African Literature And The Future

Author : Adeoti, Gbemisola
Publisher : CODESRIA
Page : 112 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2015-12-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9782869786332

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African Literature and the Future by Adeoti, Gbemisola Pdf

Many African countries achieved independence from their colonisers over five decades ago, but the people and the continent largely remain mere spectators in the arena of their own dance. The post-independence states are supposed to be sovereign, but the levers of economic and political powers still reside in the donor states. Not in many fora is the complex reality that defines Africa more trenchantly articulated than in imaginative literature produced about and on the continent. This is the crux of the essays collected in African Literature and the Future. The book reflects on Africa's past and present, addressing anxieties about the future through the epistemological lens of literature. The contributors peep ahead from a backward glance. They dissect the trend and tenor of politics and their impact on the socio-cultural and economic development of the continent as portrayed in imaginative writings over the years. One salient feature of African literature is the close affinity between art and politics in its polemics. This is well established in all the six essays in the book as the authors stress the interconnections between literature and society in their textual analyses. On the whole, there is an overwhelming feeling of angst and pessimism, but the authors perceive a glimmer of hope despite daunting odds, under different conditions. Thus, they depict the plausible fate of Africa in the twenty-first century, as informed by its ancient and recent past, gleaned from primary texts.

Author : Gbemisola Adeoti
Publisher : African Books Collective
Page : 114 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2015-12-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9782869786721

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African Literature and the Future by Gbemisola Adeoti Pdf

Many African countries achieved independence from their colonisers over five decades ago, but the people and the continent largely remain mere spectators in the arena of their own dance. The post-independence states are supposed to be sovereign, but the levers of economic and political powers still reside in the donor states. Not in many fora is the complex reality that defines Africa more trenchantly articulated than in imaginative literature produced about and on the continent. This is the crux of the essays collected in African Literature and the Future. The book reflects on Africas past and present, addressing anxieties about the future through the epistemological lens of literature. The contributors peep ahead from a backward glance. They dissect the trend and tenor of politics and their impact on the socio-cultural and economic development of the continent as portrayed in imaginative writings over the years. One salient feature of African literature is the close affinity between art and politics in its polemics. This is well established in all the six essays in the book as the authors stress the interconnections between literature and society in their textual analyses. On the whole, there is an overwhelming feeling of angst and pessimism, but the authors perceive a glimmer of hope despite daunting odds, under different conditions. Thus, they depict the plausible fate of Africa in the twenty-first century, as informed by its ancient and recent past, gleaned from primary texts.

Author : Handel Kashope Wright
Publisher : Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2004
Category : Education
ISBN : UOM:39015058235907

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A Prescience of African Cultural Studies by Handel Kashope Wright Pdf

In A Prescience of African Cultural Studies, Handel Kashope Wright makes an argument for undertaking a necessary paradigm shift: from literature studies in Africa to African Cultural Studies. There are several major themes in this text; in particular, it rejects mainstream notions of literature as (self)deceptively «apolitical» and decidedly non-utilitarian. As an alternative, Wright proposes African Cultural Studies as an African-centered discourse and praxis that incorporates written, oral, and performance forms, and overtly addresses political and sociocultural issues. He articulates African Cultural Studies in relation to existing cultural studies, its taken for granted British origin and genealogy, and its global trajectories. Finally, Wright elaborates on African Cultural Studies by reconceptualizing drama (emphasizing performance over written text), incorporating film and electronic media and exploring the potential contribution African cultural studies could make to both the discourse and process of development in Africa.

Author : Handel Kashope Wright
Publisher : National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 1995
Category : Africa
ISBN : 0612118924

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The Future of Literature in Africa is Not what it was by Handel Kashope Wright Pdf

Author : Gomia, Victor N.,Ndi, Gilbert Shang
Publisher : Spears Media Press
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2018-02-20
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781942876182

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Re-writing Pasts, Imagining Futures by Gomia, Victor N.,Ndi, Gilbert Shang Pdf

