The Blind Men and the Elephant and Other Essays in Biographical Criticism

The Blind Men and the Elephant and Other Essays in Biographical Criticism PDF Author: Bernth Lindfors
Publisher: Africa Research and Publications
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description

The Blind Men and the Elephant and Other Essays in Biographical Criticism

The Blind Men and the Elephant and Other Essays in Biographical Criticism PDF Author: Bernth Lindfors
Publisher: Africa Research and Publications
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description


Critical Perspectives on Dennis Brutus

Critical Perspectives on Dennis Brutus PDF Author: Craig W. McLuckie
Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers
ISBN: 9780894107696
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Poet, activist, teacher, and scholar, Dennis Brutus is an influential figure in African literature. Exploring his life and writings, this volume looks at Brutus's childhood, university days, his arrest and imprisonment, and his eventual return to South Africa in 1991.

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

The Oxford History of the Novel in English PDF Author: Simon Gikandi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190610018
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 608

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Book Description
Why did the novel take such a long time to emerge in the colonial world? And, what cultural work did it come to perform in societies where subjects were not free and modes of social organization diverged from the European cultural centers where the novel gained its form and audience? Answering these questions and more, Volume 11, The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean since 1950 explores the institutions of cultural production that exerted influence in late colonialism, from missionary schools and metropolitan publishers to universities and small presses. How these structures provoke and respond to the literary trends and social peculiarities of Africa and the Caribbean impacts not only the writing and reading of novels in those regions, but also has a transformative effect on the novel as a global phenomenon. Together, the volume's 32 contributing experts tell a story about the close relationship between the novel and the project of decolonization, and explore the multiple ways in which novels enable readers to imagine communities beyond their own and thus made this form of literature a compelling catalyst for cultural transformation. The authors show that, even as the novel grows in Africa and the Caribbean as a mark of the elites' mastery of European form, it becomes the essential instrument for critiquing colonialism and for articulating the new horizons of cultural nationalism. Within this historical context, the volume examines works by authors such as Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, George Lamming, Jamaica Kincaid, V.S. Naipaul, Zoe Wicomb, J. M. Coetzee, and many others.

Drinking from the Cosmic Gourd

Drinking from the Cosmic Gourd PDF Author: Nyamnjoh, Francis B.
Publisher: Langaa RPCIG
ISBN: 9956764655
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
This book questions colonial and apartheid ideologies on being human and being African, ideologies that continue to shape how research is conceptualised, taught and practiced in universities across Africa. Africans immersed in popular traditions of meaning-making are denied the right, by those who police the borders of knowledge, to think and represent their realities in accordance with the civilisations and universes they know best. Often, the ways of life they cherish are labelled and dismissed too eagerly as traditional knowledge by some of the very African intellectual elite they look to for protection. The book makes a case for sidestepped traditions of knowledge. It draws attention to Africa’s possibilities, prospects and emergent capacities for being and becoming in tune with its creativity and imagination. It speaks to the nimble-footed flexible-minded “frontier African” at the crossroads and junctions of encounters, facilitating creative conversations and challenging regressive logics of exclusionary identities. The book uses Amos Tutuola’s stories to question dualistic assumptions about reality and scholarship, and to call for conviviality, interconnections and interdependence between competing knowledge traditions in Africa.

What the forest told me

What the forest told me PDF Author: Ayo Adeduntan
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 1920033432
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
Studies of Yoruba culture and performance tend to focus mainly on standardised forms of performance, and ignore the more prevalent performance culture which is central to everyday life. What the Forest Told Me conveys the elastic nature of African cultural expression through narratives of the Yoruba hunters' exploits. Hunters' narratives provide a window on the Yoruba understanding and explanation of their world; a cosmology that negates the anthropocentric view of creation. In a very literal sense, man, in this peculiar world, is an equal actor with animal and nature spirits with whom he constantly contests and negotiates space.

The Chinua Achebe Encyclopedia

The Chinua Achebe Encyclopedia PDF Author: M. Keith Booker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313052271
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
Several hundred A-Z entries cover Achebe's major works, important characters and settings, key concepts and issues, and more. Though best known as a novelist, Achebe is also a critic, activist, and spokesman for African culture. This reference is a comprehensive and authoritative guide to his life and writings. Included are several hundred alphabetically arranged entries. Some of these are substantive summary discussions of Achebe's major works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Entries are written by expert contributors and close with brief bibliographies. The volume also provides a general bibliography and chronology. Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe is widely regarded as the most important of the numerous African novelists who gained global attention in the second half of the 20th century. Achebe is certainly the African writer best known in the West, and his first novel, Things Fall Apart, is a founding text of postcolonial African literature and regarded as one of the central works of world literature of the last 50 years. Though best known as a novelist, Achebe is also a critic, activist, and spokesman for African culture. This reference is a comprehensive and authoritative guide to his life and writings. Included are several hundred alphabetically arranged entries. Some of these are substantive summary discussions of Achebe's major works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Other topics include all of his major fictional characters and settings, important concepts and issues central to his writings, historical persons, places, and events relevant to his works, and influential texts by other writers. Entries are written by expert contributors and close with brief bibliographies. The volume also provides a general bibliography and chronology.

