Carli Coetzee and Moradewun Adejunmobi curate cutting-edge scholarship in the Routledge Handbook of African Literature. Divided into seven parts, the book presents a fresh picture of the current directions in the field. The editors call this image a Kodak moment, signaling the “anticipated transience of the critical frameworks” of the Handbook. This admission quickly turns out to be modest at best, as the critical frameworks of chapters consistently forge new ways of harnessing African literature. Jesse Arseneault, for instance, starts “African Fictions, Animal Figures and Anthropocentric Frameworks” with the oft-quoted proverb about the lion and the hunter, but uses this quotation as an entry point into animal studies instead of the usual power-relations trajectory. Anna-Leena Toivanen considers the interplay between different types of labor and mobility, employing texts that consider Afropean travel as imagined, illegal, and reversed in “Globalization, Mobility and Labor in African Diasporic Fiction.” Naminata Diabate’s “The Forms of Shame and African Literature” genders the trope of shame to question its outcomes by using major characters in different novels. Stephanie Bosch Santana complements the increasing online literary spaces with research on offline groups in Southern Africa in “The Story Club: African Literary Networks Offline.” Cajetan Iheka’s “African Literature, Audience and the Search for the (non)human” moves into unchartered territory. These are but a smattering of the superb work that comprises the volume.

Apart from laying out the stakes and summarizing the submissions, the introduction does a fine job of first connecting the chapters across the various parts, and then proposing incisive ways in which these submissions can be extended by further scholarship. These suggestions are a convenient way of teaching limitations and recommendations to graduate students or students in an advanced undergraduate research methods seminar. Students and scholars should again find that the interdisciplinary nature of the volume lends to utility beyond the confines of African literature. For example, an American Studies, Political Science, History, or Eastern European studies scholar could find value in Monica Popescu’s “‘Children of the Cold War’: Rethinking African Literary Generations through the Global Conflict,” which is a comparative analysis of how Ngugi and Wainaina viewed the Cold War. A Food and Nutrition researcher could use Delores Phillips’s “Appetite and Everyday Life in African Literature” to better understand how people process food on a sociological level, while pharmacists and pathologists could employ Pim Higginson’s “Drinking Scenes: Alcohol in the Francophone African Novel” to similarly useful ends. Ng’ang’a Muchiri’s “Depictions of Kenyan Lands and Landscapes by Four Women Writers” should be helpful to academics in Eco-Criticism and Geography. Any scholar researching into the position of China as a global power should be interested in Ying Cheng’s “History, Imperial Eyes and the ‘Mutual Gaze’: Narratives of African-Chinese Encounters in Recent Literary Work.” Creative artists will also find this volume helpful, as it will illuminate the ways in which researchers are engaging with their work.

The editors are aware of the shortcomings of a handbook that comprises 29 submissions from researchers based in five continents. They note that the dominance of prosaic genres risks creating a hierarchy, while the language problem is still unresolved decades after the Makerere conference. They acknowledge the inability to cover every blade of grass in the field of African literary criticism and consistently signpost this in their introduction. This is related to a seeming weakness in the collection, in that despite the small space allocated to each contribution, a significant number of the authors decide to analyze three or even four texts. Still, this has the advantage of reinforcing the intention to highlight potential and malleability over the idea of a finished product.

Apart from their identified shortcomings, there are two stark points of note: there is no literary or scholarly focus on North Africa, while the handful of Africa-based academics are easily outnumbered by their Western-based counterparts. The former note is a problem that is an extension of the “Sub-Saharan” African label; the latter is representative of the relative inability of locally-based scholars to publish in venues outside the continent. However, these issues do not in any way detract from the power of the Handbook, which is a tour de force and should dominate classroom and research spaces. With straightforward language that consistently and effortlessly harnesses theory, text, and argument, the editors and authors do scholarship a world of good.