African Poetry Worlds in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

This book investigates a new pan-African wave of poetry propelled by contemporary poets across the African continent and diaspora. Focusing on poems written in English during the past two decades, Suhr-Sytsma approaches the worlds of African poetry from three main angles. First, lifeworlds—subjectively experienced social worlds—provide impetus and inspiration for poets’ visions. Second, literary and arts practitioners construct art worlds for curating and publishing poetry. Finally and vitally, worlds are made in and through the language of poems. Across this book, Suhr-Sytsma asks how poets in and from Africa confront the socio-existential dilemmas of twenty-first-century African life, how new print and digital platforms founded by African creatives position poets to address these dilemmas, and how poets consequently transform given materials into aesthetic worlds. Such poetic worldmaking renews quests for freedom amidst historic and ongoing unfreedom, not just by challenging repressive governance at the national level or stereotypical images of Africa that circulate globally, but also by reinventing customary norms of representation for family, gender, and intimacy. Poetry provides avenues for writers and readers to engage in searching socio-existential thinking, to foster new forms of sociability, and to create fresh possibilities in a language wrested from colonial condescension. The first chapter advances an account of recent African poetry as sensuous thinking, while the remaining chapters and coda examine how such poetry widens the repertoires of extant modes of thinking: geographical, gendered, generational, utopian, and planetary.