Author: Chinua Achebe
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199761081
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 142
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Book Description
Chinua Achebe is Africa's most prominent writer, the author of Things Fall Apart, the best known--and best selling--novel ever to come out of Africa. His fiction and poetry burn with a passionate commitment to political justice, bringing to life not only Africa's troubled encounters with Europe but also the dark side of contemporary African political life. Now, in Home and Exile, Achebe reveals the man behind his powerful work. Here is an extended exploration of the European impact on African culture, viewed through the most vivid experience available to the author--his own life. It is an extended snapshot of a major writer's childhood, illuminating his roots as an artist. Achebe discusses his English education and the relationship between colonial writers and the European literary tradition. He argues that if colonial writers try to imitate and, indeed, go one better than the Empire, they run the danger of undervaluing their homeland and their own people. Achebe contends that to redress the inequities of global oppression, writers must focus on where they come from, insisting that their value systems are as legitimate as any other. Stories are a real source of power in the world, he concludes, and to imitate the literature of another culture is to give that power away. Home and Exile is a moving account of an exceptional life. Achebe reveals the inner workings of the human conscience through the predicament of Africa and his own intellectual life. It is a story of the triumph of mind, told in the words of one of this century's most gifted writers.
Author: Woods, Joanna
Publisher: Langaa RPCIG
ISBN: 9956792772
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
This book is about home. With Malawi as its focus, it seeks to understand ideas about home as expressed through poetry written by Malawians in English. Although African Literatures are studied those of Malawi have not received agreeable attention. This book surveys poetry by five Malawian writers – Felix Mnthali, Frank Chipasula, Jack Mapanje, Lupenga Mphande, and Steve Chimombo. The discussion negotiates scribed experience of exile, engendered by Dr. Banda’s regime, and shows that the selected poets effectively converse with a sense of home, reflecting on its transformations in their work. Interrogating the strict definitions of home, the argument highlights that far from home-less exiles in fact clarify the sense of what ‘home’ is. The manoeuvre is one of thinking towards an unboundaried ‘home’. This book will be of value not only to readers interested in the cultures of Africa but to all those with an interest in worldwide literary phenomena, and ideas therein of home and exile.
Author: Lewis Nkosi
Publisher: Longman Publishing Group
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 184
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Book Description
Author: Alex Nava
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271063300
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 394
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Book Description
In Wonder and Exile in the New World, Alex Nava explores the border regions between wonder and exile, particularly in relation to the New World. It traces the preoccupation with the concept of wonder in the history of the Americas, beginning with the first European encounters, goes on to investigate later representations in the Baroque age, and ultimately enters the twentieth century with the emergence of so-called magical realism. In telling the story of wonder in the New World, Nava gives special attention to the part it played in the history of violence and exile, either as a force that supported and reinforced the Conquest or as a voice of resistance and decolonization. Focusing on the work of New World explorers, writers, and poets—and their literary descendants—Nava finds that wonder and exile have been two of the most significant metaphors within Latin American cultural, literary, and religious representations. Beginning with the period of the Conquest, especially with Cabeza de Vaca and Las Casas, continuing through the Baroque with Cervantes and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and moving into the twentieth century with Alejo Carpentier and Miguel Ángel Asturias, Nava produces a historical study of Latin American narrative in which religious and theological perspectives figure prominently.
Author: Devika Chawla
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780739194928
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Notions of home are of increasing concern to persons who are interested in the unfolding narratives of inhabitation, displacement and dislocation, and exile. Home is viewed as a multidimensional theoretical concept that can have contradictory meanings; homes may be understood as spaces as well as places, and be associated with feelings, practices, and active states of being and moving in the world. In this book, we offer a window into the distinct ways that home is theorized and conceptualized across disciplines. The essays in this volume pose and answer the following critical and communicative questions about home: 1) How do people speak and story home in their everyday lives? And why? 2) Why and how is home as a material presence, as a sense and feeling, or as an absence central to our notion of who we are, or who we want to become as individuals, and in relation to others? 3) What is the theoretical purchase in making home as a unit of analysis in our fields of study? This collection engages home from diverse contexts and disparate philosophical underpinnings; at the same time the essays converse with each other by centering their foci on the relationship between home, place, identity, and exile. Home how we experience it and what it that says about the selves we come to occupy is an exigent question of our contemporary moment. Place, Identity, Exile: Storying Home Spaces delivers timely and critical perspectives on these important questions."
Author: Penny (ed.) Johnson
Publisher: Interlink Publishing
ISBN: 1623710413
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
How do Palestinians live, imagine and reflect on home and exile in this period of a stateless and transitory Palestine and a sharp escalation in Israeli state violence and accompanying Palestinian oppression? How can exile and home be written? In this volume of new writing, fifteen innovative and outstanding Palestinian writers—essayists, poets, novelists, critics, artists and memoirists—respond with their reflections, experiences, memories and polemics. Their contributions—poignant, humorous, intimate, reflective, intensely political—make for an offering that is remarkable for the candor and grace with which it explores the many individual and collective experiences of waiting, living for, and seeking Palestine. Contributors include: Lila Abu-Lughod, Susan Abulhawa, Suad Amiry, Rana Barakat, Mourid Barghouti, Beshara Doumani, Sharif S. Elmusa, Rema Hammami, Mischa Hiller, Emily Jacir, Penny Johnson, Fady Joudah, Jean Said Makdisi, Karma Nabulsi, Raeda Sa’adeh, Raja Shehadeh, Adania Shibli.
