Kindred Spirits

Christopher N. Okonkwo is Associate Professor of English and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia and author of A Spirit of Dialogue: Incarnations of Ogbanje, the Born-to-Die, in African American Literature.

[Kindred Spirits] further gives credence to the elasticity of the sociohistorical relevance of literature, thereby espousing how Achebe and Morrison are spontaneously engaged in black history undeterred by their differences in cultural and gender consciousness. Both writers rendezvous at the African village in writing about the collective traumas--colonization and slavery--of African and Africa-descended people. By and large, Kindred Spirits--a book of literary criticism on two canonically exceptional black writers, markedly juiced with a blend of history and real-life experiences--cannot but be the (black) reader's choice through and through.-- "Research in African Literatures" Kindred Spirits is a timely and original, well-researched study of Chinua Achebe's and Toni Morrison's mutual admirations and influences. This is a welcome book in comparative literature and African diaspora studies that competently fills the 'Achebe gap' in Morrison and also the transatlantic gap in Achebe studies. --Chielozona Eze, Northeastern Illinois University, author of Justice and Human Rights in the African Imagination: We, Too, Are Humans