The papers in this volume focus on fiction and theatre in their traditional forms as well as in their encounters with novel and innovative forms and avenues of dissemination. As a cultural practice that emerged from a process of protest and contestation of hegemony, it is understandable that one main concern in African literature and literary criticism is the resistance against the emergence of marginalizing centers in formerly or currently marginalized societies with regard to discourses, aesthetics and media of creation. These new centers that sometimes undermine the strategic/tactical exploitation of the relative advantage procured by each medium run the risk of leading to new forms of stratification that mitigate the import of African and African diasporic literatures. The collection of essays therefore seeks to analyze the representation of pertinent socio-political and historical questions in a variety of postcolonial texts from Africa and the African diasporas, notably the Caribbean islands and the United States of America. However, far from re-writing of history in a way that cedes to conservative worldviews, creative writers and critics simultaneously attempt to chart ways forward for socially all-inclusive futures. In the context of colonial and neo-colonial legacies that seem to forestall any sense of individual and collective self-fulfillment, contributors to this volume examine the pertinence of African fiction and theatre in imagining new vistas of re-conceptualizing the postcolonial condition in ways that re-galvanize the belief in an enabling future.

Author : Ashleigh Harris
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 329 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2019-08-09
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781000227956

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Afropolitanism and the Novel by Ashleigh Harris Pdf

The place of the novel as a literary form in Africa is contested. Its colonial origins and its unaffordability for most Africans make it a bad fit for the continent, yet it was also central to the creation of most postcolonial African national literary canons. These bipolar traditions remain unresolved in recent debates about Afropolitanism and the novel in Africa today. This book extends this debate, arguing that Africa’s ‘de-realization’ in global representation and the global economy is reflected in the African novel becoming dominated by Afropolitan, rather than African, aesthetics, styles, and forms. Drawing on close readings of a variety of major African novels of the 2000s, the volume traces the tensions between the novel’s complicity with and resistance to such de-realization. The book argues that current trends and experiments in African non-realist genres, such as science fiction, magical and animist realism, Afro-futurism, and speculative environmentalism, are the result of a preoccupation with such de-realization. The volume is a significant exploration into literary form and its social, philosophical, political, and economic underpinnings. It will be a must-read for scholars, students, and researchers of African literature, politics, philosophy, and culture studies.

Author : Susan Arndt,Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 271 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2020-06-29
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780429657306

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Narrating African FutureS by Susan Arndt,Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard Pdf

This volume is dedicated to fictional negotiations of future, or rather futureS. After all, ‘future’ cannot but exist in a multitude of complementary and/or competing futures, all causally related to each other just as much as to their pasts and their respective memories. Within this cyclical and causal triad of past, present and future, futureS have been made and unmade, remembered and forgotten, affirmed and subverted in the multiversity of competing agencies, interests, and accesses to power and privileges. Thus framed, African and African diasporic futureS have been done, undone and redone over the centuries, affecting and affected by planetary actions as ruled by global power constellations, whilst being contemplated and moulded by fictional in(ter)ventions in the process. Literature and other cultural means of expression such as film, fine arts, performing arts and the internet are at the centre of this volume. Employing FutureS as a critical category of analysis, the book comprises perspectives from Europe, Africa and the Middle East, from academics, activists and artists. They all share their perspectives on African and African-diasporic visions of futureS, with an emphasis on dreaming and memory, environmentalism and ethics, freedom and resistance. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of the African Literature Association.

Author : Tanure Ojaide
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 136 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2017-07-06
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781351711180

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Literature and Culture in Global Africa by Tanure Ojaide Pdf

Engaging and interrogating the idea of a ‘Global Africa’, this book examines how African literary and cultural productions have changed over the years due to the social and political influences brought about by increased globalisation. Tanure Ojaide takes a variety of European theoretical concepts and applies these to African literature, oral traditions, culture, sexuality, political leadership, environmentalism, and advocacy, demonstrating the universality of the African experience. Challenging African literary artists and scholars to think creatively about the future of the culture and literature, this new collection of literary and cultural criticism from scholar-writer Tanure Ojaide is an essential read for students and scholars of African literature and culture.

Author : Anonim
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 347 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2021-10-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9789004488809

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Towards a Transcultural Future: Literature and Human Rights in a ‘Post’-Colonial World by Anonim Pdf