How Strange the Change

How Strange the Change PDF Author: Marc Caplan
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804774765
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
This is a revolutionary work in the study of Yiddish literature and post-colonial theory, offering a new methodology for comparative research, a new definition of literary modernism, and an unprecedented juxtaposition of Jewish Studies with African literature.

Comparative Approaches to African Literatures

Comparative Approaches to African Literatures PDF Author: Bernth Lindfors
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789051836165
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Some of the essays in this book - notably those concerned with examining Western influences on sub-Saharan African writings (tracing Shakespearean and Brechtian echoes in Nigerian drama, for instance, or following the footprints of Sherlock Holmes in Swahili detective fiction) - fit the traditional definition of comparative literature. These are essays that cross national literary boundaries and sometimes transcend language barriers as well. They look for correspondences in related literary phenomena from widely dispersed areas of the globe, bringing together what is akin from what is akimbo. But most of the essays included here involve closer comparisons. Two focus on works produced in different languages within the same African nation (Yoruba and English in Nigeria, Afrikaans and English in South Africa), and one presents a taxonomy of dominant literary forms in English in three East African nations. Others concentrate on the oeuvre of a single author, and on the likely future output of exiled writers who soon will be returning home. One essay contrasts discursive tendencies within the same text, and another investigates conflicting African and Western religious beliefs. A great variety of comparative methodologies is deployed here; not all of these are transnational, multilingual or pluralistic in scope. The last two groups of essays deal with matters of characterization and authorial reputation. Studies of the depiction of African Americans, politicians and women in a wide range of African literary texts are followed by an assessment of the current standing of anglophone Africa's leading authors. In entering such highly contested terrain, the comparatist approach adopted has been that of the neutral witness to early African attempts - comparatist in their own way - to define an African canon of classic texts. Authors discussed include: Ama Ata Aidoo (Ghana); Chinua Achebe, John Pepper Clark, Cyprian Ekwensi, D.O. Fagunwa, Wole Soyinka and Amos Tutuola (Nigeria); Peter Abrahams, J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Alex La Guma, Thomas Mofolo, Es'kia Mphahlele and Karel Schoeman (South Africa).

Transgressing Frontiers

Transgressing Frontiers PDF Author: Ngong Toh
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 9956551937
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
The focus of this book is to assess, through language and literary studies in interpretation, the epistemic representation of frontiers in its shifting and fixing categories. The contributing researchers stress on the fact that crisscrossing has taken its toll on communities and disciplines and that hegemonic positions are becoming increasingly redundant and provocative. Frontier discourse is therefore, a socio-political and culturally oriented discourse. Importing it to language and literary studies also shows that literary circles like language are equally shifting and erasing borderlines. The chapters discuss crisscrossing of frontiers both as geography and epistemology. This is in line with the new cultural ontology that opens up new interpretations and shifts from previous ones in the disciplines of Language, Linguistics, Arts and Literature. The book pulls together a wide range of issues based on a plurality of theoretical assumptions. The issues presented are grouped into three broad sections. Section one looks at the creation of the self as a way to dismantle the other. In section two, the focus is on linguistic shifts and the fact that all languages need space in multilingual societies. And section three shows how people travel out of their homelands to seek comfort. Resourceful, insightful and incisive, the book offers depth and breadth in refined scholarship. The contributors are masterly in their handling of borderlines between ideology and iconoclasm, globalisation and nationalism, memory and nation, gender and identity, official and indigenous languages, self /other dialectics, migration and identity. The book is an invaluable asset to researchers and students with a penchant for interdisciplinarity, intertextuality, multiculturalism and globalisation.

Creating Postcolonial Literature

Creating Postcolonial Literature PDF Author: C. Davis
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113732838X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Using case studies, this book explores the publishing of African literature, addressing the construction of literary value, relationships between African writers and British publishers, and importance of the African market. It analyses the historical, political and economic conditions framing the emergence of postcolonial literature.