This compilation was inspired by an international symposium held on the Legon campus over three days in September 2003, hosted by the CODESRIA African Humanities institute Programme. Under the broad theme ‘Canonical Works and Continuing Innovation in African Arts & Humanities,’ speakers from all over the world were assembled in a dozen panels soaring one after another in a sustained celebration of cross-disciplinary reflection. We are often too overworked, too overstretched and under-resourced, to listen and respond to one another with any regularity across our disciplinary divides. In Consequence, our students altogether miss learning as first-hand witnesses to the ongoing analytic disputes and intellectual contests that are so essential to the productivity of any academic hive. This collection has been compiled as a possible antidote to our collective alienation. It is designed for random browsing, as if one were attending a fast-paced symposium of first rate, creative minds. We have reprinted classics that are decades –old, papers that have generated whole industries of discourse in their wake; because even the most distinguished scholars among us lack ready access to world-renowned publications outside their own fields. We have also included the work of relatively unknown theorists, specialists and literary activists in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda and elsewhere, whose contributions to cutting edge scholarship are condemned to solitary confinement, based as they are on the silenced side of the digital divide....