Studying postcolonial literatures in English can (and indeed should) make a human rights activist of the reader – there is, after all, any amount of evidence to show the injustices and inhumanity thrown up by processes of decolonization and the struggle with past legacies and present corruptions. Yet the human-rights aspect of postcolonial literary studies has been somewhat marginalized by scholars preoccupied with more fashionable questions of theory. The present collection seeks to redress this neglect, whereby the definition of human rights adopted is intentionally broad. The volume reflects the human rights situation in many countries from Mauritius to New Zealand, from the Cameroon to Canada. It includes a focus on the Malawian writer Jack Mapanje. The contributors’ concerns embrace topics as varied as denotified tribes in India, female genital mutilation in Africa, native residential schools in Canada, political violence in Northern Ireland, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the discourse of the Treaty of Waitangi. The editors hope that the very variety of responses to the invitation to reflect on questions of “Literature and Human Rights” will both stimulate further discussion and prompt action. Contributors are: Edward O. Ako, Hilarious N. Ambe, Ken Arvidson, Jogamaya Bayer, Maggie Ann Bowers, Chandra Chatterjee, Lindsey Collen, G.N. Devy, James Gibbs, J.U. Jacobs, Karen King–Aribisala, Sindiwe Magona, Lee Maracle, Stuart Marlow, Don Mattera, Wumi Raji. Lesego Rampolokeng, Dieter Riemenschneider, Ahmed Saleh, Jamie S. Scott, Mark Shackleton, Johannes A. Smit, Peter O. Stummer, Robert Sullivan, Rajiva Wijesinha, Chantal Zabus

Author : Dike Okoro
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2021-12-31
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781000477344

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Futurism and the African Imagination by Dike Okoro Pdf

This book investigates how African authors and artists have explored themes of the future and technology within their works. Afrofuturism was coined in the 1990s as a means of exploring the intersection of African diaspora culture with technology, science and science fiction. However, this book argues that literature and other arts within Africa have always reflected on themes of futurism, across diverse forms of speculative writing (including science fiction), images, spirituality, myth, magical realism, the supernatural, performance and other forms of oral resources. This book reflects on themes of African futurism across a range of literary and artistic works, also investigating how problems such as racism, sexism, social injustice and postcolonialism are reflected in these narratives. Chapters cover authors, artists, movements and performers such Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Elechi Amadi, Mazisi Kunene, Nnedi Okorafor, Lauren Beukes, Leslie Nneka Arimah and the New African Movement. The book also includes a range of original interviews with prominent authors and artists, including Tanure Ojaide, Lauren Beukes, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Benjamin Kwakye, Ntongela Masilela and Bruce Onobrakpeya. Interdisciplinary in its approach, this book will be an important resource for researchers across the fields of African literature, philosophy, culture and politics.

Author : Petina Gappah
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2021-07-06
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781982110345

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Out of Darkness, Shining Light by Petina Gappah Pdf

A powerful, moving, and revelatory novel set in nineteenth-century Africa--the captivating story of the loyal men and women who carried the body of explorer and missionary David Livingstone from Zambia to Zanzibar so that his remains could be returned home to England. Dawn, 1 May 1873, on the outskirts of Chitambo's village, near Lake Bangweulu in modern-day Zambia. The Scottish explorer and missionary David Livingstone has died. He had been heading south in the African interior on an increasingly maniacal mission to penetrate the greatest secret of Victorian exploration. He wanted to find the source of the world's longest river, the Nile. Instead, on an isolated and swampy floodplain, Dr. Livingstone found his death. How Livingstone is to be buried will be decided by his African companions, a group of sixty-nine men, women, and children. They decide that come what may, Livingstone, his papers and maps, must all be carried to England. They bury his heart and other organs under a tree and dry his flesh like jerky in the sun. Over nine months, battling severe illness and hunger, hostile chiefs and unknown terrain, all while taking a tortuous route of more than 1,000 miles to the coast to avoid marauding slave traders, they march with Livingstone's body and the evidence of his explorations. Their journey has been called "the most extraordinary story in African exploration." In this novel, their story is retold anew in the distinct, indelible voices of Livingstone's sharp-tongued female cook, Halima; a repressed, formerly enslaved African missionary named Jacob Wainwright; and the collective voice of the retainers. The result is a profound and tragic journey--an epic like no other--that encompasses all of the hypocrisy of slavery and colonization while celebrating resilience, loyalty, and love. In Out of Darkness, Shining Light, Petina Gappah has created an ambitious and artful masterpiece.

Author : Njabulo Simakahle Ndebele
Publisher : University of Kwazulu Natal Press
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : History
ISBN : STANFORD:36105131816493

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Rediscovery of the Ordinary by Njabulo Simakahle Ndebele Pdf

Njabulo S. Ndebele's essays on South African literature and culture initially appeared in various publications in the 1980s. They encompass a period of trauma, defiance, and change - the decade of the collapse of apartheid and the challenge of reconstructing a future. In 1991, the essays were collected under the current title of Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture. Here, this collection is reprinted without revision, together with an interview provoked by Albie Sachs' paper Preparing Ourselves for Freedom. That it is possible to republish the essays without revision so many years after their first appearance is a tribute to Ndebele's prescience. The issues that he raises and the questions that he poses remain key to a people who, after apartheid, have started to rediscover the complex ordinariness of living in a civil society.

