Download or read book In Search of Sunjata written by Ralph A. Austen and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays examine Sunjata from a variety of perspectives.
Download or read book The Epic of Sumanguru Kante written by Stephen Bulman and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-08-28 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Epic of Sumanguru Kante contains the Bamana text and English translation of griot Abdoulaye Sako’s oral narrative about Sumanguru, recorded in Koulikoro (Mali), together with explanatory notes, a scholarly introduction, and sections on the Bamana language and musical accompaniment.
Download or read book Translation Revisited written by Mamadou Diawara and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-01-17 with total page 551 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How realistic is it to expect translation to render the world intelligible in a context shaped by different historical trajectories and experiences? Can we rely on human universals to translate through the unique and specific webs of meaning that languages represent? If knowledge production is a kind of translation, then it is fair to assume that the possibility of translation has largely rested on the idea that Western experience is the repository of these human universals against the background of which different human experiences can be rendered intelligible. The problem with this assumption, however, is that there are limits to Western claims to universalism, mainly because these claims were at the service of the desire to justify imperial expansion. This book addresses issues arising from these claims to universalism in the process of producing knowledge about diverse African social realities. It shows that the idea of knowledge production as translation can be usefully deployed to inquire into how knowledge of Africa translates into an imperial attempt at changing local norms, institutions and spiritual values. Translation, in this sense, is the normalization of meanings issuing from a local historical experience claiming to be universal. The task of producing knowledge of African social realities cannot be adequately addressed without a prior critical engagement with how translation has come to shape our ways of rendering Africa intelligible.
Download or read book Epic Traditions of Africa written by Stephen Belcher and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1999-10-22 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Belcher's volume contains a much needed and extremely well-integrated overview and discussion of a vast inter-related West African culture complex that deserves and requires the kind of original, insightful treatment it receives here." —David Conrad Epic Traditions of Africa crosses boundaries of language, distance, and time to gather material from diverse African oral epic traditions. Stephen Belcher explores the rich past and poetic force of African epics and places them in historical and social, as well as artistic contexts. Colorful narratives from Central and West African traditions are illuminated along with texts that are more widely available to Western readers—the Mande Sunjata and the Bamana Segou. Belcher also takes up questions about European influences on African epic poetry and the possibility of mutual influence through out the genre. This lively and informative volume will inspire an appreciation for the distinctive qualities of this uniquely African form of verbal art.
Download or read book Honour in African History written by John Iliffe and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first published account of the role played by ideas of honour in African history from the fourteenth century to the present day. It argues that appreciation of these ideas is essential to an understanding of past and present African behaviour. Before European conquest, many African men cultivated heroic honour, others admired the civic virtues of the patriarchal householder, and women honoured one another for industry, endurance, and devotion to their families. These values both conflicted and blended with Islamic and Christian teachings. Colonial conquest fragmented heroic cultures, but inherited ideas of honour found new expression in regimental loyalty, respectability, professionalism, working-class masculinity, the changing gender relationships of the colonial order, and the nationalist movements which overthrew that order. Today, the same inherited notions obstruct democracy, inspire resistance to tyranny, and motivate the defence of dignity in the face of AIDS.
Download or read book Epic Adventures written by Jan Jansen and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2004 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The many adventures of the "epic" in modern times are fascinating topics in themselves. The Romantics claimed that every self-respecting nation should, at some time, have had one and they set out to reconstruct these epics for political as well as cultural reasons. Such epics represented earlier stages in the development of nation-states and in this modern world they were, for a long time, hard to appreciate. The introduction of tape recorders, however, brought the epic back in the limelight. It became fashionable for scholars to record long oral narratives, and to present them as long written poems that reflected deeply ingrained ideas. Because of this technology, the idea of the epic was revitalized. This volume presents critical analyses of epics in Sub-Saharan Africa, the former Soviet Union, South-East Asia, Medieval Europe, and America and discusses the process of revitalization, sometimes even invention, of epics in particular historical, political, and academic contexts. Jan Jansen is a member of the Department of Anthropology of the University of Leiden, Netherlands. Henk M.J. Maier is professor in the Department of Languages and Cultures of Southeast Asia and Oceania of the University of Leiden, Netherlands.
