In this volume, Ngugi wa Thiong'o summarizes and develops a cross-section of the issues he has grappled with in his work, which uses a combination of imagery, language, folklore, and character to "decolonize the mind." He also confronts the politics of language in African writing; the problem of linguistic imperialism and literature's ability to resist it; the difficult balance between orality, or "orature," and writing, or "literature"; the tension between national and world literature; and the role of the literary curriculum in both reaffirming and undermining the dominance of the Western canon. Throughout, he engages a range of philosophers and theorists writing on power and postcolonial creativity, including Hegel, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and Aime Cesaire. Yet his explorations remain grounded in his own experiences with literature (and orature) and rework the difficult dialectics of theory into richly evocative prose.