Download or read book African Literature Today written by Ernest Emenyo̲nu and published by African Literature Today (Hard. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AFRICAN LITERATURE TODAY was established at a time of uncertainty and reconstruction but for 50 years it has played a leading role in nurturing imaginative creativity and its criticism on the African continent and beyond. Contemporary African creative writers have confidently taken strides which resonate all over the world. The daring diversities, stylistic innovations and enchanting audacities which characterize their works across many different genres resonate with readers beyond African geographic and linguistic boundaries. Writers in Africa and the diaspora seem to be speaking with collective and individual voices that compel world attention and admiration. And they arebeing read in numerous world languages. This volume's contributors recognize the foundations laid by the pioneer African writers as they point vigorously to contemporary writers who have moved African imaginative creativityforward with utmost integrity, and to the critics who continue to respond with unyielding tenacity. The founding Editor of ALT, Professor Eldred Durosimi Jones, recalls in an interview in this volume, the role ALT played in the evolution and stimulation of a wave of African literary studies and criticism in mid-20th century: "The 1960s saw a good deal of activity among scholars teaching African Literature throughout Africa and the world, and this ledto a series of conferences in African Literature in Dakar, Nairobi, and Freetown.around the idea of communication between the various English Departments which took an interest in African Literature. We decided on a bulletin, which was just a kind of newsletter between departments saying what was going on....it was that bulletin that showed the potential of this kind of communication... after that we started African Literature Today as a journal inviting articles on the works of African writers." Contributors to the series demonstrate the impact of the growth in studies and criticism of African Literature in the 50 years since its founding. Series Editor: Ernest N. Emenyonu is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint, USA. Reviews Editor: Obi Nwakanma

Download or read book A General Theory of Oblivion written by José Eduardo Agualusa and published by Random House. This book was released on 2015-06-25 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 2017 A finalist for the Man Booker International Prize 2016 The brilliant new novel from the winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. On the eve of Angolan independence, Ludo bricks herself into her apartment, where she will remain for the next thirty years. She lives off vegetables and pigeons, burns her furniture and books to stay alive and keeps herself busy by writing her story on the walls of her home. The outside world slowly seeps into Ludo’s life through snippets on the radio, voices from next door, glimpses of a man fleeing his pursuers and a note attached to a bird’s foot. Until one day she meets Sabalu, a young boy from the street who climbs up to her terrace.

Download or read book Naturalizing Africa written by Cajetan Iheka and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes how African literary texts have engaged with pressing ecological problems in Africa. It is a multi-disciplinary text, for both researchers and scholars of African Studies, the environment and postcolonial literature.

Download or read book Naked Agency written by Naminata Diabate and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-06 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across Africa, mature women have for decades mobilized the power of their nakedness in political protest to shame and punish male adversaries. This insurrectionary nakedness, often called genital cursing, owes its cultural potency to the religious belief that spirits residing in women's bodies can be unleashed to cause misfortune in their targets, including impotence, disease, and death. In Naked Agency, Naminata Diabate analyzes these collective female naked protests in Africa and beyond to broaden understandings of agency and vulnerability. Drawing on myriad cultural texts from social media and film to journalism and fiction, Diabate uncovers how women create spaces of resistance during socio-political duress, including such events as the 2011 protests by Ivoirian women in Côte d’Ivoire and Paris as well as women's disrobing in Soweto to prevent the destruction of their homes. Through the concept of naked agency, Diabate explores fluctuating narratives of power and victimhood to challenge simplistic accounts of African women's helplessness and to show how they exercise political power in the biopolitical era.

Download or read book Travels with Mae written by Eileen Julien and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a series of lyrical vignettes Eileen M. Julien traces her life as an African American woman growing up in middle-class New Orleans in the 1950s and 1960s. Julien's narratives focus on her relationship with her mother, family, community, and the city itself, while touching upon life after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Haunted by a colonial past associated with African presence, racial mixing, and suspect rituals, New Orleans has served the national imagination as a place of exoticism where objectionable people and unsavory practices can be found. The destruction of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath revealed New Orleans' deep poverty and marginalized population, and brought a media storm that perpetuated the city's stigma. Travels with Mae lovingly restores the wonder of this great city, capturing both its beauty and its pain through the eyes of an insider.