Download or read book Literature and the Language Arts written by and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 1420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 The Cloth of Many Colored Silks written by John O. Hunwick and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays honouring African scholar Ivor Wilks.
Download or read book Epic Ancestors of the Sunjata Era written by David C. Conrad and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sunjata written by Gordon Innes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-08-09 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Performing Africa written by Paulla A. Ebron and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-11 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The jali--a member of a hereditary group of Mandinka professional performers--is a charismatic but contradictory figure. He is at once the repository of his people's history, the voice of contemporary political authority, the inspiration for African American dreams of an African homeland, and the chief entertainment for the burgeoning transnational tourist industry. Numerous journalists, scholars, politicians, and culture aficionados have tried to pin him down. This book shows how the jali's talents at performance make him a genius at representation--the ideal figure to tell us about the "Africa" that the world imagines, which is always a thing of illusion, magic, and contradiction. Africa often enters the global imagination through news accounts of ethnic war, famine, and despotic political regimes. Those interested in countering such dystopic images--be they cultural nationalists in the African diaspora or connoisseurs of "global culture"--often found their representations of an emancipatory Africa on an enthusiasm for West African popular culture and performance arts. Based on extensive field research in The Gambia and focusing on the figure of the jali, Performing Africa interrogates these representations together with their cultural and political implications. It explores how Africa is produced, circulated, and consumed through performance and how encounters through performance create the place of Africa in the world. Innovative and discerning, Performing Africa is a provocative contribution to debates over cultural nationalism and the construction of identity and history in Africa and elsewhere.
Download or read book Migration Jihad and Muslim Authority in West Africa written by John H. Hanson and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1996-10-22 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John H. Hanson's pathbreaking study revises late-nineteenth-century colonialist assumptions about a West African Muslim social movement. Using indigenous Arabic manuscripts, travel narratives, and oral materials, Hanson assesses the meaning of a series of revolts against Islamic authority. The book investigates three political crises that took place at Nioro, a town in the region of Karta in the upper Senegal River valley, conquered during a military jihad or "holy war" by Shaykh Umar Tal. Although Umar and his successors steadfastly promoted jihad, Futanke colonists, defying their leaders, opted to remain settled on the lands they had seized; instead of going to war, the colonists devoted themselves to production of foodstuffs for sale in an increasingly vital regional economy. Incisive analysis of charismatic authority and its limits, as demonstrated by Umar and his son Amadu Sheku, illuminates patterns in the unfolding relations between leaders and followers.
Download or read book History in Africa written by and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sundiata written by Djibril Tamsir Niane and published by . This book was released on 1965 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The son of Sogolon, the hunchback princess, and Maghan, known as "the handsome", Sundiata grew up to fulfill the prophesies of the soothsayers that he would unite the twelve kingdoms of Mali into one of the most powerful empires ever known in Africa, which at its peak stretched right across the savanna belt from the shores of the Atlantic to the dusty walls of Timbuktu. Retold by generations of griots, the guardians of African culture, this oral tradition has been handed down from the thirteenth century and captures all the mystery and majesty of medieval African kingship. It is an epic tale, part history and part legend.
Download or read book Sunjata written by Bamba Suso and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 1999-10-07 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sunjata Keita was the founder of one of the greatest empires of Western Africa. These two epic accounts of his life portray a greedy, slow-witted child - said to have crawled until the age of seven - who grew up as prophecy foretold to become a mighty warrior, renowned for his bravery and superhuman strength. They describe how, with the help of his sister, who seduced their arch-enemy Sumanguru into revealing his secret powers, Sunjata defeated the Susu overlords and created the Mali Empire which would last for two centuries. Based on events from the early thirteenth century, these tales of heroism and magic are still celebrated across West Africa as part of a living epic oral tradition.
Download or read book Papers Presented at the International Conference on Mande Studies Leiden the Netherlands March 1995 written by and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 910 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
