Women's Literature in Kenya and Uganda: The Trouble With Modernity

For nearly a decade, writers’ collectives such as Kwani Trust in Kenya and Femrite, the Ugandan women writers’ association, have dramatically reshaped the East African literary scene. Women’s Literature in Kenya and Uganda: The Trouble with Modernity extends the purview of postcolonial literary studies by providing the long overdue critical inquiry that these writers so urgently deserve. Marie Kruger demonstrates that the writers’ simultaneous interest in gender dynamics within local communities and in social exchanges between two neighboring East African nations allows for a unique examination of the relationship between modernity, gender, and the complex cultural and political networks of the region.

Marie Kruger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Iowa, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate classes on African and postcolonial literature and film. Her work has been published in US-American, German, and Kenyan literary journals, including Research in African Literatures, Postcolonial Text, Swahili Forum and The Nairobi Journal of Literature. She has also edited and co-authored several pedagogical publications for African language studies.