Download or read book Cultural identity in the East African novel written by Regina Hartmann and published by diplom.de. This book was released on 2014-04-11 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: As the Black African writers have taught us, we must dance our word, for in human speech as in dance, lies an offering; to speak and to write is also to offer oneself to the other; it is to be reborn together . This quotation by M. Rombaut locates African literature close to the performing arts. According to his statement African literature seems to transcend the conventional European conception of writing, which is conceiving literature as something planned and permanent. The idea of a literary performance in African writing places the author much closer to the story-teller, who is dependent on his audience and trying to keep in touch with them. By processing their feelings in his performance he gives expression to a common consciousness. In contrast to the Western author who often wants to stand apart from his society, African authors tend to aim their participation in the formation of a shared identity. This paper tries to find out how authors from the framework of East Africa conceive of cultural identity. Basically, I will proceed in two steps: part A is dedicated to the development of a pattern within which the complex issue of identity can be adequately discussed in an East African context. In Part B I will then apply this discussion scheme to three novels which as I will explain are representative for East African writing, in far as this term is justified. Part A starts off from some basic observations about identity, on the foundation of which I want to deduce the structure of my analysis. I will argue that identity is based on ones observation of the environment and on the influence of outsiders. All this is to some extent true for two concepts: individual and cultural identity. The latter develops when a group of individuals feels or is ascribed a common bond apt to correspond to several individual self-concepts. These individuals may then share a feeling of home, which can act as a physical but also mental commitment. Departing form these ideas I will show that four issues might be interesting in dealing with cultural identity, which can be expressed by some central questions: 1.Identity imposed and adopted: In how far can others influence our identity? 2.Identity rediscovered and reinvented:To what extent does our history work on identity? 3.Identity displaced: How does our feeling of physical or mental bond to a physical or mental space I will call home work on identity? 4.Identity integrated: How [...]
Download or read book Transgressing Boundaries written by Elizabeth F. Oldfield and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2013 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fictions written between 1939 and 2005 by indigenous and white (post)colonial women writers emerging from an African–European cultural experience form the focus of this study. Their voyages into the European diasporic space in Africa are important for conveying how African women’s literature is situated in relation to colonialism. Notwithstanding the centrality of African literature in the new postcolonial literatures in English, the accomplishments of the indigenous writer Grace Ogot have been eclipsed by the critical attention given to her male counterparts, while Elspeth Huxley, Barbara Kimenye, and Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye, who are of Western cultural provenance but adopt an African perspective, are not accommodated by the genre of ‘expatriate literature’. The present study of both indigenous and white (post)colonial women’s narratives that are common to both categories fills this gap. Focused on the representation of gender, identity, culture, and the ‘Other’, the texts selected are set in Kenya and Uganda, and a main concern is with the extent to which they are influenced by setting and intercultural influences. The ‘African’ woman’s creation of textuality is at once the expression of female individualities and a transgression of boundaries. The particular category of fiction for children as written by Kimenye and Macgoye reveals the configuration of a voice and identity for the female ‘Other’ and writer which enables a subversive renegotiation of identity in the face of patriarchal traditions.
Download or read book Swahili Beyond the Boundaries written by Alamin M. Mazrui and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Africa is a marriage of cultures: African and Asian, Islamic and Euro-Christian. Nowhere is this fusion more evident than in the formation of Swahili, Eastern Africa's lingua franca, and its cultures. Swahili Beyond the Boundaries: Literature, Language, and Identity addresses the moving frontiers of Swahili literature under the impetus of new waves of globalization in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These momentous changes have generated much theoretical debate on several literary fronts, as Swahili literature continues to undergo transformation in the mill of human creativity. Swahili literature is a hybrid that is being reconfigured by a conjuncture of global and local forces. As the interweaving of elements of the colonizer and the colonized, this hybrid formation provides a representation of cultural difference that is said to constitute a "third space," blurring existing boundaries and calling into question established identitarian categorizations. This cultural dialectic is clearly evident in the Swahili literary experience as it has evolved in the crucible of the politics of African cultural production. However, Swahili Beyond the Boundaries demonstrates that, from the point of view of Swahili literature, while hybridity evokes endless openness on questions of home and identity, it can simultaneously put closure on specific forms of subjectivity. In the process of this contestation, a new synthesis may be emerging that is poised to subject Swahili literature to new kinds of challenges in the politics of identity, compounded by the dynamics and counterdynamics of post-Cold War globalization.
