Author: Brendon Nicholls
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317087585
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
This is the first comprehensive book-length study of gender politics in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's fiction. Brendon Nicholls argues that mechanisms of gender subordination are strategically crucial to Ngugi's ideological project from his first novel to his most recent one. Nicholls describes the historical pressures that lead Ngugi to represent women as he does, and shows that the novels themselves are symptomatic of the cultural conditions that they address. Reading Ngugi's fiction in terms of its Gikuyu allusions and references, a gendered narrative of history emerges that creates transgressive spaces for women. Nicholls bases his discussion on moments during the Mau Mau rebellion when women's contributions to the anticolonial struggle could not be reduced to a patriarchal narrative of Kenyan history, and this interpretive maneuver permits a reading of Ngugi's fiction that accommodates female political and sexual agency. Nicholls contributes to postcolonial theory by proposing a methodology for reading cultural difference. This methodology critiques cultural practices like clitoridectomy in an ethical manner that seeks to avoid both cultural imperialism and cultural relativisim. His strategy of 'performative reading,' that is, making the conditions of one text (such as folklore, history, or translation) active in another (for example, fiction, literary narrative, or nationalism), makes possible an ethical reading of gender and of the conditions of reading in translation.
Author: Oliver Lovesey
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 1603291830
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 275
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Book Description
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is one of the most important and celebrated authors of postindependence Africa as well as a groundbreaking postcolonial theorist. His work, written first in English, then in Gikuyu, engages with the transformations of his native Kenya after what is often termed the Mau Mau rebellion. It also gives voice to the struggles of all Africans against economic injustice and political oppression. His writing and activism have continued despite imprisonment, the threat of assassination, and exile. Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," provides resources and background for the teaching of Ngũgĩ's novels, plays, memoirs, and criticism. The essays of part 2, "Approaches," consider the influence of Frantz Fanon, Karl Marx, and Joseph Conrad on Ngũgĩ; how the role of women in his fiction is inflected by feminism; his interpretation and political use of African history; his experimentation with orality and allegory in narrative; and the different challenges of teaching Ngũgĩ in classrooms in the United States, Europe, and Africa.
Author: Richard Begam
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199980969
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 345
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Book Description
Africa -- Asia -- The Caribbean -- Ireland -- Australia/New Zealand -- Canada
Author: Sheldon George
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350383481
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
In what innovative ways do novels by diasporic Black women writers experiment with the representation of Black subjectivity? This collection explores the inventiveness of contemporary Black women writers – Black British, African, Caribbean, African American – who remake traditional understandings of blackness. As the title word “experimental” signals, these essays foreground the narrative form and stylistic innovations of the black-authored novels they analyze. They also show how these experiments with form mirror the novels' convention-breaking experiments with reimagining Black female subjectivities. While each novel, of course, represents the complexities of diasporic experiences differently, some issues emerge that are broadly shared not just within a regional group, but across geographical borders. One feature of the collection is a comparative look at such linking themes across borders, under the rubrics: a return to precolonial systems of belief, reinventions of mothering, relational subjectivities, memory, history and haunting, and posthumanist revaluations. These themes take different shapes across the multitude of diverse cultures studied in this book. But together they establish a pan-global imaginative practice.
Author: Eren Bolat
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527581691
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 155
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Book Description
Until the lives and issues of African women arrived on the agenda of postcolonial writers, African women, who continued their lives under double colonization by patriarchy and dominant powers, did not have much standing in literary works and in the world of literature. Postcolonial African women have often been represented as weak, subaltern, and speechless by western writers, and have even been underrepresented by some postcolonial writers. This book shows how the African woman, who is usually represented in clichéd and stereotyped forms, is depicted a versatile way in Ngugi and Adichie’s novels.
Author: Dr. Amna Shamim
Publisher: Idea Publishing
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
The focus of this book is upon the changing perception of women in African society and their portrayal over different periods in the novels of Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o; the writers who intriguingly wrote on the constant changing role of African women in Igbo and Gikuyu clans. The book dicusses the image of African women entrapped in double jeopardy in both traditional and modern Africa. There has been a remarkable transformation in the representation of women from the early novels to the later novels of both the writers that has been studied in this book from close quarters. The approach and technique of the novelists in projecting their female characters has also been analyzed. The novels of both the writers marked a sea change in the thinking and perception of Westerners with reference to Africa and its people. This work is devoted to the exploration of the image of women in the East and West African societies through the selected novels of Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
Author: Brendon Nicholls
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754658252
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
This is the first comprehensive book-length study of gender politics in Ngugi wa Thiong's fiction. Brendon Nicholls argues that the mechanisms of gender subordination are strategically crucial to Ngugi's ideological project, but that his fiction also creates transgressive spaces for women.Nicholls proposes a strategy of 'performative reading' that offers an ethical basis for analyzing cultural difference and critiquing cultural practices, while avoiding both cultural imperialism and cultural relativism.
