Download or read book Re imagining African Identity in the Twenty First Century written by Fetson Anderson Kalua and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-05-21 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book discusses the idea of African identity in the twenty-first century, calling into question and deconstructing any understanding and representation of the idea of African identity as being based exclusively on the notion of ‘Blackness’, or the Black race. In countering such an idea of African identity as a flawed notion, the text propounds the idea of intermediality as a new modality of thinking about the importance of embracing the primacy of tolerance for the difference of identity. The notion of intermediality promotes the need for people of all races across the African continent to embrace the idea of difference as the defining feature of African identity so that the geographical locality called Africa is seen as a vibrant, open, and cosmopolitan continent which is accessible to people of all races and identities.
Download or read book Identity Issues in Kenyan Literature written by and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 Proverbs Textuality and Nativism in African Literature written by Adeleke Adeeko and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Provocative, original, and consistently engaging. . . . It deals with the most significant issues in African literary studies today, issues of language, ideology, and identity that are relevant around the world."--Christopher L. Miller, Yale University In one of the first studies to connect anglophone literary criticism with African localist tendencies of nativism, Ad��k� argues that nativism is a highly productive and intensely generative category in the formation of African literature and criticism. He shows the complexities of nativism (the call for authenticity and identity) both in writing and criticism and proposes that virtually all influential African criticism and writing can be discussed under any combination of three varieties of nativism: classical, structuralist, and linguistic. In the process of arguing that the nativist temperament is not alien to contemporary literary theory and that the theories do not negate the motivating spirit of nativism, Ad��k� offers a self-reflexive reading of representative oral and written, national and ethnic African literatures. He suggests a deconstructive reading of Yoruba meta-proverbs and connects the critical arts of such well-known writers as Chinua Achebe (Arrow of God), Ayi Kwei Armah (Thousand Seasons), and Ngugi wa Thiongo (Devil on the Cross) to those of other national and ethnic writers like Femi Osofisan (Kolera Kolej) and Oladejo Okediji (Rere Run). Ad�l�ke Ad��k� is assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His work has appeared in Ariel, Imprimatur, and Pretexts.
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 Beyond the Boundaries written by Alamin Mazrui and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 217 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 The Politics of M Othering written by Obioma Nnaemeka and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-08-04 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection is a study of African literature framed by the central, and multi-faceted, idea of 'mother' - motherland, mothertongue, motherwit, motherhood, mothering - looking at the paradoxical location of (m)other as both central and marginal. Whilst the volume stands as a sustained feminist analysis, it engages feminist theory itself by showing how issues in feminism are, in African literature, recast in different and complex ways.
Download or read book Gender in African Women s Writing written by Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1997-12-22 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a cogent analysis of the complexities of gender in the work of nine contemporary Anglophone and Francophone novelists. . . . offers illuminating interpretations of worthy writers . . . " —Multicultural Review "This book reaffirms Bessie Head's remark that books are a tool, in this case a tool that allows readers to understand better the rich lives and the condition of African women. Excellent notes and a rich bibliography." —Choice ". . . a college-level analysis which will appeal to any interested in African studies and literature." —The Bookwatch This book applies gender as a category of analysis to the works of nine sub-Saharan women writers: Aidoo, Bá, Beyala, Dangarembga, Emecheta, Head, Liking, Tlali, and Zanga Tsogo. The author appropriates western feminist theories of gender in an African literary context, and in the process, she finds and names critical theory that is African, indigenous, self-determining, which she then melds with western feminist theory and comes out with an over-arching theory that enriches western, post-colonial and African critical perspectives.
Download or read book Issues in African Literature written by Charles E. Nnolim and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2010 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Africa Writes Back to Self written by Evan M. Mwangi and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2010-07-02 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The profound effects of colonialism and its legacies on African cultures have led postcolonial scholars of recent African literature to characterize contemporary African novels as, first and foremost, responses to colonial domination by the West. In Africa Writes Back to Self, Evan Maina Mwangi argues instead that the novels are primarily engaged in conversation with each other, particularly over emergent gender issues such as the representation of homosexuality and the disenfranchisement of women by male-dominated governments. He covers the work of canonical novelists Nadine Gordimer, Chinua Achebe, NguÅgiÅ wa Thiong'o, and J. M. Coetzee, as well as popular writers such as Grace Ogot, David Maillu, Promise Okekwe, and Rebeka Njau. Mwangi examines the novels' self-reflexive fictional strategies and their potential to refigure the dynamics of gender and sexuality in Africa and demote the West as the reference point for cultures of the Global South.
Download or read book Language and the Construction of Multiple Identities in the Nigerian Novel written by Romanus Aboh and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2018-12-28 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Language and the construction of multiple identities in the Nigerian novel examines the multifaceted relation between people and the various identities they construct for themselves and for others through the context-specific ways they use language. Specifically, this book pays attention to how forms of identities ethnic, cultural, national and gender are constructed through the use of language in select novels of Adichie, Atta and Betiang. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this book draws analytical insights from critical discourse analysis, literary discourse analysis and socio-ethno-linguistic analysis. This approach enables the author to engage with the novels, to illuminate the link between the ways Nigerians use language and the identities they construct. Being a context-driven analysis, this book critically scrutinises literary language beyond stylistic borders by interrogating the micro and macro levels of language use, a core analytical paradigm frequently used by discourse analysts who engage in critical discourse analysis.
