Modern African Poetry As Counter-Discursive Practice

This paper proceeds from highlighting a few contestable standpoints on the viability and integrity of the postcolonial critical project to map the postcolonial in modern African poetry. It ascribes the tendency to theorise the unknown in much of postcolonial theorising in the Anglo-American academy to a neglect of the primacy of textual validation/authority in the constitution of literary theory, identifies four paradigms for the postcolonial reading of modern African poetry, and suggests that the writing-back paradigm may still be relevant in explaining this tradition.