The African Scholar: And Other Essays by Abiola Irele

No longer is African literature, in its dominant thrust, defined by an apologetic or polemical response to the representation of Africa in the colonial ideology, and African thought generally by an effort of reformulation of the African image, in what Valentin Mudimbe has called, in his work The Invention of Africa (1988), “a discourse of succession.”This new literature, with the states of consciousness it illuminates, thus marks a break with the effort of elaboration of a counter discourse in relation to the colonial imposition that we associate with the work of an earlier generation of African writers and intellectuals.