Download or read book Doomi Golo The Hidden Notebooks written by Boubacar Boris Diop and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first novel to be translated from Wolof to English, Doomi Golo—The Hidden Notebooks is a masterful work that conveys the story of Nguirane Faye and his attempts to communicate with his grandson before he dies. With a narrative structure that beautifully imitates the movements of a musical piece, Diop relates Faye’s trauma of losing his only son, Assane Tall, which is compounded by his grandson Badou’s migration to an unknown destination. While Faye feels certain that his grandson will return one day, he also is convinced that he will no longer be alive by then. Faye spends his days sitting under a mango tree in the courtyard of his home, reminiscing and observing his surroundings. He speaks to Badou through his seven notebooks, six of which are revealed to the reader, while the seventh, the “Book of Secrets,” is highly confidential and reserved for Badou’s eyes only. In the absence of letters from Badou, the notebooks form the only possible means of communication between the two, carrying within them tunes and repetitions that give this novel its unusual shape: loose and meandering on the one hand, coherent and tightly interwoven on the other. Translated by Vera Wülfing-Leckie and El Hadji Moustapha Diop.
Download or read book Doomi Golo The Hidden Notebooks written by Boubacar Boris Diop and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 Murambi The Book of Bones written by Boubacar Boris Diop and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2006-04-04 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[W]hat is true of Rwanda is true in each of us; we all share in Africa." -- L'Harmattan "[This novel] comes closer than have many political scientists or historians to trying to understand why this small country... sank in such appalling violence." -- Radio France International In April of 1994, nearly a million Rwandans were killed in what would prove to be one of the swiftest, most terrifying killing sprees of the 20th century. In Murambi, The Book of Bones, Boubacar Boris Diop comes face to face with the chilling horror and overwhelming sadness of the tragedy. Now, the power of Diop's acclaimed novel is available to English-speaking readers through Fiona Mc Laughlin's crisp translation. The novel recounts the story of a Rwandan history teacher, Cornelius Uvimana, who was living and working in Djibouti at the time of the massacre. He returns to Rwanda to try to comprehend the death of his family and to write a play about the events that took place there. As the novel unfolds, Cornelius begins to understand that it is only our humanity that will save us, and that as a writer, he must bear witness to the atrocities of the genocide. From the novel: "If only by the way people are walking, you can see that tension is mounting by the minute. I can feel it almost physically. Everyone is running or at least hurrying about. I meet more and more passersby who seem to be walking around in circles. There seems to be another light in their eyes. I think of the fathers who have to face the anguished eyes of their children and who can't tell them anything. For them, the country has become an immense trap in the space of just a few hours. Death is on the prowl. They can't even dream of defending themselves. Everything has been meticulously prepared for a long time: the administration, the army, and the [militia] are going to combine forces to kill, if possible, every last one of them."
Download or read book Musho written by Liz Gunner and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 1991-09-30 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Musho! Zulu Popular Praises Elizabeth Gunner, an authority on Zulu literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and Mafika Gwala, a South African teacher and poet, have translated, transcribed, and annotated a wide variety of Zulu izibongo poetry. In so doing, they have revealed the incredible breadth of this traditional genre, which is usually equated with nineteenth-century epic traditions that celebrate the deeds of Shaka and the successor kings of his Zulu monarchy. Musho!, with its extensive historical introduction, and literary commentary on Zulu poetry, is a major contribution to the field.