Author : Russell West-Pavlov
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2018-06-04
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780192559999

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Eastern African Literatures by Russell West-Pavlov Pdf

The Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures series offers stimulating and accessible introductions to definitive topics and key genres and regions within the rapidly diversifying field of postcolonial literary studies in English. This volume offers an overview of contemporary Eastern African writing in English since the mid-twentieth century. It takes a fresh look at what has been an under-represented regional literary tradition within what continues to be an under-represented continental literary tradition. In particular, it broadens the scope of such an overview, complementing the extant monographs on well-known Eastern African writers such as Ngũgĩ to include a host of more recent, less-publicized novelists, dramatists, and poets. It extends the geographical range of existing studies from the familiar triad of Kenyan, Ugandan, and Tanzanian traditions of writing in English, to include the lesser-known Somali, Ethiopian, or Sudanese, or Mauritian or Madagascan traditions. Rather than simply addressing national traditions or broad thematic bundles, the volume treats works as literatures of a region: that is, as literatures of place and space. Eastern African Literatures stresses the formative role of space, place and geography in fashioning the fabric of social interaction, whether individual or collective, in generating history, in moulding identities, and as a consequence in defining the shape of the future. The 'spatial' perspectives allow the 'proximate' rather than the 'distant' influence of literary art to come into view. Proximate modes of literary communication, arising out of residual but vibrant traditions of oral communication, blend with contemporary media to produce hybrid genres of proximity specific to Eastern African literary production. In this way, the book also makes a contribution to the ongoing theorization of literary and cultural innovation in the cultures of the Global South.

Author : E. Nnolim
Publisher : African Books Collective
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2010-12-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9789788422822

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Issues in African Literature by E. Nnolim Pdf

The multitudinous nature of African literature has always been an issue but really not a problem, although its oral base has been used by expatriate critics to accuse African literature of thin plots, superficial characterisation, and narrative structures. African literature also, it is observed, is a mixed grill: it is oral; it is written in vernacular or tribal tongues; written in foreign tongues English, French, Portuguese and within the foreign language in which it is written, pidgin and creole further bend the already bent language giving African literature a further taint of linguistic impurity. African literature further suffers from the nature of its "newness" and this created problems for the critic. Because it is new, and because its critics are in simultaneous existence with its writers, we confront the problem of "instant analysis". Issues in African Literature continues the debate and tries to clarify contemporary burning issues in African literature, by focussing on particular areas where the debate has been most concerned or around which it has hovered and been persistent.

Author : Kofi Anyidoho,Abena P. A. Busia,Anne V. Adams
Publisher : Africa Research and Publications
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 1999
Category : African literature
ISBN : UCSC:32106012268618

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Beyond Survival by Kofi Anyidoho,Abena P. A. Busia,Anne V. Adams Pdf

Even in the best of times, the artist is constantly reaching beyond the present; the severity of Africa's present situation of crisis must urge our artists even farther into their version of a new life. In Beyond Survival, some of the best interpreters of African Literature focus on the role of the creative artist as a critical assessor, confidence builder and inspirer to excellence.The central theme of this important collection of essays in inspired by the belief that given the severity of the current crisis of life for African peoples, and given the intuitive and cultivated ability of the creative artist to monitor and accurately capture the complexities of any human institution, close attention to the world of African and African-heritage writers should provide not only important insights into various dimensions of the problem, but also and perhaps even more crucial, subtle but reliable pointers to probable solutions. More than any other group of people, it is perhaps to the artists we must turn for a creative but ultimately realizable vision of the future.The contributors fall under five broad headings, beginning with an introductory section featuring three important addresses delivered during the 1994 ALA annual conference in Accra, Ghana, at which these papers were first presented, as well a specially commissioned essay in memory of the late Flora Nwapa, one of Africa's best known pioneer women writers. The four other sections present a total of twenty essays focussing on: Shifting Paradigms; New Life: Language and Artistic Tradition; New Life: Language, Literature & National Policy; and Resistance Strategies.