Author: Edward W. Said
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674003026
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 664
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Book Description
With their powerful blend of political and aesthetic concerns, Edward W. Said's writings have transformed the field of literary studies. This long-awaited collection of literary and cultural essays offers evidence of how much the fully engaged critical mind can contribute to the reservoir of value, thought, and action essential to our lives and culture.
Author: Wheatland Foundation
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822309871
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
In December 1987 a group of published novelists, poets, and journalists met in Vienna to participate in the Wheatland Conference on Literature. The writers presented papers addressing their common experience--that of being exiled. Each explored different facets of the condition of exile, providing answers to questions such as: What do exiled writers have in common? What is the exile's obligation to colleagues and readers in the country of origin? Is the effect of changing languages one of enrichment or impoverishment? How does the new society treat the emigre? Following each essay is a peer discussion of the topic addressed. The volume includes writers whose origins lie in Central Europe, South Africa, Israel, Cuba, Chile, Somalia, and Turkey. Through their testimony of the creative process in exile, we gain insight into the forces which affect the creative process as a whole. Contributors. William Gass, Yury Miloslavsky, Jan Vladislav, Jiri Grusa, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Horst Bienek, Edward Limonov, Nedim Gursel, Nuruddin Farah, Jaroslav Vejvoda, Anton Shammas, Joseph Brodsky, Wojciech Karpinski, Thomas Venclova, Yuri Druzhnikov
Author: Russell Jeung
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 0310527848
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
Russell Jeung's spiritual memoir shares the difficult, often joyful, and sometimes harrowing account of his life in East Oakland's Murder Dubs neighborhood and of his Chinese-Hakka history. On a journey to discover how the poor and exiled are blessed, At Home in Exile is the story of his integration of social activism and a stubborn evangelical faith. Holding English classes in his apartment (which doubled as a food pantry for a local church) for undocumented Latino neighbors and Cambodian refugees, battling drug dealers who threatened him, exorcising a spirit possessing a teen, and winning a landmark housing settlement against slumlords with a gathering of his neighbors—Jeung's story is, by turns, moving and inspiring, traumatic and exuberant. As Jeung retraces the steps of his Chinese-Hakka family and his refugee neighbors, weaving the two narratives together, he asks difficult questions about longing and belonging, wealth and poverty, and how living in exile can transform your faith: "Not only did relocation into the inner city press me toward God, but it made God's words more distinct and clear to me...As I read Scriptures through the eyes of those around me—refugees and aliens—God spoke loudly to me his words of hope and truth." With humor, humility, and keen insight, he describes the suffering and the sturdiness of those around him and of his family. He relates the stories of forced relocation and institutional discrimination, of violence and resistance, and of the persistence of Christ's love for the poor.
Author: Taiye Selasi
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0670919896
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
A stunning novel, spanning generations and continents, Ghana Must Go by rising star Taiye Selasi is a tale of family drama and forgiveness, for fans of Zadie Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. This is the story of a family -- of the simple, devastating ways in which families tear themselves apart, and of the incredible lengths to which a family will go to put itself back together. It is the story of one family, the Sais, whose good life crumbles in an evening; a Ghanaian father, Kweku Sai, who becomes a highly respected surgeon in the US only to be disillusioned by a grotesque injustice; his Nigerian wife, Fola, the beautiful homemaker abandoned in his wake; their eldest son, Olu, determined to reconstruct the life his father should have had; their twins, seductive Taiwo and acclaimed artist Kehinde, both brilliant but scarred and flailing; their youngest, Sadie, jealously in love with her celebrity best friend. All of them sent reeling on their disparate paths into the world. Until, one day, tragedy spins the Sais in a new direction. This is the story of a family: torn apart by lies, reunited by grief. A family absolved, ultimately, by that bitter but most tenuous bond: familial love. Ghana Must Go interweaves the stories of the Sais in a rich and moving drama of separation and reunion, spanning generations and cultures from West Africa to New England, London, New York and back again. It is a debut novel of blazing originality and startling power by a writer of extraordinary gifts. 'Ghana Must Go is both a fast moving story of one family's fortunes and an ecstatic exploration of the inner lives of its members. With her perfectly-pitched prose and flawless technique, Selasi does more than merely renew our sense of the African novel: she renews our sense of the novel, period. An astonishing debut' Teju Cole, author of Open City Taiye Selasi was born in London and raised in Massachusetts. She holds a B.A. in American Studies from Yale and an M.Phil. in International Relations from Oxford. "The Sex Lives of African Girls" (Granta, 2011), Selasi's fiction debut, appears in Best American Short Stories 2012. She lives in Rome.