Download or read book Subversive Traditions written by Jonathon Repinecz and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can traditions be subversive? The kinship between African traditions and novels has been under debate for the better part of a century, but the conversation has stagnated because of a slowness to question the terms on which it is based: orality vs. writing, tradition vs. modernity, epic vs. novel. These rigid binaries were, in fact, invented by colonialism and cemented by postcolonial identity politics. Thanks to this entrenched paradigm, far too much ink has been poured into the so-called Great Divide between oral and writing societies, and to the long-lamented decline of the ways of old. Given advances in social science and humanities research—studies in folklore, performance, invented traditions, colonial and postcolonial ethnography, history, and pop culture—the moment is right to rewrite this calcified literary history. This book is not another story of subverted traditions, but of subversive ones. West African epics like Sunjata, Samori, and Lat-Dior offer a space from which to think about, and criticize, the issues of today, just as novels in European languages do. Through readings of documented performances and major writers like Yambo Ouologuem and Amadou Hampâté Bâ of Mali, Ahmadou Kourouma of Ivory Coast, and Aminata Sow Fall and Boubacar Boris Diop of Senegal, this book conducts an entirely new analysis of West African oral epic and its relevance to contemporary world literature.
Download or read book African Migration Narratives written by Cajetan Iheka and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-04 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the representations of migration in African literature, film, and other visual media, with an eye to the stylistic features of these works as well as their contributions to debates on migration
Download or read book A Useless Man written by Sait Faik Abasiyanik and published by Archipelago. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With all the wit and brilliance of Chekhov, a distinctive collection of lyrical stories from Sait Faik Abasıyanık, “Turkey’s greatest short story writer” (The Guardian) Sait Faik Abasıyanık’s fiction traces the interior lives of strangers in his native Istanbul: ancient coffeehouse proprietors, priests, dream-addled fishermen, poets of the Princes’ Isles, lovers and wandering minstrels of another time. The stories in A Useless Man are shaped by Sait Faik’s political autobiography – his resistance to social convention, the relentless pace of westernization, and the ethnic cleansing of his city – as he conjures the varied textures of life in Istanbul and its surrounding islands. The calm surface of these stories might seem to signal deference to the new Republic’s restrictions on language and culture, but Abasıyanık’s prose is crafted deceptively, with dark, subversive undercurrents. “Reading these stories by Sait Faik feels like finding the secret doors inside of poems,” Rivka Galchen wrote. Beautifully translated by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe, A Useless Man is the most comprehensive collection of Sait Faik’s stories in English to date.
Download or read book Kaveena written by Boubacar Boris Diop and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-28 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dark and suspenseful novel tells the story of a fictitious West African country caught in the grip of civil war. The dispassionate and deadpan narrator, Asante Kroma, is a former head of Secret Services and finds himself living with the corpse of the dictator, a man who once ruled his nation with an iron fist. Through a series of flashbacks and letters penned by the dictator, N'Zo Nikiema, readers discover the role of the French shadow leader, Pierre Castaneda, whose ongoing ambition to exploit the natural resources of the country knows no limits. As these powerful men use others as pawns in a violent real-life chess match, it is the murder of six-year-old Kaveena and her mother's quest for vengeance that brings about a surprise reckoning.
Download or read book Handbook of African Philosophy written by Elvis Imafidon and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-09-30 with total page 639 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook provides in one volume rich, comprehensive and rigorous coverage of specific subject areas and thematic concerns in the ever-evolving academic discipline of African philosophy. This Handbook is unique in its focus on central and emerging areas within African philosophy such as Afro-communitarian philosophy, ethics, epistemology, social and political philosophy, existentialism, philosophy of religion, gender philosophy, philosophy of education, phenomenology, transhumanism, African philosophy futures, and philosophy of the non-human. The thirty-two chapters in this Handbook explore the rich textual and non-textual forms of philosophical knowledge in Africa and adequately represent the broad and diverse scope of African philosophy, showing the richness and depth of the philosophical tradition. This reference work is indispensable to students and researchers in African philosophy, comparative philosophy and world philosophies.
