Download or read book Pre Colonial Africa in Colonial African Narratives written by Donald R. Wehrs and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his study of the origins of political reflection in twentieth-century African fiction, Donald Wehrs examines a neglected but important body of African texts written in colonial (English and French) and indigenous (Hausa and Yoruba) languages. He explores pioneering narrative representations of pre-colonial African history and society in seven texts: Casely Hayford's Ethiopia Unbound (1911), Alhaji Sir Abubaker Tafawa Balewa's Shaihu Umar (1934), Paul Hazoumé's Doguicimi (1938), D.O. Fagunwa's Forest of a Thousand Daemons (1938), Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954), and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958). Wehrs highlights the role of pre-colonial political economies and articulations of state power on colonial-era considerations of ethical and political issues, and is attentive to the gendered implications of texts and authorial choices. By positioning Things Fall Apart as the culmination of a tradition, rather than as its inaugural work, he also reconfigures how we think of African fiction. His book supplements recent work on the importance of indigenous contexts and discourses in situating colonial-era narratives and will inspire fresh methodological strategies for studying the continent from a multiplicity of perspectives.
Download or read book Claiming History written by Eleni Coundouriotis and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Places African literature--novels of the colonial and postcolonial periods, written in both French and English--in their proper context within the field of postcolonial studies and illustrates how historical narration not only "answers back" to Europe's colonialist legacy, but also serves as a complex form of dissent among Africans themselves.
Download or read book The Surreptitious Speech written by V. Y. Mudimbe and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1992-09 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Distinguished scholar V. Y. Mudimbe assembles a lively tribute to Presence Africaine, the landmark African studies journal begun in 1947 Paris. While it celebrates the project's forty-year history, The Surreptitious Speech does not naively canonize the journal but rather offers a vibrant discussion and critical reading of its context, characteristics, and significance.
Download or read book Decolonizing Translation written by Kathryn Batchelor and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The linguistically innovative aspect of Francophone African literature has been recognized and studied from a variety of angles over recent decades, yet little attention has been paid to what happens to such literature when it is translated into another language. Taking as its corpus all sub-Saharan Francophone African texts that have ever been published in English, this book explores the ways in which translators approach innovative features such as African-language borrowings, neologisms and other deliberate manipulations of French, depictions of sociolinguistic variation, and a variety of types of wordplay. The implications of their translation decisions are drawn out with reference to the broader significances that are often accorded to postcolonial literature, and earlier critics' calls for a decolonized translation practice are explored from both a practical and theoretical angle. These findings are used to push towards a detailed investigation of the postcolonial turn in translation studies, drawing on the work of key postcolonial theorists such has Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak. This is a timely and incisive critical assessment of contemporary discourses on the ethics and politics of translation.
Download or read book Packaging Post coloniality written by Richard Watts and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Packaging Post/Coloniality, Richard Watts breaks from convention and reads Francophone books by their covers, focusing on the package over the content. Watts looks at the ways that the 'paratext'--the covers, illustrations, promotional summaries, epigraphs, dedications, and prefaces or forewords that enclose the text--mediates creative works by writers from sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia whose place in the French literary institution was and remains a source of conflict. In order to be acceptable for French bookstore shelves, the novels, essays, and collections of poetry created in colonial territories were deemed to need explanation and sponsorship by an authority in the field. Watts finds the French mission civilisatrice, or 'civilizing mission, ' manifest in prefaces, introductions, and dedications inserted in the books that appeared in the metropole during the height of French imperialism. In the postcolonial era, book packaging reveals a struggle to reverse the power dynamic: Francophone writers introduced each others' texts, yet books still appeared with covers promoting stereotypical images of the Francophone world. This fascinating journey through a particular cultural history of the book is a unique take on the quest for a literary identity. Watts concludes his study by looking at English mediations of Francophone works, with a chapter on reading and teaching Francophone literature in translation.
Download or read book Research in African Literatures written by and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vol. 1- , spring 1970- , include "A Bibliography of American doctoral dissertations on African literature," compiled by Nancy J. Schmidt.
Download or read book The Tongue Tied Imagination written by Tobias Warner and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2021 African Literature Association First Book Award Should a writer work in a former colonial language or in a vernacular? The language question was one of the great, intractable problems that haunted postcolonial literatures in the twentieth century, but it has since acquired a reputation as a dead end for narrow nationalism. This book returns to the language question from a fresh perspective. Instead of asking whether language matters, The Tongue-Tied Imagination explores how the language question itself came to matter. Focusing on the case of Senegal, Warner investigates the intersection of French and Wolof. Drawing on extensive archival research and an under-studied corpus of novels, poetry, and films in both languages, as well as educational projects and popular periodicals, the book traces the emergence of a politics of language from colonization through independence to the era of neoliberal development. Warner reads the francophone works of well-known authors such as Léopold Senghor, Ousmane Sembène, Mariama Bâ, and Boubacar Boris Diop alongside the more overlooked Wolof-language works with which they are in dialogue. Refusing to see the turn to vernacular languages only as a form of nativism, The Tongue-Tied Imagination argues that the language question opens up a fundamental struggle over the nature and limits of literature itself. Warner reveals how language debates tend to pull in two directions: first, they weave vernacular traditions into the normative patterns of world literature; but second, they create space to imagine how literary culture might be configured otherwise. Drawing on these insights, Warner brilliantly rethinks the terms of world literature and charts a renewed practice of literary comparison.