Author: Oliver Lovesey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317019652
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
Addressing a neglected dimension in postcolonial scholarship, Oliver Lovesey examines the figure of the postcolonial intellectual as repeatedly evoked by the fabled troika of Said, Spivak, and Bhabha and by members of the pan-African diaspora such as Cabral, Fanon, and James. Lovesey’s primary focus is Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, one of the greatest writers of post-independence Africa. Ngũgĩ continues to be a vibrant cultural agitator and innovator who, in contrast to many other public intellectuals, has participated directly in grassroots cultural renewal, enduring imprisonment and exile as a consequence of his engagement in political action. Lovesey’s comprehensive study concentrates on Ngũgĩ’s non-fictional prose writings, including his largely overlooked early journalism and his most recent autobiographical and theoretical work. He offers a postcolonial critique that acknowledges Ngũgĩ’s complex position as a virtual spokesperson for the oppressed and global conscience who now speaks from a location of privilege. Ngũgĩ’s writings, Lovesey shows, display a seemingly paradoxical consistency in their concerns over nearly five decades at the same time that there have been enormous transformations in his ideology and a shift in his focus from Africa’s holocaust to Africa’s renaissance. Lovesey argues that Ngũgĩ’s view of the intellectual has shifted from an alienated, nearly neocolonial stance to a position that allows him to celebrate intellectual activism and a return to the model of the oral vernacular intellectual even as he challenges other global intellectuals. Tracing the development of this notion of the postcolonial intellectual, Lovesey argues for Ngũgĩ’s rightful position as a major postcolonial theorist who helped establish postcolonial studies.
Author: Timothy Bewes
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400836492
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
In a postcolonial world, where structures of power, hierarchy, and domination operate on a global scale, writers face an ethical and aesthetic dilemma: How to write without contributing to the inscription of inequality? How to process the colonial past without reverting to a pathology of self-disgust? Can literature ever be free of the shame of the postcolonial epoch--ever be truly postcolonial? As disparities of power seem only to be increasing, such questions are more urgent than ever. In this book, Timothy Bewes argues that shame is a dominant temperament in twentieth-century literature, and the key to understanding the ethics and aesthetics of the contemporary world. Drawing on thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Theodor Adorno, and Gilles Deleuze, Bewes argues that in literature there is an "event" of shame that brings together these ethical and aesthetic tensions. Reading works by J. M. Coetzee, Joseph Conrad, Nadine Gordimer, V. S. Naipaul, Caryl Phillips, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Zoë Wicomb, Bewes presents a startling theory: the practices of postcolonial literature depend upon and repeat the same structures of thought and perception that made colonialism possible in the first place. As long as those structures remain in place, literature and critical thinking will remain steeped in shame. Offering a new mode of postcolonial reading, The Event of Postcolonial Shame demands a literature and a criticism that acknowledge their own ethical deficiency without seeking absolution from it.
Author: Laura Wright
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820335681
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
This study examines how postcolonial landscapes and environmental issues are represented in fiction. Wright creates a provocative discourse in which the fields of postcolonial theory and ecocriticism are brought together. Laura Wright explores the changes brought by colonialism and globalization as depicted in an array of international works of fiction in four thematically arranged chapters. She looks first at two traditional oral histories retold in modern novels, Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness (South Africa) and Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Petals of Blood (Kenya), that deal with the potentially devastating effects of development, particularly through deforestation and the replacement of native flora with European varieties. Wright then uses J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (South Africa), Yann Martel's Life of Pi (India and Canada), and Joy Williams's The Quick and the Dead (United States) to explore the use of animals as metaphors for subjugated groups of individuals. The third chapter deals with India's water crisis via Arundhati Roy's activism and her novel, The God of Small Things. Finally, Wright looks at three novels--Flora Nwapa's Efuru (Nigeria), Keri Hulme's The Bone People (New Zealand), and Sindiwe Magona's Mother to Mother (South Africa)--that depict women's relationships to the land from which they have been dispossessed. Throughout Wilderness into Civilized Shapes, Wright rearticulates questions about the role of the writer of fiction as environmental activist and spokesperson, the connections between animal ethics and environmental responsibility, and the potential perpetuation of a neocolonial framework founded on western commodification and resource-based imperialism.
