Africa’s imagination has been dominated and overshadowed, informed by pressing social and political issues, and its fiction has reflected this in its commitment to social realism. However, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, this tendency has been challenged by the rise to prominence of experimental fiction exhibiting postmodern and magical realist characteristics.  After Colonialism: African Postmodernism and Magical Realism thoroughly examines this new fiction and its contribution to the liberation of Africa’s imagination. It finds, perhaps ironically, that a liberated imagination provides a powerful tool for understanding, and perhaps even resolving, the complex issues of postcolonial Africa.

Gerald Gaylard is Associate Professor of English at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.