Download or read book What Time Is It written by Emre Baykal and published by Arter Publications. This book was released on 2019-09-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arter initiates a new publication series, Arter Background, to accompany group exhibitions drawn from its collection, which holds more than 1,300 works of art as of 2019. This first book of the series accompanies one of the opening exhibitions of Arter’s new building, a collection-based group exhibition entitled What Time Is It?. Curated by Emre Baykal and Eda Berkmen, the exhibition is conceived around the concepts of memory, space and time. In the book, excerpts of texts selected around the ideas active in the curatorial process are complemented by new essays written specifically for this context, in line with Arter’s mission of encouraging artistic and cultural production. It thus features texts on themes associated with houses, everyday objects, personal and collective histories, inside and outside, urban rhythms, architecture, archaeology, borders and migration, and includes commissioned essays by Erdem Ceylan, Deniz Gül, Gökhan Kodalak, and Nil Sakman. While close-up visual excerpts taken from the art works are cited side by side with the texts, the installation views from the exhibition assume their places as the first entries into the memory of Arter’s new space. With contributions by Etel Adnan • Guillaume Apollinaire • Marc Augé • Ingeborg Bachmann • Matsuo Basho • Joe Brainard • Sevim Burak • Erdem Ceylan • Boubacar Boris Diop • Harun Farocki • Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht • Deniz Gül • Nurdan Gürbilek • Christopher F. Hasty • Eric Hattan • Stephen Hawking • Zbigniew Herbert • Cem İleri • Gökhan Kodalak • Milan Kundera • Henri Lefebvre • Édouard Levé • Agustín Fernández Mallo • Jonas Mekas • Georges Perec • Fernando Pessoa • Marcel Proust • Rodrigo Quian Quiroga • Rainer Maria Rilke • Yannis Ritsos • Nil Sakman • Bruno Schulz • W.G. Sebald • Susan Sontag • Wallace Stevens • Stefan Zweig
Download or read book Melancholy written by László F. Földényi (Foldenyi) and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alberto Manguel praises the Hungarian writer László Földényi as “one of the most brilliant essayists of our time.” Földényi’s extraordinary Melancholy, with its profusion of literary, ecclesiastical, artistic, and historical insights, gives proof to such praise. His book, part history of the term melancholy and part analysis of the melancholic disposition, explores many centuries to explore melancholy’s ambiguities. Along the way Földényi discovers the unrecognized role melancholy may play as a source of energy and creativity in a well-examined life. Földényi begins with a tour of the history of the word melancholy, from ancient Greece to the medieval era, the Renaissance, and modern times. He finds the meaning of melancholy has always been ambiguous, even paradoxical. In our own times it may be regarded either as a psychic illness or a mood familiar to everyone. The author analyzes the complexities of melancholy and concludes that its dual nature reflects the inherent tension of birth and mortality. To understand the melancholic disposition is to find entry to some of the deepest questions one’s life. This distinguished translation brings Földényi’s work directly to English-language readers for the first time.
Download or read book Mediating Violence from Africa written by George MacLeod and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2023-10 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mediating Violence from Africa explores how African and non-African Francophone authors, filmmakers, editors, and scholars have packaged, interpreted, and filmed the violent histories of post–Cold War Francophone Africa. This violence, much of which unfolded in front of Western television cameras, included the use of child soldiers facilitated by the Soviet Union’s castoff Kalashnikov rifles, the rise of Islamist terrorism in West Africa, and the horrific genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Through close readings of fictionalized child-soldier narratives, cinematic representations of Islamist militants, genocide survivor testimony, and Western scholarship, George S. MacLeod analyzes the ways Francophone African authors and filmmakers, as well as their editors and scholarly critics, negotiate the aesthetic, political, cultural, and ethical implications of making these traumatic stories visible. MacLeod argues for the need to periodize these productions within a “post–Cold War” framework to emphasize how shifts in post-1989 political discourse are echoed, contested, or subverted by contemporary Francophone authors, filmmakers, and Western scholars. The questions raised in Mediating Violence from Africa are of vital importance today. How the world engages with and responds to stories of recent violence and loss from Africa has profound implications for the affected communities and individuals. More broadly, in an era in which stories and images of violence, from terror attacks to school shootings to police brutality, are disseminated almost instantly and with minimal context, these theoretical questions have implications for debates surrounding the ethics of representing trauma, the politicization of memory, and Africa’s place in a global (as opposed to a postcolonial or Euro-African) economic and political landscape.
