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Author: Cecile Bishop
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351553569
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 195
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Book Description
The figure of the dictator looms large in representations of postcolonial Africa. Since the late 1970s, writers, film-makers and theorists have sought to represent the realities of dictatorship without endorsing the colonialist cliches portraying Africans as incapable of self-government. Against the heavily-politicized responses provoked by this dilemma, Bishop argues for a form of criticism that places the complexity of the reader's or spectator's experiences at the heart of its investigations. Ranging across literature, film and political theory, this study calls for a reengagement with notions - often seen as unwelcome diversions from political questions - such as referentiality, genre and aesthetics. But rather than pit 'political' approaches against formal and aesthetic procedures, the author presents new insights into the interplay of the political and the aesthetic. Cecile Bishop is a Junior Research Fellow in French at Somerville College, Oxford.
Author: Cecile Bishop
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351553569
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 195
Get Book Here
Book Description
The figure of the dictator looms large in representations of postcolonial Africa. Since the late 1970s, writers, film-makers and theorists have sought to represent the realities of dictatorship without endorsing the colonialist cliches portraying Africans as incapable of self-government. Against the heavily-politicized responses provoked by this dilemma, Bishop argues for a form of criticism that places the complexity of the reader's or spectator's experiences at the heart of its investigations. Ranging across literature, film and political theory, this study calls for a reengagement with notions - often seen as unwelcome diversions from political questions - such as referentiality, genre and aesthetics. But rather than pit 'political' approaches against formal and aesthetic procedures, the author presents new insights into the interplay of the political and the aesthetic. Cecile Bishop is a Junior Research Fellow in French at Somerville College, Oxford.
Author: Cécile Bishop
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781351553551
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The figure of the dictator looms large in representations of postcolonial Africa. Since the late 1970s, writers, film-makers and theorists have sought to represent the realities of dictatorship without endorsing the colonialist cliches portraying Africans as incapable of self-government. Against the heavily-politicized responses provoked by this dilemma, Bishop argues for a form of criticism that places the complexity of the reader's or spectator's experiences at the heart of its investigations. Ranging across literature, film and political theory, this study calls for a reengagement with notions - often seen as unwelcome diversions from political questions - such as referentiality, genre and aesthetics. But rather than pit 'political' approaches against formal and aesthetic procedures, the author presents new insights into the interplay of the political and the aesthetic. Cecile Bishop is a Junior Research Fellow in French at Somerville College, Oxford.
Author: Robert Spencer
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030665569
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 283
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Book Description
This book examines the representation of dictators and dictatorships in African fiction. It examines how the texts clarify the origins of postcolonial dictatorships and explore the shape of the democratic-egalitarian alternatives. The first chapter explains the ‘neoliberal’ period after the 1970s as an effective ‘recolonization’ of Africa by Western states and international financial institutions. Dictatorship is theorised as a form of concentrated economic and political power that facilitates Africa’s continued dependency in the context of world capitalism. The deepest aspiration of anti-colonial revolution remains the democratization of these authoritarian states inherited from the colonial period. This book discusses four novels by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Ahmadou Kourouma, Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in order to reveal how their themes and forms dramatize this unfinished struggle between dictatorship and radical democracy.
Author: Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 081014042X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Where there are dictators, there are novels about dictators. But “dictator novels” do not simply respond to the reality of dictatorship. As this genre has developed and cohered, it has acquired a self-generating force distinct from its historical referents. The dictator novel has become a space in which writers consider the difficulties of national consolidation, explore the role of external and global forces in sustaining dictatorship, and even interrogate the political functions of writing itself. Literary representations of the dictator, therefore, provide ground for a self-conscious and self-critical theorization of the relationship between writing and politics itself. The Dictator Novel positions novels about dictators as a vital genre in the literatures of the Global South. Primarily identified with Latin America, the dictator novel also has underacknowledged importance in the postcolonial literatures of francophone and anglophone Africa. Although scholars have noted similarities, this book is the first extensive comparative analysis of these traditions; it includes discussions of authors including Gabriel García Márquez, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Alejo Carpentier, Augusto Roa Bastos, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, José Mármol, Esteban Echeverría, Ousmane Sembène , Chinua Achebe, Aminata Sow Fall, Henri Lopès, Sony Labou Tansi, and Ahmadou Kourouma. This juxtaposition illuminates the internal dynamics of the dictator novel as a literary genre. In so doing, Armillas-Tiseyra puts forward a comparative model relevant to scholars working across the Global South.
Author: Jini Kim Watson
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823294846
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
Honorable Mention, 2022 René Wellek Prize How did the Cold War shape culture and political power in decolonizing countries and give rise to authoritarian regimes in the so-called free world? Cold War Reckonings tells a new story about the Cold War and the global shift from colonialism to independent nation-states. Assembling a body of transpacific cultural works that speak to this historical conjuncture, Jini Kim Watson reveals autocracy to be not a deficient form of liberal democracy, but rather the result of Cold War entanglements with decolonization. Focusing on East and Southeast Asia, the book scrutinizes cultural texts ranging from dissident poetry, fiction, and writers’ conference proceedings of the Cold War period, to more recent literature, graphic novels, and films that retrospectively look back to these decades with a critical eye. Paying particular attention to anti-communist repression and state infrastructures of violence, the book provides a richaccount of several U.S.–allied Cold War regimes in the Asia Pacific, including the South Korean military dictatorship, Marcos’ rule in the Philippines, illiberal Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, and Suharto’s Indonesia. Watson’s book argues that the cultural forms and narrative techniques that emerged from the Cold War-decolonizing matrix offer new ways of comprehending these histories and connecting them to our present. The book advances our understanding of the global reverberations of the Cold War and its enduring influence on cultural and political formations in the Asia Pacific. Cold War Reckonings is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.
