Culture, Society, and Politics in Modern African Literature

Culture, Society, and Politics in Modern African Literature PDF Author: Tanure Ojaide
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
A gap exists between African literary texts and their interpretation for many scholars and readers of African literature today. Unfamiliar with the cultures, societies, and politics of Africa, some readers bring a perspective to the work that is at odds with the worldview embodied by the works themselves. In Culture, Society, and Politics in Modern African Literature, Ojaide and Obi investigate the paradoxes and ironies of a literature produced in Africa and interpreted by readers and scholars (African and non-African) who are living outside the continent. Starting from the premise that literature is a cultural production of a people, they look at some of the factors important for the interpretation and analysis of African literature, including the colonial experience of Africans, the realities of the post-independence era, and the economic conditions of African states. This book, the collaborative work of a literary scholar-poet and a sociologist, addresses the general and specific problems in the understanding of African literature and will be of interest to students and scholars, as well as to general audiences. "In sum, the individual chapters cover a wide range within African literature, geographically and linguistically, with a special focus on current trends in creative production and criticism. The book is well written, with clear and concise explanations of critical terms and concepts." -- African Studies Review

Culture, Society, and Politics in Modern African Literature

Culture, Society, and Politics in Modern African Literature PDF Author: Tanure Ojaide
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Get Book Here

Book Description
A gap exists between African literary texts and their interpretation for many scholars and readers of African literature today. Unfamiliar with the cultures, societies, and politics of Africa, some readers bring a perspective to the work that is at odds with the worldview embodied by the works themselves. In Culture, Society, and Politics in Modern African Literature, Ojaide and Obi investigate the paradoxes and ironies of a literature produced in Africa and interpreted by readers and scholars (African and non-African) who are living outside the continent. Starting from the premise that literature is a cultural production of a people, they look at some of the factors important for the interpretation and analysis of African literature, including the colonial experience of Africans, the realities of the post-independence era, and the economic conditions of African states. This book, the collaborative work of a literary scholar-poet and a sociologist, addresses the general and specific problems in the understanding of African literature and will be of interest to students and scholars, as well as to general audiences. "In sum, the individual chapters cover a wide range within African literature, geographically and linguistically, with a special focus on current trends in creative production and criticism. The book is well written, with clear and concise explanations of critical terms and concepts." -- African Studies Review

Indigeneity, Globalization, and African Literature

Indigeneity, Globalization, and African Literature PDF Author: Tanure Ojaide
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137560037
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
Literature remains one of the few disciplines that reflect the experiences, sensibility, worldview, and living realities of its people. Contemporary African literature captures the African experience in history and politics in a multiplicity of ways. Politics itself has come to intersect and impact on most, if not all, aspects of the African reality. This relationship of literature with African people’s lives and condition forms the setting of this study. Tanure Ojaide’s Indigeneity, Globalization, and African Literature: Personally Speaking belongs with a well-established tradition of personal reflections on literature by African creative writer-critics. Ojaide’s contribution brings to the table the perspective of what is now recognized as a “second generation” writer, a poet, and a concerned citizen of Nigeria’s Niger Delta area.

Close to the Sources

Close to the Sources PDF Author: Abebe Zegeye
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1136659897
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
European and African works have found it difficult to move past the image of Africa as a place of exotica and relentless brutality. This book explores the status and critical relationship between politics, culture, literary creativity, criticism, education and publishing in the context of promoting Africa’s indigenous knowledge, and seeks to recover some of the sites where Africans continue to elaborate conflicting politics of self-affirmations. It both acknowledges and steps outside the protocols of analysis informed by nationalism, differentiating the forms that postcolonial theories have taken, and arguing for a selective appropriation of theory that emerges from Africa’s lived experiences.

African Literature and the Politics of Culture

African Literature and the Politics of Culture PDF Author: James Tar Tsaaior
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443853828
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This book essentially negotiates African literature as a veritable site of artistic and cultural production and situates it within the dynamic of postcolonial cultural politics. It critically evaluates African literature as a contour of cultural contestation with the imperial politics of knowledge production about others and as an ideological strategy for knowing them. The book’s main contribution to the critical discourse on African literature and culture inheres in the fact that politics constitutes the enduring concern of society as it re/shapes and over-determines discourses which have continued to remain crucial to societal engineering. It, however, imagines the discursive existence as necessary for the evolving of a dynamic African literary tradition with an abiding fidelity to the verities of history. The book is useful for literary scholars, historians, critics, experts and students of postcolonial/cultural studies as well as general readership interested in African studies.

The Culture of Politics in Modern Kenya

The Culture of Politics in Modern Kenya PDF Author: Angelique Haugerud
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521595902
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Once the major success story of a troubled continent,by the early 1990s Kenya came to be regarded as its fallen star. This book challenges such images of reversal and the analytical polarities which sustain them. The analysis ranges from telescopic to microscopic fields, and combining many disciplines and perspectives to give a rich and varied picture of the culture of politics in twentieth-century Kenya.'...a highly perceptive and interesting analysis, deconstruction is not too strong a term, of Kenya's politics....[A] well researched, documented and enlightening book' African Affairs

Writers and Social Thought in Africa

Writers and Social Thought in Africa PDF Author: Wale Adebanwi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317378628
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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Book Description
Social theory and social theorizing about Africa has largely ignored African literature. However, because writers are some of the continent’s finest social thinkers, they have produced – and continue to produce – works which constitute potential sources for the analysis of social thought, and for constructing social theory, in and beyond the continent. This comprehensive collection examines the relationship between African literature and African social thought. It explores the evolution and aesthetics of social thought in African fiction, and African writers’ conceptions of power and authority, legitimacy, history and modernity, gender and sexuality, culture, epistemology, globalization, and change and continuity in Africa. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies.