Download or read book The Buddha Geoff and Me written by Edward Canfor-Dumas and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-05-03 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ed is having a hard time - at work, in his love life and, well, generally. Then he meets an unlikely Buddhist - who drinks and smokes and talks his kind of language. Bit by bit, things begin to change... Ed doesn't always take Geoff's advice. Or, when he does he lapses at the crucial moment. His path to understanding is not a straight one, especially as life keeps throwing more and more 'stuff' at him. Often he fails - like most of us, in fact. But sometimes he manages to get it right. And when he does, surprising things begin to happen ... In The Buddha, Geoff and Me Edward Canfor-Dumas brings all his skills to bear in an absorbing story of everyday city life, where the characters stand out with all their human strengths and weaknesses, and the ending brings Ed - and perhaps all of us? - a hope we didn't necessarily expect. The Buddha, Geoff and Me - for anyone who's ever begun to wonder what the whole damn thing is all about ...
Download or read book Black African Cinema written by Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the proselytizing lantern slides of early Christian missionaries to contemporary films that look at Africa through an African lens, N. Frank Ukadike explores the development of black African cinema. He examines the impact of culture and history, and of technology and co-production, on filmmaking throughout Africa. Every aspect of African contact with and contribution to cinematic practices receives attention: British colonial cinema; the thematic and stylistic diversity of the pioneering "francophone" films; the effects of television on the motion picture industry; and patterns of television documentary filmmaking in "anglophone" regions. Ukadike gives special attention to the growth of independent production in Ghana and Nigeria, the unique Yoruba theater-film tradition, and the militant liberationist tendencies of "lusophone" filmmakers. He offers a lucid discussion of oral tradition as a creative matrix and the relationship between cinema and other forms of popular culture. And, by contrasting "new" African films with those based on the traditional paradigm, he explores the trends emerging from the eighties and nineties. Clearly written and accessible to specialist and general reader alike, Black African Cinema's analysis of key films and issues—the most comprehensive in English—is unique. The book's pan-Africanist vision heralds important new strategies for appraising a cinema that increasingly attracts the attention of film students and Africanists.
Download or read book A True Novel written by Minae Mizumura and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2013-11-12 with total page 883 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A remaking of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights set in postwar Japan A True Novel begins in New York in the 1960s, where we meet Taro, a relentlessly ambitious Japanese immigrant trying to make his fortune. Flashbacks and multilayered stories reveal his life: an impoverished upbringing as an orphan, his eventual rise to wealth and success—despite racial and class prejudice—and an obsession with a girl from an affluent family that has haunted him all his life. A True Novel then widens into an examination of Japan’s westernization and the emergence of a middle class. The winner of Japan’s prestigious Yomiuri Literature Prize, Mizumura has written a beautiful novel, with love at its core, that reveals, above all, the power of storytelling.
Download or read book African Cinema and Human Rights written by Mette Hjort and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-01 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing theory and practice together, African Cinema and Human Rights argues that moving images have a significant role to play in advancing the causes of justice and fairness. The contributors to this volume identify three key ways in which film can achieve these goals: documenting human rights abuses and thereby supporting the claims of victims and goals of truth and reconciliation within larger communities; legitimating, and consequently solidifying, an expanded scope for human rights; and promoting the realization of social and economic rights. Including the voices of African scholars, scholar-filmmakers, African directors Jean-Marie Teno and Gaston Kaboré, and researchers whose work focuses on transnational cinema, this volume explores overall perspectives, and differences of perspective, pertaining to Africa, human rights, and human rights filmmaking alongside specific case studies of individual films and areas of human rights violations. With its interdisciplinary scope, attention to practitioners' self-understandings, broad perspectives, and particular case studies, African Cinema and Human Rights is a foundational text that offers questions, reflections, and evidence that help us to consider film's ideal role within the context of our ever-continuing struggle towards a more just global society.
