Africa Realism

Abraham, William. The African Mind. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962. A classic text of African philosophy.

Achebe, Chinua. Morning Yet On Creation Day. New York: Anchor Press, 1975. A lucid and representative coverage of the writer's abiding critical concerns.

Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuike. Toward the Decolonisation of African Literature. London: Routledge, 1980. A passionate call to the decolonization of African literature and criticism that has generated a lot of controversy.

Cooper, Brenda. Magical Realism in West African Fiction. London: Routledge, 1998. A groundbreaking study of the concept in African literature.

Feuser, Willfred. "Wole Soyinka: The Problem of Authenticity." Black Literature Forum 22, no. 3 (fall 1988): 555–575.

Garuba, Harry. "Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing African Literature, Culture, and Society." Public Culture 15, no. 2 (2003): 261–285. A work of profound originality on realism and the philosophy of African arts.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. An important contribution to the study of African and African-American cultural theory.

Gugelberger, Georg. Marxism and African Literature. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1986. An outstanding and representative text on trends in African Marxist literary criticism.

Heywood, Christopher, ed. Perspectives on African Literature. London: Heinemann, 1971. A good source on 1960s African literary criticism.

Irele, Abiola. The African Experience in Literature and Ideology. London: Heinemann, 1981. A rigorous sociological study of African literature.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Decolonising the African Mind. London: Heinemann, 1986. A radical Afrocentric and original reading of the terms of cultural colonization as well as liberation.

——. Moving the Centre. London: Heinemann, 1993. A more universalist account of cultural decolonization.

Oruka, Henry Odera. Sage Philosophy. Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1990. A singularly original piece of African philosophy.

——. Trends in Contemporary African Philosophy. Nairobi, Kenya: n.p., 1990. A good overview of African philosophy by one of its leading practitioners.

Senghor, Léopold Sédar. Prose and Poetry. London: Heinemann, 1974. Carefully chosen representative texts.

Serequeberhan, Tsenay, ed. African Philosophy. New York: Paragon House, 1991. An extremely useful overview of historical and current trends in African philosophy.

Soyinka, Wole. Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976. A major work of African philosophy and literary criticism.

Welsh-Asante, Kariamu, ed. The African Aesthetic: Keeper of the Traditions. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993. An excellent assembly of the tradition.

Wiredu, Kwasi. Philosophy and an African Culture. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1980. A classic from a man who might be rightly called the father of modern African philosophy.