Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is a towering figure in African literature, and his novels A Grain of Wheat, Weep Not, Child, and Petals of Blood are modern classics. Emerging from a literary scene that flourished in the 1950s and '60s during the last years of colonialism in Africa, he is now known not just as a novelist--one who, in the late '70s, famously stopped writing novels in English and turned to the language he grew up speaking, Gĩkũyũ--but as a major postcolonial theorist.

In Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas, Ngũgĩ gives us a series of essays that build on the revolutionary ideas about language and its constructive role in national culture, history, and identity that he set out in his earlier work. In a book that is intricate, nuanced, and accessible, he reaffirms the power of African languages to fight back against both the psychic and material impacts of colonialism, past and present. Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas also explores these themes through chapters on some of Ngũgĩ's contemporaries, including Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka.

A book with immense relevance to our present moment, Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas works both as a wonderful introduction to the enduring themes of Ngũgĩ's work as well as a vital addition to the library of the world's greatest and most provocative living writers.

One of the leading writers and scholars at work today, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o was born in Limuru, Kenya, in 1938. He is the author of A Grain of Wheat; Weep Not, Child; and Petals of Blood, as well as Birth of a Dream Weaver, Wrestling with the Devil, Minutes of Glory, The Perfect Nine, and Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas (all from The New Press). Currently Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, Ngũgĩ is the recipient of twelve honorary doctorates, among other awards, and has been nominated for the Man Booker International Prize.