Download or read book Kafka s Curse written by Achmat Dangor and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 1999 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: His unforgiving brother, a post-apartheid politician, tries to come to terms with Oscar's apostasy but will himself betray both his principles and his family when he falls in love with Amina, a beautiful and spirited psychotherapist.
Download or read book The Power of African Cultures written by Toyin Falola and published by University Rochester Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analysis of the ties between culture and every aspect of African life, using Africa's past to explain present situations. This book focuses on the modern cultures of Africa, from the consequences of the imposition of Western rule to the current struggles to define national identities in the context of neo-liberal economic policies and globalization.The book argues that it is against the backdrop of foreign influences that Africa has defined for itself notions of identity and development. African cultures have been evolving in response to change, and in other ways solidly rooted in a shared past. The book successfully deconstructs the last one hundred and fifty years of cultures that have been disrupted, replaced, and resurrected. The Power of African Cultures challenges many preconceived notions, such as male dominance and female submission, the supposed unity of ethnic groups, and contemporary Western stereotypes of Africans. It also shows the dynamism of African cultures to adapt to foreign imposition: even as colonial rule forced the adoption of foreign institutions and cultures, African cultures appropriated these elements. Traditions were reworked, symbols redefined, and the past situated in contemporary problems in order to accommodate the modern era. Toyin Falola is a Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters and Fellow of the Historical Society of Nigeria. He is the recipient of the 2006 Cheikh Anta Diop Award for Exemplary Scholarship in AfricanStudies, and the 2008 Quintessence Award by the Africa Writers Endowment. He holds an honorary doctorate from Monmouth University and he is University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin where heis also the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities. His books include Nationalism and African Intellectuals and Violence in Nigeria, both from the University of Rochester Press.
Download or read book Being Maasai written by Thomas Spear and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 1993-04-01 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyone “knows” the Maasai as proud pastoralists who once dominated the Rift Valley from northern Kenya to central Tanzania. But many people who identity themselves as Maasai, or who speak Maa, are not pastoralist at all, but farmers and hunters. Over time many different people have “become” something else. And what it means to be Maasai has changed radically over the past several centuries and is still changing today. This collection by historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and linguists examines how Maasai identity has been created, evoked, contested, and transformed from the time of their earliest settlement in Kenya to the present, as well as raising questions about the nature of ethnicity generally.
Download or read book Media and Identity in Africa written by Kimani Njogu and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-09 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies of the media in Africa, incorporating both African and international perspectives, are few. The thirty papers collected here were presented at a seminar organised and hosted by the Kenya-based Twaweza Communications and the International African Institute in Nairobi in 2004. They demonstrate how media outlets are used to perpetuate, question or modify the unequal power relations between the North and the South. Focusing on east Africa, the papers include discussions of the construction of old and new social entities, as defined by class, gender, ethnicity, political and economic differences, wealth, poverty, cultural behaviour, language and religion. The authors illustrate how there is increasing control by local people of traditional and modern forms of media. Globalization is being countered by local responses, within the context of social and cultural identities. Essentially, the book describes the tensions between the global and the local, tensions not often discussed in media studies, thus pioneering new debates.
Download or read book Wizard of the Crow written by Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo and published by East African Publishers. This book was released on 2007 with total page 788 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Swahili Modernities written by Patricia Caplan and published by Africa Research and Publications. This book was released on 2004 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers the themes of modernity, identity and politics on the East African coast and islands. This area is undergoing rapid change as globalisation makes its impact. Tourism, increased monetisation, emigration and immigration and various multinational agencies are all significant factors. The volume also focuses on how the Swahili language, literature and culture have been affected by modernity and the way in which Swahili women continue to live under the strong social constraints that this community place them under. - Verlagsangaben
Download or read book Swahili Modernities written by Patricia Caplan and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers the themes of modernity, identity, and politics on the East African coast and islands. Currently, this area is undergoing rapid change as ?globalization? makes its impact. Tourism, increased monetisation, emigration from and immigration to the area, and the varying policies of multinational agencies and local states are all significant factors. These chapters reveal some of the ways in which the Swahili seek to maintain their boundaries, even as they adapt their cultural practices to new realities. Some of the specific issues addressed are the effects of recent economic and social changes in towns such as Bagamoyo and Malindi, the north and south of Mafia Island, and the Comoro Islands. The history of Zanzibar, long a multicultural society which underwent a revolution in 1964 and has recently once again experienced violent political confrontations, is also examined, especially within the context of the tensions which arise when ethnic differences are essentialized and politicized as they have been on Zanzibar.The volume also focuses on how the Swahili language, literature, and culture have been affected by modernity. The expression of Swahili identity in poetry and song are explored, revealing how recent songs and performance known as taarabu reflect changes in social circumstances as well as shifting audience boundaries. By examining the representation of women in two kinds of Swahili literature, a classical nineteenth century poem and two recent plays, this volume also reveals the strong social constraints under which Swahili women?and others in East Africa?continue to live.
