Contemporary perspectives on writings from Africa and African Diaspora are tributaries of the frontier spirit of Black Renaissance informing past, present and continuing perspectives on black and African traditions in literature. King and Ogungbesan not only affirm this tradition in A Celebration of black and African Writing which provides a fillip to the cultural fellowship and sense of oneness within black world literatures but also note how the “phenomenal flowering of black writing” in the fifties and sixties of African political self determination saw writers turning from “the older problems of colonialism towards the new issues resulting from political independence.” This trend has continued in new writings of late twenty-first century and early millennium which tend to hybridized individualities and their concern with the internal contradictions of modern African nationalities and black world experience. Thus something had happened from the twilight of the century through the dawn of the millennium. There had emerged a new tenor in African and black writing led by an avant garde of younger energies envisioning and rewriting postcolonial power relations in their various national and cultural environments. In addition, conflicts of citizenship, gender relations and oppressive strictures of the minority within a racially structured majority have trailed the new discourse. This emerging body of writings is grounded on historical understanding of the cultural and social need for black emancipation but introrsely directed to the reconnaissance of past with present and fluid future prospects. Here, in a capsule, is the phenomenon of growing postmodernist traditions in which the challenges of globalization and international cooperation give new meanings and relations to universalism, ethnicity, terrorism and the question of power as it affects our planet. All these are corroborated by the relevant historical forces which lie at the heart of the emerging literary dialogues from Africa and the Black world which is the objective of this supplement. It is thereby apparent that this critical omnibus of new writings is not just intended to encapsulate the proud zest of Pan African idealism and racial concern for legacies that seem lost in postmodernist concerns with differences and revisions, but its anchorage on continental heritage in the inclusivist tradition of its forbears is at the core of its artistic relevance.

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