In Native Stranger: A Blackamerican's Journey into the Heart of Africa (1992), Eddy L. Harris explores what it means to be the person he is. What, if anything, connects him to Africa? What is the relation between the person he knows himself to be, and the person others see? Searching for answers to his questions, he finds himself caught between his attempts to remain open to new ways of seeing and understanding the world, on the one hand, and succumbing to the pressures of monolithic narratives about African otherness, race, belonging, roots and the past, on the other hand. This tension gives rise to an ambiguity and a number of contradictions which make the text fold back on itself. His literary project therefore ultimately serves to raise questions not only about his own identity and place in the world, but also about the conditions of writing about the self. Central among the contradictions that permeate the text is a doubling of epistemological perspectives, which can be described as an effect of what W. E. B. Dubois famously termed double-consciousness. While Harris is able to use the contradictions that arise from his writing to explore and represent the complexity of the questions that are foregrounded in his text, he is unable to answer them. His project is in other words a kind of failure, but as this article argues, this failure is the price that Harris pays to access the full complexity of selfhood, beyond political and social narratives about collective identity and how the present is shaped by the past.

This article studies alterity in John Slaughter’s travelogue Brother in the Bush: An African American’s Search for Self in East Africa (2005). The book chronicles the author’s travels in Africa in the wake of a life-altering experience that makes him want to change the way he lives and sees the world. He therefore travels to Africa in order to search for a new self and a view of the world free from the materialist greed, insularity and artificiality of life in the West. However, Slaughter’s Africa is, more than an actual geographical space, a well of metaphors and images that he uses to discuss the alienation of middleclass life in the West. These metaphors and images are meaningful primarily from the point of view of the life that he wants to leave behind, and the alterity of Africa therefore adds few ‘new’ insights and adds little to his process of inner change.

OkadaBooks is an Android application and online platform for publishing and reading books electronically. It was founded by author and engineer Okechukwu Ofili and won mobile service provider MTN Nigeria's App of the Year Award (2013) in the category Best Overall App' (Osuagwu). At the time of writing, OkadaBooks offer their users more than 200 000 titles which have been downloaded more than one million times. OkadaBooks content ranges from novels and poetry to contemporary African comics, self-help literature and children's literature. The newer material is to a large extent written by non-established writers who use the app as a way to reach readers rather than to earn money by letting the reader access their texts for free. Other writers' books can be purchased through the app using a variety of payment methods. This interview with Magnus Okeke was done via email in September 2018, five years after the launch of OkadaBooks. Okeke became OkadaBooks's first employee at the end of 2014. He leads what he calls a proactive customer support team' who assist customers via phone, email, playstore and other channels. Okeke has studied computer science at Yaba College of Technology in Lagos, Nigeria, and is currently studying to become a product manager.

This article studies collections of inspirational poetry published on the Nigerian online platform and app, OkadaBooks. OkadaBooks lets users upload and access ebooks for free or at a low cost. Nigerian inspirational poetry can be seen as a hybrid poetic form that borrows from motivational speaking, self-help and religious pamphlet literature. The collections are marketed to readers as works of literature that through their literary qualities and poetic language can inspire the reader to create a better future for him- or herself. The main argument in the article is that the poetic and rhetorical devices that are used in this literature, which I propose to call the poetics of uplift, can be read as instrumental in the commodification of the text. The poets foreground the relevance and value of their texts through the different ways in which they promulgate a view of poetic language as having the power to change people's futures for the better. The article looks specifically at how poets use literary devices such as the use of the pronoun you' and the imperative grammatical mode to speak directly to the reader and further considers how these poems explicitly celebrate language and the very concept of poetry.

This chapter outlines the history of Animal Horror Cinema and highlights important periods and discursive developments within the genre. The chapter also discusses this type of cinema in relation to other kinds of horror films and observes that the focus on the relation between animality and humanity makes films like Jaws (1975), The Birds (1963) and Cujo (1983) different in theoretically significant ways from supernatural horror narratives and from ‘eco-horror’ films. Economic and technical restrictions often mean that animal horror films are not realist in a strict sense. The size of animals is often exaggerated and they are given human traits. Even so, human characters’ encounters with animals in animal horror cinema is more ‘real’ than the kind of encounters with the invisible, supernatural forces from beyond the realm of reality that have dominated the history of horror cinema.

The first academic study of the genre of animal horror cinema is essential for cinema and animal studies scholars as well as for fans of horror film. It defines this popular sub-genre, outlines its history and studies recent films as well as cult classics from a variety of perspectives. A central idea in the book is that animal horror cinema mirrors socially entrenched fears of and attitudes toward animals. Thus, animal horror cinema reveals attitudes toward the fabric of social life, the fragility of the eco-system and a deep uncertainty about what makes humans different from animals. The book contains chapters by scholars with different national and disciplinary backgrounds, and therefore offers a wide range of interpretations on the significance of the animal in modern horror film.

In his 1977 essay ‘Why Look at Animals?’ John Berger writes about the place of animals in the visual cultures of modernity and postmodernity. The actual animal has all but disappeared from human life in modernity, Berger points out. Numerous species that used to be close to us humans, including animals that are still bred for their meat and hide, have been Largely removed from the lives of the vast majority of the population of the Western world. Few people ever have to think about the animal that the meat they eat once was. The animals that people do encounter are usually not ‘wild’ animals who behave as such: pets are seen as family members and zoo animals are domesticated and some are trained to perform tricks. However, while we have all but rid the urban and suburban West of animals, we have filled the resulting void with signs that remind us of their absence — though the wild animals themselves are gone, images of animals that invade human culture proliferate. The visual aspect of human-animal relations, in other words, did not disappear with the animal, but has lived on in forms ranging from anthropomorphic renderings of animals in Beatrix Potter’s books and numerous Disney cartoons to displays of live animals at aquariums and zoos — and, of course, animal and nature films. Urban Western modernity thus seems almost to dissolve the animal ‘into pure spectral-ity’ (Burt, 2002, pp. 26–7). The animal in (post)modern visual culture is a ghostly presence that the actual wild animal leaves behind.