recipient of the 2006 UNC Charlotte's First Citizens Bank Scholar Medal Award for his writing and academic accomplishments, and is a Fellow in Writing of the University of Iowa. He taught for many years at the University of Maiduguri, and is currently Professor of African-American and African Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he teaches African/Pan-African literature and art.