Download or read book The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros written by Galawdewos and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "geadl" or hagiography, originally written by Gealawdewos thirty years after the subject's death, in 1672-1673. Translated from multiple manuscripts and versions.

Download or read book African Novels and the Question of Orality written by Eileen Julien and published by . This book was released on 1992-07-22 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This genre lends itself to sophisticated experimentation in political discourse. Sony Labou Tansi's La Vie et demie (1979) and Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Devil on the Cross (1982) caricature the puerile representatives of political and economic power through grotesque physical appetites and bodily deformations.

Download or read book African Literature written by Jonathan P. Smithe and published by Nova Publishers. This book was released on 2002 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African literature, like the continent itself is enormous and diverse. East Africa's literature is different from West Africa's which is quite different from South Africa's which has different influences on it than North Africa's. Africa's literature is based on a widespread heritage of oral literature, some of which has now been recorded. Arabic influence can be detected as well as European, especially French and English. Legends, myths, proverbs, riddles and folktales form the mother load of the oral literature. This book presents an overview of African literature as well as a comprehensive bibliography, primarily of English language sources. Accessed by subject, author and title indexes.

Download or read book You Can t Get Lost in Cape Town written by Zoë Wicomb and published by Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 2000 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The South African novel of identity that "deserves a wide audience on a par with Nadine Gordimer."

Download or read book Written Under the Skin written by Carli Coetzee and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2019 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2021 ALA Book of the Year Award - Scholarship The author uses the image of blood under the skin as a way of understanding cultural and literary forms in contemporary South Africa. Chapters deal with the bloodied histories of apartheid and blood as trope for talking about change.

Download or read book Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic African Literature written by Christopher E. W. Ouma and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-02-27 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the representation of figures, memories and images of childhood in selected contemporary diasporic African fiction by Adichie, Abani, Wainaina and Oyeyemi. The book argues that childhood is a key framework for thinking about contemporary African and African Diasporic identities. It argues that through the privileging of childhood memory, alternative conceptions of time emerge in this literature, and which allow African writers to re-imagine what family, ethnicity, nation means within the new spaces of diaspora that a majority of them occupy. The book therefore looks at the connections between childhood, space, time and memory, childhood gender and sexuality, childhoods in contexts of war, as well as migrant childhoods. These dimensions of childhood particularly relate to the return of the memory of Biafra, the figures of child soldiers, memories of growing up in Cold War Africa, queer boyhoods/sonhood as well as experiences of migration within Africa, North America and Europe.

Download or read book Mount Pleasant written by Patrice Nganang and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2016-04-12 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A majestic tale of colonialism and transformation, Patrice Nganang's Mount Pleasant tells the astonishing story of the birth of modern Cameroon, a place subject to the whims of the French and the Germans, yet engaged in a cultural revolution. In 1931, Sara is taken from her family and brought to Mount Pleasant as a gift for Sultan Njoya, a ruler cast into exile by French colonialists. Merely nine years old, she is on the verge of becoming the sultan’s 681st wife. But when she is dragged to Bertha, the long-suffering slave charged with training Njoya’s brides, Sara’s life takes a curious turn. Bertha sees within this little girl her son Nebu, who died tragically years before, and she saves Sara from her fate by disguising her as her son. In Sara’s new life as a boy she bears witness to the world of Sultan Njoya---a magical yet vulnerable community of artists and intellectuals---and learns of the sultan’s final days in the Palace of All Dreams and the sad fate of Nebu, the greatest artist their culture had ever seen. Seven decades later, a student returns home to Cameroon to learn about the place it once was, and she finds Sara, silent for years, ready to tell her story. But her serpentine tale, entangled by flawed memory and bursts of the imagination, reinvents history anew. The award-winning novelist Patrice Nganang’s Mount Pleasant is a lyrical resurrection of early-twentieth-century Cameroon and an elegy to the people swept up in the forces of colonization.

