ABOUT THIS BOOK

This is the first book to interpret the African dimension of contemporary Hispanic literature.

Equatorial Guinea, a former Spanish colony, is the only African country in which Spanish is an official language and which has a tradition of literature in Spanish. This is a study of the literature produced by the nation’s writers from 2007 to 2013. Since its independence in 1968, Equatorial Guinea has been ruled by dictators under whom ethnic differences have been exacerbated, poverty and violence have increased, and critical voices have been silenced. The result has been an exodus of intellectuals—including writers who express their national and exile experiences in their poems, plays, short stories, and novels. The writers discussed include Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo, and Guillermina Mekuy, among others.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Marvin A. Lewis is Professor Emeritus of Spanish American and African Diaspora literatures in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures of the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is the founding Director of the Afro-Romance Institute for Languages and Literatures of the African Diaspora (1996-2005) at MU, Founder of the Afro-Latin/American Research Association (ALARA) and Editor of its publication (PALARA) (1996-2005). Lewis has published six books with the University of Missouri Press, which are: Afro-Hispanic Poetry, 1940-1980: From Slavery to Negritud in South American Verse, 1983; Treading the Ebony Path: Ideology and Violence in Contemporary Afro-Colombian Prose Fiction, 1987; Ethnicity and Identity in Contemporary Afro-Venezuelan Literature: a Culturalist Approach, 1992; Afro-Argentine Discourse: Another Dimension of the Black Diaspora, 1996, Translated by Gabriela Díaz Cortez, El discurso Afroargentino: otra dimensión de la diáspora negra, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina, 2011; An Introduction to the Literature of Equatorial Guinea; Between Colonialism and Dictatorship, 2007; and Equatorial Guinean Literature in its National and Transnational Contexts, 2017.

Lewis is also the author of The Peruvian Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa, 1983; Afro-Uruguayan Literature: Post-Colonial Persectives, 2003, translated by the author and Alicia Porrini, Cultura y literatura afrouruguaya: perspectivas post-coloniales, 2011; and Adalberto Ortiz: From Margin to Center, 2013.

Current projects include a book-length study: Nelson Estupiñán Bass: An Introduction to his writings (in press), translated by Gabriela Díaz Cortez and Valentina Goldraij, Nelson Estupiñán Bass: una introducción a sus escritos, Quito: Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, 2017. A book-length study of Afrocolombian literature and the environment is underway. The project was supported by a Fulbright Grant in 2016 for research in the Colombian Chocó region.

Lewis lives in Columbia, MO.

REVIEWS

“Provides an excellent overview of a little-known area of African Hispanophone cultures and literatures.”—Dellita Martin-Ogunsola, University of Alabama at Birmingham, author of The Eve-Hagar Paradigm in the Fiction of Quince Duncan

“A much-needed study in the field. It updates and refreshes the scholarship on an aspect of Hispanic and African literary studies often relegated to the back burner.”—Alain Lawo-Sukam, Texas A&M University, author of Hacia una poética afro-colombiana: el caso del Pacífico

“Marvin A. Lewis presents us with an innovative examination of texts by Equatorial Guinean authors in the twenty-first century. By delving into literature produced at home and abroad within a transnational framework, Lewis explores how 'nation' and 'diaspora' intersect. This approach elicits an important question: What constitutes a 'national' literature in this age of globalization? Understanding Equatorial Guinea's literary corpus as one informed by simultaneous processes of nation building and transnational experiences, this insightful study offers illuminating analyses about this national literature at its crossroads. Equatorial Guinean Literature in its National and Transnational Contexts is indispensable reading for everyone interested in the connections between African and Hispanic literatures.”—Elisa Rizo, Iowa State University, coeditor of Receptions of the Classics in the African Diaspora of the Hispanophone and Lusophone Worlds: Atlantis Otherwise

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Nationalism, Migration, Diaspora, Transnationalism
Chapter 1: The Transnational Character of Equatorial Guinean Literature—El metro, El porteador de Marlow and Autorretrato con un infiel
Chapter 2: Malabo: The Cultural Matrix—Ecos de Malabo and Luz en la noche: poesía y teatro
Chapter 3: Women: Between Tradition and Modernity—Las tres virgenes de Santo Tomás, Tres almas para un corazón and Mokámbo, aromas de libertad
Chapter 4: From Fiction to Reality—En el lapso de una ternura and Matinga, sangre en la selva
Chapter 5: Dictatorship in a Pan-African Perspective—Siete días en Bioko and Conspiración en el Green (El informe Abayak)
Chapter 6: Language as Cultural Resistance—Sueños y realidad and Los callados anhelos de una vida
Chapter 7: Equatorial Guinea: The People’s Perspective—Avión de ricos, ladrón de cerdos and Arde el monte de noche
Conclusion
Select Bibliography

REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you with an electronic file for alternative access.

Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.

It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.