Politics and the Urban Experience in Postcolonial West African Literature

Politics and the Urban Experience in Postcolonial West African Literature PDF Author: Gbemisola Adeoti
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781910609194
Category : City dwellers in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Politics and the Urban Experience in Postcolonial West African Literature

Politics and the Urban Experience in Postcolonial West African Literature PDF Author: Gbemisola Adeoti
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781910609194
Category : City dwellers in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Wole Soyinka

Wole Soyinka PDF Author: Biodun Jeyifo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139439081
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Biodun Jeyifo examines the connections between the innovative and influential writings of Wole Soyinka and his radical political activism. Jeyifo carries out detailed analyses of Soyinka's most ambitious works, relating them to the controversies generated by Soyinka's use of literature and theatre for radical political purposes. He gives a fascinating account of the profound but paradoxical affinities and misgivings Soyinka has felt about the significance of the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century. Jeyifo also explores Soyinka's works with regard to the impact on his artistic sensibilities of the pervasiveness of representational ambiguity and linguistic exuberance in Yoruba culture. The analyses and evaluations of this study are presented in the context of Soyinka's sustained engagement with the violence of collective experience in post-independence, postcolonial Africa and the developing world. No existing study of Soyinka's works and career has attempted such a systematic investigation of their complex relationship to politics.

Postcolonial Imagination and Moral Representations in African Literature and Culture

Postcolonial Imagination and Moral Representations in African Literature and Culture PDF Author: Chielozona Eze
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739145061
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
The postcolonial African culture, as it is discoursed in the academia, is largely influenced by Africa's response to colonialism. To the degree that it is a response, it is to considerably reactive, and lacks forceful moral incentives for social critical consciousness and nation-building. Quite on the contrary, it allows especially African political leaders to luxuriate in the delusions of moral rectitude, imploring, at will, the evil of imperialism as a buffer to their disregard of their people. This book acknowledges the social and psychological devastations of colonialism on the African world. It, however, argues that the totality of African intellectual response to colonialism and Western imperialism is equally, if not more, damaging to the African world. In what ways does the average African leader, indeed, the average African, judge and respond to his world? How does he conceive of his responsibility towards his community and society? The most obvious impact of African response to colonialism is the implicit search for a pristine, innocent paradigm in, for instance, literary, philosophical, social, political and gender studies. This search has its own moral implication in the sense that it makes the taking of responsibility on individual and social level highly difficult. Focusing on the moral impact of responses to colonialism in Africa and the African Diaspora, this book analyzes the various manifestations of delusions of moral innocence that has held the African leadership from the onerous task of bearing responsibility for their countries; it argues that one of the ways to recast the African leaders' responsibility towards Africa is to let go, on the one hand, the gaze of the West, and on the other, of the search for the innocent African experience and cultures. Relying on the insights of thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Wole Soyinka, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Achille Mbembe and Wolgang Welsch, this book suggests new approaches to interpreting African experiences. It discusses select African works of fiction as a paradigm for new interpretations of African experiences.

Postcolonial Identities and West African Literature

Postcolonial Identities and West African Literature PDF Author: Anwesha Das
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527591492
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 108

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Book Description
Anchored in postcolonial theory, this book highlights the concept of “postcolonial soliloquies” as an original idea in analyzing West African literature. It uses the political theory of “dialogue” to broaden the reader’s understanding of history, culture, identity and indigenous memories. The book shows how the novels of T. Obinkaram Echewa plunge into the known territory of colonial history with new boundaries.

Decolonising the Mind

Decolonising the Mind PDF Author: Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 0852555016
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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Book Description
Ngugi wrote his first novels and plays in English but was determined, even before his detention without trial in 1978, to move to writing in Gikuyu.

Citizen and Subject

Citizen and Subject PDF Author: Mahmood Mamdani
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691180423
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
In analyzing the obstacles to democratization in post- independence Africa, Mahmood Mamdani offers a bold, insightful account of colonialism's legacy--a bifurcated power that mediated racial domination through tribally organized local authorities, reproducing racial identity in citizens and ethnic identity in subjects. Many writers have understood colonial rule as either "direct" (French) or "indirect" (British), with a third variant--apartheid--as exceptional. This benign terminology, Mamdani shows, masks the fact that these were actually variants of a despotism. While direct rule denied rights to subjects on racial grounds, indirect rule incorporated them into a "customary" mode of rule, with state-appointed Native Authorities defining custom. By tapping authoritarian possibilities in culture, and by giving culture an authoritarian bent, indirect rule (decentralized despotism) set the pace for Africa; the French followed suit by changing from direct to indirect administration, while apartheid emerged relatively later. Apartheid, Mamdani shows, was actually the generic form of the colonial state in Africa. Through case studies of rural (Uganda) and urban (South Africa) resistance movements, we learn how these institutional features fragment resistance and how states tend to play off reform in one sector against repression in the other. The result is a groundbreaking reassessment of colonial rule in Africa and its enduring aftereffects. Reforming a power that institutionally enforces tension between town and country, and between ethnicities, is the key challenge for anyone interested in democratic reform in Africa.

Exploitation and Misrule in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa

Exploitation and Misrule in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa PDF Author: Kenneth Kalu
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319964968
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
This book offers new perspectives on the history of exploitation in Africa by examining postcolonial misrule as a product of colonial exploitation. Political independence has not produced inclusive institutions, economic growth, or social stability for most Africans—it has merely transferred the benefits of exploitation from colonial Europe to a tiny African elite. Contributors investigate representations of colonial and postcolonial exploitation in literature and rhetoric, covering works from African writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Kwame Nkrumah, and Bessie Head. It then moves to case studies, drawing lines between colonial subjugation and present-day challenges through essays on Mobutu’s Zaire, Nigerian politics, the Italian colonial fascist system, and more. Together, these essays look towards how African states may transform their institutions and rupture lingering colonial legacies.

Post Colonial Identities

Post Colonial Identities PDF Author: Chin Ce
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 9783603736
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Post Colonial Identities revisits issues regarding the newer literature within the expansive African heritage of diverse regional and national groupings. It is poised at substantiating the uniformity of Africa in terms of literary and cultural movements, and lending some inter-disciplinary insights on the whole body of literature through twentieth century history.

South African Writing in Transition

South African Writing in Transition PDF Author: Rita Barnard
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350086894
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Bringing together leading and emerging scholars, this book asks the question: how has contemporary South African literature grappled with ideas of time and history during the political transition away from apartheid? Reading the work of major South African writers such as J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and Ivan Vladislavic as well as contemporary crime fiction, South African Writing in Transition explores how concerns about time and temporality have shaped literary form across the country's literary culture. Establishing new connections between leading literary voices and lesser known works, the book explores themes of truth and reconciliation, disappointment and betrayal.

Re-Inventing the Postcolonial (in the) Metropolis

Re-Inventing the Postcolonial (in the) Metropolis PDF Author: Cecile Sandten
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004328769
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 462

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Book Description
The volume Re-Inventing the Postcolonial (in the) Metropolis offers a wide-ranging collection of interdisciplinary essays by international scholars that address the postcolonial urban imaginary across five continents.