Introduction

Summary

This Introduction lays out the gap in Africa–China scholarship regarding the humanities and world literature particularly. The need for humanistic scholarship on Africa–China relations pinpoints how these exchanges are more than just economic or political; they are also linguistic and cultural. I also articulate how the book intervenes into African literary history. I detail my method of interpreting these texts according to frameworks that include the Cold War, Third Worldism, the Indian Ocean, and the Global South. These approaches enable how I read African literature beyond its conventional relationship with the former European colonizer and the West in general. One main goal is to rework our understanding of postcolonial literature’s “worldliness” by configuring it according to African literary imaginaries of China.