African Philology

Africa is no nonliterate continent, especially so if one includes its northern coastal area: more than two thousand years ago, methods of dealing with scripts - today called philology - were developed in Alexandria. Robert Stockhammer discusses contributions to an African Philology, including works by Herodotus, Augustine, Ken Saro-Wiwa and J.M. Coetzee: epics, novels, travelogues, historical, philosophical and rhetorical treatises. What becomes apparent is that Africa, beyond geographical determinations, is and has been the setting of globalisation processes which are transported as well as reflected by philological practices.

Stockhammer succeeds in exposing the differences and similarities of the continent’s textual world based on examples from antiquity to the present in such a way that a first answer to the question of what African philology actually is becomes possible. This is a question that remained unasked for a long time despite the fact that the continent’s importance has been growing for years. The relationship between globalisation and literature (in terms of multilingualism, cosmopolitanism and climate change), long since the author’s focal area of research, is only one of the many perspectives Stockhammer uses to examine the continent’s written creations.

»African Philology is distinguished, beyond its impressive scholarliness, by its very contemporary language.« Bert Rebhandl, der Freitag