The field of African literary and cultural studies is undergoing significant transformations in tandem with changes in related academic disciplines and throughout the world at large. The theme of this volume at once encourages further exploration of issues that have long been central in scholarship on literature and orature while at the same time forging new ways of conceiving the relationship between African cultures of the past and present, and their ongoing reconfiguration in a range of diasporic communities that are continually reinventing themselves.