Dr. Victor Gomia publishes book on African fiction and plays

A new book edited by Dr. Victor Gomia, associate professor of English, has been published recently that highlights African and African-diasporic fiction and theater works.

Dr. Gomia is the lead editor of Re-writing Pasts, Imagining Futures: Critical Explorations of Contemporary African Fiction and Theater, a volume that focuses on such works in their traditional forms as well as in their encounters with innovative forms and avenues of dissemination.

Prominent among the arguments made in the book is that post-colonial African literature and criticism came from the ashes of protest and contestation of hegemony, a reality that explains the resistance against the emergence of marginalizing centers with regard to discourses, aesthetics and media creation. 

The collection of essays analyze the representation of pertinent socio-political and historical questions in a variety of postcolonial texts from Africa and the African Diasporas, notably the Caribbean islands and the United States of America. However, far from re-writing of history in a way that cedes to conservative worldviews, creative writers and critics simultaneously attempt to chart ways forward for socially all-inclusive futures in an increasingly interconnected world.

According to Dr. Gomia, who conceived the project and served as its lead editor, the release of the book this summer marks the end of three years of collaborative work by scholars of African Literature at the University of Bayreuth in Germany and Delaware State University.

Rewriting Pasts, Imagining Futures: Critical Explorations of Contemporary African Fiction and Theater is available with the following distributors: African Books Collective, Amazon and Spears Media Press.