The Comic Imagination in Modern African Literature and Cinema

This book significantly expands the interdisciplinary discourse on African literature and cinema by exploring Africa’s under-visited carnivalesque poetics of laughter. Focusing on modern African literature as well as contemporary African cinema and Nollywood, it examines the often-neglected aesthetics of the African comic imagination. In modern African literature the pertinent styles range from comic simplicitas to comic magnitude with the facilitation of language, characterization, and plot by a poetics of laughter or lightness as an important aspect of style. The African comic imagination variously reflects, across genres, both the festival character of comedy and its pedagogical value.