Ottobah Cugoano

The complete texts of the most important & absorbing slave narratives in the African-American literary tradition.

Pan-African History brings together Pan-Africanist thinkers and activists from the Anglophone and Francophone worlds of the past two-hundred years. Included are well-known figures such as Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah, and Martin Delany, and the authors' original research on lesser-known figures such as Constance Cummings-John and Dusé Mohammed Ali reveals exciting new aspects of Pan-African activism.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s original, groundbreaking study explores the relationship between the African and African-American vernacular traditions and black literature, elaborating a new critical approach located within this tradition that allows the black voice to speak for itself. Examining the ancient poetry and myths found in African, Latin American, and Caribbean culture, and particularly the Yoruba trickster figure of Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey whose myths help articulate the black tradition's theory of its literature, Gates uncovers a unique system for interpretation and a powerful vernacular tradition that black slaves brought with them to the New World. His critical approach relies heavily on the Signifying Monkey--perhaps the most popular figure in African-American folklore--and signification and Signifyin(g). Exploring signification in black American life and literature by analyzing the transmission and revision of various signifying figures, Gates provides an extended analysis of what he calls the "Talking Book," a central trope in early slave narratives that virtually defines the tradition of black American letters. Gates uses this critical framework to examine several major works of African-American literature--including Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo--revealing how these works signify on the black tradition and on each other. The second volume in an enterprising trilogy on African-American literature, The Signifying Monkey--which expands the arguments of Figures in Black--makes an important contribution to literary theory, African-American literature, folklore, and literary history.

Covering five centuries--from the rise of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in the 15th century and the early Portuguese missionaries right through to the Church and its key role in Africa today--this major new volume is the first complete history of the Christian Church in Africa. Written by a leading authority on Church history who has spent many years in Africa, it looks at all aspects of Christianity in Africa, including its relationship to traditional values and customs, politics, and the comparable rise of Islam in Africa during the period. It is the latest volume in the highly successful Oxford History of the Christian Church series.