The Politics of Elite Culture

The Politics of Elite Culture PDF Author: Abner Cohen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520312023
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This title focuses on the dramatic process underlying the development of cultural mystique in the articulation of elite organization. The symbolic beliefs and practices involved act to reconcile, camouflage, or mystify a major contradiction in the development and functioning of elite groups, a contradiction between their universalistic functions and particularistic interests, between their duties to serve wider publics and their simultaneous endeavor to promote their own sectional power. Concentrating on the detailed, experimental study of one power elite within a modern small-scale nation-state--Sierra Leone--Cohen analyzes these processes. But his findings are systematically worked out within a general, cross-cultural comparative perspective, and he thereby further develops his earlier formulations about the instrumental functions of culture in politcal organization. Culture is analyzed in terms of symbolic forms, symbolic functions, and dramaturgical techniques. Politico-cultural causation is explored as it operates in chains of dramatic performances on different levels of social organization. Familiar, everyday symbolic events are taken out of their ordinary ideological sequences and, as Brecht would put it, thrown into crisis by showing their involvement in major power struggles. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1981.

Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender

Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender PDF Author: Florence Stratton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000158772
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
The influence of colonialism and race on the development of African literature has been the subject of a number of studies. The effect of patriarchy and gender, however, and indeed the contributions of African women, have up until now been largely ignored by the critics. Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender is the first extensive account of African literature from a feminist perspective. In this first radical and exciting work Florence Stratton outlines the features of an emerging female tradition in African fiction. A chapter is dedicated to each to the works of four women writers: Grace Ogot, Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta and Mariama Ba. In addition she provides challenging new readings of canonical male authors such as Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiongo'o and Wole Soyinka. Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender thus provides the first truly comprehensive definition of the current literary tradition in Africa.

Society, Women and Literature in Africa

Society, Women and Literature in Africa PDF Author: Orabueze, Florence Onyebuchi
Publisher: M & J Grand Orbit Communications
ISBN: 9785412792
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Society, Women and Literature in Africa explores the ideological, literary, political, cultural and ethical issues related to feminist writing. She discusses how contemporary African writers have tried to counteract men’s false assumptions about sex, love, society, fecundity and womanhood, and further details how African writers have responded to the demands of feminism. “Woman’s Cross Cultural Burden in the selected works of West African Female writers” explores the recurrent themes of motherhood, polygamy, abandonment and widowhood in the works of Nwapa, Emecheta, Alkali, Aidoo and Mariama Bâ. In “Prostitution: A Metaphor for the Degradation of Womanhood in Bode Osanyin’s the Noble Mistress”, the author approaches the subject of woman degradation in society from the perspectives of comprehensive research and an in-depth referencing. “Gendered Social Division of Labour in the African Novel” explores the theme of unfairness, of institutionalized differentiation in the African novel. It reveals the total emasculation of woman in patriarchy and her desire to be liberated from male-annexation. “The Prison World of Nigeria Woman: Female Reticence in Sefi Attah’s “Everything Good Will Come”, the author explores the dimensions of “gender silences”. She shows how woman’s voice has been stolen in patriarchy, thus rendering her a social and political mutant. “Womanhood as a Metaphor for Sexual Slavery in Nawal El Saddawi’s Woman at Point Zero” underscores that in patriarchy a woman is educated to make an object of herself for male pleasure. She is excluded from politics as a result of religion. “The Ugly Face of Ghana in the New Millennium: Alienation of Children in Amma Darko’s Faceless” is a stylistic study of the consequences of globalization in postindependent Ghana. In “The Theme of Dispossession in A.N Akwanya’s the Pilgrim Foot”, the author examines the myriad perspectives of dispossession and the dispossessor.

Ousmane Sembene and the Politics of Culture

Ousmane Sembene and the Politics of Culture PDF Author: Lifongo J. Vetinde
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739192558
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
Undoubtedly one of Africa’s most influential first generation of writers and filmmakers, Ousmane Sembene's creative works of fiction as well as his films have been the subject of a considerable number of scholarly articles. The schemas of reading applied to Sembene's oeuvre (novels, short stories and films) have, in the main, focused either on his militant posture against colonialism, his disenchantment with African leadership, or his infatuation with documenting the past in an attempt to present a balanced and nuanced view of African history. While these studies, unquestionably contribute to a better understanding of his works, they collectively ignore Sembene’s relentless preoccupation with culture in his entire career as a writer and filmmaker. The collection of essays in Sembene and the Politics of Culture sets out to fill that gap as the contributors at once foreground Sembene’s fixation on the centrality of culture in the articulation of the discourse of national consciousness and reevaluate his intellectual and artistic legacy within an overarching framework of African liberation. The contributors critically reassess the ideological underpinnings of Sembene’s thoughts, his role as one of the foundational pillars of African cultural production, and his relevance in current discourses of nationhood. They do so through a wide variety of interdisciplinary approaches that draw on linguistics, feminist theory, film theory, historiography, Marxist criticism, psychoanalysis and a host of other approaches that give novel insights in the critical analysis of the works under study. In the part entitled “Testimonies," a collection of conversations with people who worked closely with Sembene, each of the interlocutors provide illuminating insights into the man's life and work. The variety of themes and critical approaches in this critical anthology will certainly be of interest not only to students and scholars of African literature and cinema at various levels of intellectual and cultural sophistication but also anyone interested in the analysis of the nexus between power, culture, and the discourse of liberation.