ACROSS BORDERS
This edition of 2010 JAL is a further quest through an all-expansive African heritage in and beyond regional or national groupings. It is built upon the framework of Black cultural nationalism as a consistent element of African-centred modernity. Across Borders is consequently an attempt to commit the process of African integration in postcoloniality and postmodernity to the exploration of perspectives on black identities in contemporary writings beyond the borders of Africa and across the Atlantic. We are interested in theories and critical perspectives on creative works which reveal how the continued and currently celebrated influence of Western civilization on Africa occasions a discontinuity in forms of life throughout the continent and now demands remedial visions and counteractive propositions to the cycle of abuses and fragmentation of the continent.
Literary researchers and theoretical exponents in their studies of new and existing literatures must be knowledgeable about how the African experience of modernity associated with a Western paradigm is fraught with corruption and tensions at various political, social, economic and psychological levels of African communal and individual existence, and its possible remediation through an imaginative articulation of the greater unity and higher prospects in the diversities, hybridity and fusions that are embedded in the external and subjective realities of the black world.
We are therefore interested in truly original perspectives which pride in past achievements, can interpret the present, and also adumbrate the future in fidelity to African cultural endowments, rational vigour and sense of positive destiny.
We will welcome insightful, original and critically informed expose on modern African novelists, poets, dramatists and critiques of African and Black literature through whom an African consciousness and awareness direct their creative investigation of Black humanity in the direction of restoration and repair to the consequences of colonialism, westernisation, corruption and intellectual degeneration of Africa and her peoples.

Selected Reading:
Irele, Abiola. The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora. NY: Oxford UP. 2001.
M’Baye, Babacar. “Colonisation and African Modernity in Cheikh Hamidou Kane's Ambiguous Adventure.” Journal of African Literature and Culture. JALC (ALJ) 2006.
Ce, Chin. “ ‘Happily After’: Revisioning African writing.” Bards and Tyrants: Essays in Contemporary African Writing. AI: Handel Books, 2008.

Submissions Guidelines:
Original abstracts of no more than 600 words showing topic, intended arguments and their relevance to the discourse theme or subcategory should be submitted by Microsoft Word attachment for approval to editors@africaresearch.org or to ircalc@gmail.com