Critical Perspectives on Hausa Literature

African literatures in African languages are still in the margin of literary critical analyses and theories. As a consequence,there are few critical studies and theories focused on the interface between the African oral literatures in African languages and their written ones. This situation raises important critical and theoretical questions for literary critics, theoreticians and students. This book provides critical perspectives taking into account aspects of the interface between the oral and written forms through a case study on Hausa literature. In fact, the notion of interface permeates the book: interface between the collective repertoire of Hausa oral traditions and the individual, more stylized usages of elements of the repertoire by traditional artists; between oral and written literary productions in the Hausa language as well as in translation; between the traditional astists and modern writters and between Francophone and Anglophone literary traditions and civilizations often competing with the Hausa ones from Northern Nigeria and Southeastern Niger, symbols of different colonial experiences.