Download or read book Swahili Origins written by J. de V. Allen and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kiswahili has become the lingua franca of eastern Africa. Yet there can be few historic peoples whose identity is as elusive as that of the Swahili. Some have described themselves as Arabs, as Persians or even, in one place, as Portuguese. It is doubtful whether, even today, most of the people about whom this book is written would unhesitatingly and in all contexts accept the name Swahili. This book was central to the thought and lifework of the late James de Vere Allen. It is his major study of the origin of the Swahili and of their cultural identity. He focuses on how the African element in their cultural patrimony was first modified by Islam and later changed until many Swahili themselves lost sight of it. They share a language and they share a culture. Their territory stretches from the coast of southern Somalia to the Lamu archipelago in Kenya, to the Rovuma River in modern Mozambique and out into the islands of the Indian Ocean. But they lack a shared historical experience. James de Vere Allen, in this study of contentious originality, set out to give modern Swahili evidence of their shared history during a period of eight centuries.
Download or read book African Brazilian Culture and Regional Identity in Bahia Brazil written by Scott Ickes and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines how in the middle of the twentieth century, Bahian elites began to recognize African-Bahian cultural practices as essential components of Bahian regional identity. Previously, public performances of traditionally African-Bahian practices such as capoeira, samba, and Candomblé during carnival and other popular religious festivals had been repressed in favor of more European traditions.
Download or read book Reading Migration and Culture written by Dan Ojwang and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-12-14 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book uses the uniquely positioned culture of East African Asians to reflect upon the most vexing issues in postcolonial literary studies today. By examining the local histories and discourses that underpin East African Asian literature, it opens up and reflects upon issues of alienation, modernity, migration, diaspora, memory and nationalism.
Download or read book The Rise of the African Novel written by Mukoma Wa Ngugi and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2018-03-27 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engaging questions of language, identity, and reception to restore South African and diaspora writing to the African literary tradition
Download or read book African Identity in Asia written by Shihan de S. Jayasuriya and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eastbound Africans -- The African presence in Asia -- Dispersal of Africans across the Indian Ocean -- The military role of Africans -- Sounds of Africa -- The history and sociology of African migrants -- Reflections on African displacement.
Download or read book Colonialism and Cultural Identity written by Patrick Colm Hogan and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2000-01-27 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the diverse responses of colonized people to metropolitan ideas and to indigenous traditions. Going beyond the standard isolation of mimeticism and hybridity—and criticizing Homi Bhabha's influential treatment of the former—Hogan offers a lucid, usable theoretical structure for analysis of the postcolonial phenomena, with ramifications extending beyond postcolonial literature. Developing this structure in relation to major texts by Derek Walcott, Jean Rhys, Chinua Achebe, Earl Lovelace, Buchi Emecheta, Rabindranath Tagore, and Attia Hosain, Hogan also provides crucial cultural background for understanding these and other works from the same traditions.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of African Literature written by Simon Gikandi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-09-02 with total page 886 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most comprehensive reference work on African literature to date, this book covers all the key historical and cultural issues in the field. The Encyclopedia contains over 600 entries covering criticism and theory, African literature's development as a field of scholarship, and studies of established and lesser-known writers and their texts. While the greatest proportion of literary work in Africa has been a product of the twentieth century, the Encyclopedia also covers the literature back to the earliest eras of story-telling and oral transmission, making this a unique and valuable resource for those studying social sciences as well as humanities. This work includes cross-references, suggestions for further reading, and a comprehensive index.