Download or read book African Literature in the Twentieth Century written by O. R. Dathorne and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1975 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores intellectual currents in African prose and verse from sung or chanted lines to modern writings
Download or read book Amazons of Black Sparta 2nd Edition written by Stanley B. Alpern and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2011-04-11 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The only thoroughly documented Amazons in world history are the women warriors of Dahomey, an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western African kingdom. Once dubbed a 'small black Sparta,' residents of Dahomey shared with the Spartans an intense militarism and sense of collectivism. Updated with a new preface by the author, Amazons of Black Sparta is the product of meticulous archival research and Alpern's gift for narrative. It will stand as the most comprehensive and accessible account of the woman warriors of Dahomey.
Download or read book Astonishment and Evocation written by Ivo Strecker and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All societies are shaped by arts, media, and other persuasive practices that can awe, captivate, enchant or otherwise seem to cast a spell on the audience. Likewise, scholarship itself often is driven by a sense of wonder and a willingness to be open to what lies beyond the obvious. This book broadens and deepens this perspective. Inspired by Stephen Tyler’s view of ethnography as an art of evocation, international scholars from the fields of aesthetics, anthropology, and rhetoric explore the spellbinding power of elusive meanings as people experience them in daily life and while gazing at works of art, watching films or studying other cultures. The book is divided into three parts covering the evocative power of visual art, the immersion in ritual and performance, and the reading, writing, and interpretation of texts. Taken as a whole, the contributions to the book demonstrate how astonishment and evocation deserve an important place in the conceptual repertoire of the human sciences.
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 1009 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.
Download or read book Politics in Francophone Africa written by Victor T. Le Vine and published by Lynne Rienner Publishers. This book was released on 2004 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the elements that have shaped the particular political dynamics of the 14 former French colonies in west and equatorial Africa while allowing them to remain part of a unique francophone sociopolitical community.
Download or read book The Black Mind written by Oscar Ronald Dathorne and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1976 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book African Literature in French written by Dorothy S. Blair and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1976-11-18 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 1976 book provides both a historical survey and a critical analysis of the literature in French from West and Equatorial Africa. Professor Blair begins by discussing the social, educational and political influences which led to the formation of the Negritude movement and to a flowering of French-African creative writing. This historical approach is then complemented by a study of the different literary genres. She traces the evolution of the first manifestations of literary activity in French by African writers, the written folk-tale, fable and short story, from the oral tradition of the indigenous culture, and the eventual appearance of the novel with a legendary or historical theme. The origins of French-African drama are considered for the first time, and the work of the minor poets analysed. Finally, Professor Blair attempts a definition of the French-African novel, and studies examples from three major periods from the 1930s onwards.
Download or read book World Literature Today written by and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Posthumous Career of Manuel Puig written by and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book European language Writing in Sub Saharan Africa written by Albert S. Gérard and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1986-01-01 with total page 1296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major comparative study of African writing in western languages, European-language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by Albert S. Gérard, falls into four wide-ranging sections: an overview of early contacts and colonial developments “Under Western Eyes”; chapters on “Black Consciousness” manifest in the debates over Panafricanism and Negritude; a group of essays on mental decolonization expressed in “Black Power” texts at the time of independence struggles; and finally “Comparative Vistas,” sketching directions that future comparative study might explore. An introductory essay stresses the millennia of writing in Africa, side by side with a richly eloquent and artistic set of vernacular oral traditions; written and oral traditions have become interwoven in adaptations of imported forms and linguistic innovations that challenge traditional “high” literary norms. Gérard uses the mathematical concept of “fuzzy sets” to explain why the focus on “Black Africa” has led him to set aside for future analysis the literatures produced in North Africa, which fall under the influence of Muslim civilization, as well as the diasporic literatures of the New World. Over sixty scholars from twenty-two countries contribute specialized studies of creative writing by leading authors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries such as Achebe, Mphahlele, Ngugi, Senghor, Soyinka, and Tutuola. Critical analyses are organized primarily around regions, reflecting different colonial languages imposed through schools and other social institutions. Some authors trace the adaptation of western genres, others identify syncretism with folktales or myths. The volumes are attentive to the heterogeneity of national literatures addressed to polyethnic and multilingual populations, and they note the instrumental politics of language in newly independent states. A closing chapter, “Tasks Ahead,” identifies areas for future scholars to explore.