Author: J. Roger Kurtz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315467518
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
This book fills a gap in the field of contemporary trauma studies by interrogating the relevance of trauma for African literatures. Kurtz argues that a thoughtful application of trauma theory in relation to African literatures is in fact a productive exercise, and furthermore that the benefits of this exercise include not only what it can do for African literature, but also what it can do for trauma studies. He makes the case for understanding trauma healing within the larger project of peacebuilding, with an emphasis on the transformative potential of what he terms the African moral imagination as embodied in the creative work of its writers. He offers readings of selected works by Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chimamanda Adichie, and Nuruddin Farah as case studies for how African literature can influence our understanding of trauma and trauma healing. This will be a valuable volume for those with interests in current trends and developments in trauma studies, African literary studies, postcolonial studies, and memory studies.
Author: David Attwell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429513755
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature provides a new and wide-ranging appraisal of shame in colonial and postcolonial literature in English. Bringing together young and established voices in postcolonial studies, these essays tackle shame and racism, shame and agency, shame and ethical recognition, the problem of shamelessness, the shame of willed forgetfulness. Linked by a common thread of reflections on shame and literary writing, the essays consider specifically whether the aesthetic and ethical capacities of literature enable a measure of stability or recuperation in the presence of shame’s destructive potential. The obscenity of the in-human, both in the colonial setting and in aftermaths that show little sign of abating, entails the acute significance of shame as a subject for continuing and urgent critical attention.
Author: James S. Williams
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350105066
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 439
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Book Description
Since the beginnings of African cinema, the realm of beauty on screen has been treated with suspicion by directors and critics alike. James S. Williams explores an exciting new generation of African directors, including Abderrahmane Sissako, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Fanta Régina Nacro, Alain Gomis, Newton I. Aduaka, Jean-Pierre Bekolo and Mati Diop, who have begun to reassess and embrace the concept of cinematic beauty by not reducing it to ideological critique or the old ideals of pan-Africanism. Locating the aesthetic within a range of critical fields - the rupturing of narrative spectacle and violence by montage, the archives of the everyday in the 'afropolis', the plurivocal mysteries of sound and language, male intimacy and desire, the borderzones of migration and transcultural drift - this study reveals the possibility for new, non-conceptual kinds of beauty in African cinema: abstract, material, migrant, erotic, convulsive, queer. Through close readings of key works such as Life on Earth (1998), The Night of Truth (2004), Bamako (2006), Daratt (Dry Season) (2006), A Screaming Man (2010), Tey (Today) (2012), The Pirogue (2012), Mille soleils (2013) and Timbuktu (2014), Williams argues that contemporary African filmmakers are proposing propitious, ethical forms of relationality and intersubjectivity. These stimulate new modes of cultural resistance and transformation that serve to redefine the transnational and the cosmopolitan as well as the very notion of the political in postcolonial art cinema.
Author: Yasser Elhariry
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 178694040X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 303
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Book Description
This volume is about what happens to the contemporary French lyric in the translingual Arabic context. Drawing on lyric theory, comparative poetics, and linguistics, it reveals three generic modes of translating Arabic poetics into French in works by Habib Tengour (Algeria), Edmond Jabès (Egypt), Salah Stétié (Lebanon), Abdelwahab Meddeb (Tunisia), and Ryoko Sekiguchi (Japan).
Author: Alexandra Reza
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198896336
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
Anticolonial Form: Literary Journals at the End of Empire addresses the relationship between culture and politics in two journals published in Europe by African writers: Présence Africaine, launched in Paris in 1947, and Mensagem, published between 1948 and 1964 in Lisbon. Grounded in extensive archival work, the book argues for a comparative and transnational approach to postcolonial literary studies, for the significance of the literary journal as a key form in the development of African writing in French, Portuguese, and English, and for a historically and geographically contingent understanding of the relationships between literature, culture, and politics. This book takes up the idea of articulation (drawn from the cultural theorist Stuart Hall) to bring forward the contingent and fugitive connections that networks of literary journals fostered between francophone, anglophone, and lusophone writers in the conjuncture of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s. It argues that comparison as a praxis and a method was central to the anticolonial charge of those journals, on whose pages we see an iterative back and forth between writing from and about different parts of the colonial world, a recursive effort to establish how ideas and analyses developed in one part of the colonial world could travel, and be adopted and adapted in others. Reza figures this back and forth between sameness and difference as a comparative practice and argues that different journals formalized this comparative thrust through the techniques of juxtaposition and translation. This anticolonial comparative sensibility, enabled by the journal form, produced a powerful analytic for understanding different European colonialisms together, not in mononational, monoimperialist terms as disaggregated and radically separate, but as connected in material and ideological terms. Many scholars have argued convincingly that the institutionalised practice of comparison in the academic field of comparative literature is itself imbricated with histories of colonialism. Reza's argument, which is richly historicized and substantiated with extensive archival work, takes on a particular significance in the context of that critique as the anticolonial comparison she focuses on offers a different tradition of relational praxis from which to think about connection and comparison itself.
