African Poetry, Black Transnationalism, and the Making of Literary Worlds

Under Contract with Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Studies in World Literature Series

For many readers, African literature means the novel: Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Yet poetry was a major genre where African writers actively imagined new literary worlds. Poets founded magazines, filled radio airwaves, exhibited alongside painters, and gathered at conferences across continents. In African Poetry, Black Transnationalism, and the Making of Literary Worlds, Adwetewa-Badu shows that what we now know as African poetry did not emerge from isolated national traditions. It was made through transnational networks of media, institutions, and social bonds.

Developing a method she calls network poetics, Adwetewa-Badu follows poetry from the mid-twentieth century to the present. She traces it through little magazines such as Black Orpheus, Okike, and Lotus; radio broadcasts; galleries and artistic groups like Mbari and Paa ya Paa; writers' conferences; roads and transport infrastructure; literary friendships; and the contemporary prize economy. These networks made African poetry a project of Black transnationalism, in which Caribbean and African American poets such as Kamau Brathwaite, Quincy Troupe, and Jayne Cortez were not distant interlocutors but participants in defining African modernity. Through sustained readings of poets including Kofi Awoonor, John Pepper Clark, Efua Sutherland, Wole Soyinka, Dennis Brutus, Rebeka Njau, Romeo Oriogun, and Safia Elhillo, the book recasts African poetry not as a sealed tradition but as something poets built through exchange.

Adwetewa-Badu considers, among other things, the significance of Okike's editors opening the magazine with Brathwaite's "Bread," and engaging Troupe's love poems. She examines how poets including Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka, Aimé Césaire, Langston Hughes, and John Pepper Clark, gathered in West Berlin for a poetry conference, debated Négritude and the terms of Black transnationalism, and discussed the work of African poetry. She examines how Awoonor's "Laments," rearranged and layered with jazz in a London studio, and Efua Sutherland's participation in "The Singing Net," made broadcast a medium for poetry that exceeded print. And she reads the press release announcing Elhillo's Sillerman First Book Prize, alongside Oriogun's path from Facebook timelines to the Nigeria Prize for Literature, to show how today's poetry prizes produce the figure of the diasporic "African poet." Across these cases, African poets kept Africa at the center of their work even as they extended it across the Black world.

Challenging novel-centered accounts of world literature, this book moves African poetry from the margins of the field to a central site where global modernity was theorized, contested, and given form by Africans. Ultimately, African Poetry, Black Transnationalism, and the Making of Literary Worlds calls for a relational literary history: one that studies not isolated texts but the networks that bring them into being and carry them across space and time.