Download or read book Cultural Netizenship written by James Yékú and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-03 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does social media activism in Nigeria intersect with online popular forms—from GIFs to memes to videos—and become shaped by the repressive postcolonial state that propels resistance to dominant articulations of power? James Yékú proposes the concept of "cultural netizenship"—internet citizenship and its aesthetico-cultural dimensions—as a way of being on the social web and articulating counter-hegemonic self-presentations through viral popular images. Yékú explores the cultural politics of protest selfies, Nollywood-derived memes and GIFs, hashtags, and political cartoons as visual texts for postcolonial studies, and he examines how digital subjects in Nigeria, a nation with one of the most vibrant digital spheres in Africa, deconstruct state power through performed popular culture on social media. As a rubric for the new digital genres of popular and visual expressions on social media, cultural netizenship indexes the digital everyday through the affordances of the participatory web. A fascinating look at the intersection of social media and popular culture performance, Cultural Netizenship reveals the logic of remediation that is central to both the internet's remix culture and the generative materialism of African popular arts.

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 contains over 600 entries that cover criticism and theory, its development as a field of scholarship, and studies of established and lesser-known writers.

Download or read book African Literature in the Digital Age written by Shola Adenekan and published by James Currey. This book was released on 2023-03-21 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book-length study on the relationship between African literature and new media. The digital space provides a new avenue to move literature beyond the restrictions of book publishing on the continent. Arguing that writers are putting their work on cyberspace because communities are emerging from this space, and because increasing numbers of Africans use the internet as part of their day-to-day engagement with their societies and the world, Shola Adenekan explores this transformative development in Nigeria and Kenya, both significant countries in African literature and two of the continent's largest digital technology hubs. Queer Kenyans and Nigerians find new avenues for their work online where print publishers are refusing to publish short stories and poems on same-sex desire. Binyavanga Wainaina's rise to critical acclaim arguably started on the literary blog Generator 21. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's literary celebrity partly relies on her prolific use of social media to tell thestory of powerful Nigerian women. With further examples from the development of literature across the continent, this innovative book sheds new light on narratives about digital Africa. It will also be the first major work to provide a trajectory of class consciousness in Kenyan and Nigerian writing. Through this analysis, the book articulates the difference in attitudes towards queerness, sexuality, and hetero-normativity among successive generations of writers.

Download or read book Secret Son written by Laila Lalami and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2010-05-09 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Raised by his mother in a one-room house in the slums of Casablanca, Youssef El Mekki has always had big dreams of living another life in another world. Suddenly his dreams are within reach when he discovers that his father—whom he’d been led to believe was dead—is very much alive. A wealthy businessman, he seems eager to give his son a new start. Youssef leaves his mother behind to live a life of luxury, until a reversal of fortune sends him back to the streets and his childhood friends. Trapped once again by his class and painfully aware of the limitations of his prospects, he becomes easy prey for a fringe Islamic group. In the spirit of The Inheritance of Loss and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Laila Lalami’s debut novel looks at the struggle for identity, the need for love and family, and the desperation that grips ordinary lives in a world divided by class, politics, and religion.

Download or read book Poetry Print and the Making of Postcolonial Literature written by Nathan Suhr-Sytsma and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-10 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature reveals an intriguing history of relationships among poets and editors from Ireland and Nigeria, as well as Britain and the Caribbean, during the mid-twentieth-century era of decolonization. The book explores what such leading anglophone poets as Seamus Heaney, Christopher Okigbo, and Derek Walcott had in common: 'peripheral' origins and a desire to address transnational publics without expatriating themselves. The book reconstructs how they gained the imprimatur of both local and London-based cultural institutions. It shows, furthermore, how political crises challenged them to reconsider their poetry's publics. Making substantial use of unpublished archival material, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma examines poems in print, often the pages on which they first appeared, in order to chart the transformation of the anglophone literary world. He argues that these poets' achievements cannot be extricated from the transnational networks through which their poems circulated - and which they in turn remade.