African Literary Histories and History in African Literatures

This chapter offers a series of approaches to, and questions about, the different types of historical engagement to be found in African literatures. History, in African literatures, is not a term that applies simply to narratives that engage with the past: African literatures offer historians examples of the imagination in history and the imagination as history. The chapter proposes a three-tiered methodology: first, consideration of the time and place of literary production; second, consideration of the ways in which works of literature engage with the concepts of time, memory, and historical consciousness; and third, consideration of the temporal and geographical distances separating literary works from their current audiences.