EMERGING PERSPECTIVES ON TESS OSONYE ONWUEME: Women, Youth, and Eco-literature

The volume contains twenty-four essays and some interviews with Tess Osonye Onwueme. The essays address a wide range of themes in Onwueme’s works. These essays reflect a diversity of theoretical and critical approaches from feminism, Black feminism/womanism, and performance studies to linguistics and ecocriticism. The essays also represent the perspectives of international scholars located in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the United States.

Today Tess Osonye Onwueme has established herself as one of the key voices in Nigerian drama in particular and in African drama in general.  She has also garnered an expanding international following or readership. Her published collection of works includes fifteen plays, a collection of fables, and essays, spanning four decades. Her plays have been performed and studied in Africa, the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean. 

Onwueme’s plays cover a diversity of issues, ranging from women’s representation and roles in a changing Nigerian (African) society, to women’s activism, gender/sexuality and power, eco-feminism (women’s protest against environmental devastation), as well as the impact of globalization and multi-national economics on African nations. The catalog of her thematic foci is extensive and such diversity enriches her works. Overwhelmingly, however, the central subjects of Tess Osonye Onwueme’s plays are women, the youth, and the ordinary masses caught in a struggle against violence, traditional as well as colonial and postcolonial pressures.  

ABOUT THE EDITOR

Maureen N. Eke, Professor, teaches in the Department of English, Central Michigan University. Her publications include an edited collection of essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved (2015). Maureen Ngozi Eke has served as the President of the African Literature Association (ALA) and was the Associate Vice President for Diversity and International Education at CMU (2002-2006). She received the Michigan Education Association’s (MEA) Elizabeth Siddall Human Rights Award in 2016.

World Rights

Category: Literature, Literary Criticism/AFRICA

Trim size: 6 x 9"

Page count: 504

Publication year: 2023