Postcolonial Health in African Literatures

Postcolonial Health in African Literatures uncovers the overlooked intersections between public health histories, environmental governance, and literary expression in postcolonial African contexts. Through five chapters, the book examines how canonical and understudied African authors construct literary epidemiologies that respond to and reimagine the material and epistemological afterlives of colonial health regimes and their postcolonial transformations. In doing so, it advances new methodological approaches to African literary studies, building on ecocritical and materialist turns. The chapters trace literary epidemiological imaginaries across Southern, East, and West African contexts, mapping their continuities and transformations on either side of pivotal historical and political transitions—pre- and post-independence, the end of formal apartheid, periods of state collapse and reconstruction, and the aftermath of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.

Through innovative close reading strategies that embrace engage the broader archives of life surrounding literary texts — including authorial life writing, colonial and postcolonial epidemiological archives, and political ecologies of health. Postcolonial Health in African Literatures offers new ways of reading and relating key themes in global health humanities and the social sciences of medicine. The chapters foreground the co-constitutive relationship between ecological and medical concerns in African postcolonial contexts, exploring topics such as water politics, agrarian biopolitics, insect-vectored diseases, infection biology at molecular, cellular, and ecological scales, and postgenomic approaches to environmental health. Building on these analyses, the book develops new reading strategies that connect African literary studies to planetary and climate concerns.