Download or read book Reflections on Identity in Four African Cities written by S. B. Bekker and published by African Minds. This book was released on 2006 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Identity has become the watchword of our times. In sub-Saharan Africa, this certainly appears to be true and for particular reasons. Africa is urbanising rapidly, cross-border migration streams are swelling and globalising influences sweep across the continent. Africa is also facing up to the challenge of nurturing emergent democracies in which citizens often feel torn between older traditional and newer national loyalties. Accordingly, collective identities are deeply coloured by recent urban as well as international experience and are squarely located within identity politics where reconciliation is required between state nation-building strategies and sub-national affiliations. They are also fundamentally shaped by the growing inequality and the poverty found on this continent. These themes are explored by an international set of scholars in two South African and two Francophone cities. The relative importance to urban residents of race, class and ethnicity but also of work, space and language are compared in these cities. This volume also includes a chapter investigating the emergence of a continental African identity. A recent report of the Office of the South African President claims that a strong national identity is emerging among its citizens, and that race and ethnicity are waning whilst a class identity is in the ascendance. The evidence and analyses within this volume serve to gauge the extent to which such claims ring true, in what everyone knows is a much more complex and shifting terrain of shared meanings than can ever be captured by such generalisations.
Download or read book Media and Identity in Africa written by John Middleton and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-04 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the role of the media in Africa? How do they work? How do they interact with global media? How do they reflect and express local culture? Incorporating both African and international perspectives, Media and Identity in Africa demonstrates how media outlets are used to perpetuate, question, or modify the unequal power relations between Africa and the rest of the world. Discussions about the construction of old and new social entities which are defined by class, gender, ethnicity, political and economic differences, wealth, poverty, cultural behavior, language, and religion dominate these new assessments of communications media in Africa. This volume addresses the tensions between the global and the local that have inspired creative control and use of traditional and modern forms of media.
Download or read book African Identities written by Kadiatu Kanneh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-01-04 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating and well researched study explores the meaning generated by `Africa' and `Blackness' throughout the century. Using literary texts, autobiography, ethnography, and historical documents, African Identities discusses how ideas of Africa as an origin, as a cultural whole, or as a complicated political problematic, emerge as signifiers for analysis of modernity, nationhood and racial difference. Kanneh provides detailed readings of a range of literary texts, including novels by: * Toni Morrison * Alice Walker * Gloria Naylor * Ngugi Wa Thiong'o * Chinua Achebe * and V.S. Naipaul. For anyone interested in literature, history, anthropology, political writing, feminist or cultural analysis, this book opens up new areas of thought across disciplines.
Download or read book Gender Issues in African Literature written by Ce, Chin and published by Handel Books. This book was released on 2014-04-03 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gender Issues in African Literature examines the ways in which some protagonists of African fictions are made to counter and challenge intertwined Western discourses on gender, employment, sexuality, and health. Here the conflict between Tradition and Modernity is argues from the favourite premise of male supremacist ideology showing how women have 'unlearned' these false concepts to build a sustained feminist movement and (re)learn the value of sisterhood. There is a bold attempt to reread Achebe as a consistent in urging women to fight the seemingly oppressive structures that have traditionally discriminated against them, and to disregard their diversity and embrace their unity. A chapter of Feminist Re-writing disagrees with the attempt to equate theory with political activism and presents Feminist literature as more than a verbal assertion that points to Feminist aesthetics and politics. The use of the trauma theory and testimony literature to explore traumatisation of female characters and its impact for Zimbabwean civil society is a useful addition to these gender studies in African literature.
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 Postcolonial Identity in Wole Soyinka written by Mpalive-Hangson Msiska and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2007 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soyinka's representation of postcolonial African identity is re-examined in the light of his major plays, novels and poetry to show how this writer's idiom of cultural authenticity both embraces hybridity and defines itself as specific and particular. For Soyinka, such authenticity involves recovering tradition and inserting it in postcolonial modernity to facilitate transformative moral and political justice. The past can be both our enabling future and our nemesis. In a distinctive approach grounded in cultural studies, Postcolonial Identity in Wole Soyinka locates the artist's intellectual and political concerns within the broader field of postcolonial cultural theory, arguing that, although ostensibly distant from mainstream theory, Soyinka focuses on fundamental questions concerning international culture and political identity formations - the relationship between myth and history / tradition and modernity, and the unresolved tension between power as a force for good or evil. Soyinka's treatment of the relationship between individual selfhood and the various framing social and collective identities, so the book argues, is yet another aspect linking his work to the broader intellectual currents of today. Thus, Soyinka's vision is seen as central to contemporary efforts to grasp the nature of modernity. His works conceptualize identity in ways that promote and modify national perceptions of 'Africanness', rescuing them from the colonial and neocolonial logic of cultural denigration in a manner that fully acknowledges the cosmopolitan and global contexts of African postcolonial formation. Overall, what emerges from the present study is the conviction that, in Soyinka's work, it is the capacity to assume personal and collective agency and the particular choices made by particular subjects at given historical moments that determine the trajectory of change and ultimately the nature of postcolonial existence itself. Postcolonial Identity in Wole Soyinka is a major and imaginative contribution to the study of Wole Soyinka, African literature, and postcolonial cultural theory and one in which writing and creativity stand in fruitful symbiosis with the critical sense. It should appeal to Soyinka scholars, to students of African literature, and to anyone interested in postcolonial and cultural theory.
