Tongue and Mother Tongue takes on two compelling challenges: the language question and the place and role of the mother tongue in African literature. The collection is the culmination of the fierce, decades-old debates on the question of African literature and its criticism. Hence, the volume’s combination of reprints of seven previously-published but pertinent essays on the language question and seven selected critical essays from the 20th annual meeting of the African Literature Association. The fourteen essays, ranging from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives, are arranged in five thematic categories whose sequence should be experienced as a continuous dialogue rather than a collection of discrete statements: · The language question which includes five essays which come to grips with the more theoretical aspects of the issue whether or not African writers should write in African languages, and what the ideological implications of each side of the debate are. · The nature of criticism which contains a compelling essay examining the state of the literary discourse of the past decade, and the immediacy of its implicit concern for the fate of mother-tongue literary discourse. · The influence of the oral tradition on African literatures – an essay which uses indigenous tropes within African orature to define systems of interpretation in African literature. · African scholarship and the critical analysis of mother-tongue African literatures – two essays which demonstrate the “respectability and legitimacy” of the creative and scholarly work being done in the field, especially in the example of Yoruba metalanguage and literature. · Critical essays which contain five general, textual analyses.

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