Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of African Oral Traditions and Folklore written by Akintunde Akinyemi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-03-05 with total page 1041 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook offers the most comprehensive, analytic, and multidisciplinary study of oral traditions and folklore in Africa and the African Diaspora to date. Preeminent scholars Akintunde Akinyemi and Toyin Falola assemble a team of leading and rising stars across African Studies research to retrieve and renew the scholarship of oral traditions and folklore in Africa and the Diaspora just as critical concerns about their survival are pushed to the forefront of the field. With five sections on the central themes within orality and folklore – including engagement ranging from popular culture to technology, methods to pedagogy – this handbook is an indispensable resource to scholars, students, and practitioners of oral traditions and folklore preservation alike. This definitive reference is the first to provide detailed, systematic discussion, and up-to-date analysis of African oral traditions and folklore.

Download or read book Oral Literature in Africa written by Ruth Finnegan and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2012-09 with total page 614 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ruth Finnegan's Oral Literature in Africa was first published in 1970, and since then has been widely praised as one of the most important books in its field. Based on years of fieldwork, the study traces the history of storytelling across the continent of Africa. This revised edition makes Finnegan's ground-breaking research available to the next generation of scholars. It includes a new introduction, additional images and an updated bibliography, as well as its original chapters on poetry, prose, "drum language" and drama, and an overview of the social, linguistic and historical background of oral literature in Africa. This book is the first volume in the World Oral Literature Series, an ongoing collaboration between OBP and World Oral Literature Project. A free online archive of recordings and photographs that Finnegan made during her fieldwork in the late 1960s is hosted by the World Oral Literature Project (http: //www.oralliterature.org/collections/rfinnegan001.html) and can also be accessed from publisher's website.

Download or read book Oral History in a Wounded Country written by Philippe Denis and published by University of Kwazulu Natal Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the end of apartheid and the exciting, but elusive, advent of a new nation, South Africa is witness to the emergence of a new generation of oral historians whose aim is to develop a broader, more inclusive, and culturally sensitive understanding of the South African past. In a country still wounded by a legacy of racial discrimination, the retrieving of oral memories is a task more urgent than ever. Oral History in a Wounded Country shows how the cultural, political, socio-economic, and intellectual evolutions - that gave birth to South Africa as we know it today - affect the oral history process. It will help practitioners, whether they use oral history as one technique among others to gain a better knowledge of the past or envisage oral history as an academic discipline in its own right, to reflect critically on their practice and find better ways of handling the interview process. The challenge is to appreciate the complexity of South Africa's diverse histories, while being attentive to the dynamics of the interview and their effect on both interviewers' and interviewees' sense of identity.

Download or read book Orality Literacy and Colonialism in Southern Africa written by Jonathan A. Draper and published by Society of Biblical Lit. This book was released on 2003 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literacy is essentially about the control of information, memory, and belief, and with colonialism in Southern Africa came the Bible and text-based literacy monitored by missionaries and colonial authorities. Old and new oral traditions, however, are beyond the control of empire and often carry the resistance, hopes, and dreams of colonized people. The essays in this volume recover aspects of Southern Africa's rich oral tradition. The authors, from disciplines such as anthropology, African literature, and biblical studies, delineate some of the contours of the indigenous knowledge systems which sustained resistance to colonialism and today provide resources for postapartheid society in Southern Africa.

Download or read book Xhosa Oral Poetry written by Jeff Opland and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1983-12-30 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, first published in 1983, was the first detailed study of the Xhosa oral poetry tradition.

Download or read book Archaeology and Oral Tradition in Malawi written by Yusuf M. Juwayeyi and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2020 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First comprehensive account of the origins and early history of the Chewa as revealed by oral tradition and archaeology that allows a more accurate picture of a pre-literate society.

Download or read book Kingdoms and Chiefdoms of Southeastern Africa written by Elizabeth A. Eldredge and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2015 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History and oral traditions in southeastern Africa -- Oral traditions in the reconstruction of southern African history -- Shipwreck survivor accounts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries -- Founding families and chiefdoms east of the Drakensberg -- Maputo Bay peoples and chiefdoms before 1740 -- Maputo Bay, 1740-1820 -- Eastern chiefdoms of southern Africa, 1740-1815 -- Zulu conquests and the consolidation of power, 1815-21 -- Military campaigns, migrations, and political reconfiguration -- Ancestors, descent lines, and chiefdoms west of the Drakensberg before 1820 -- The Caledon River valley and the Basotho of Moshoeshoe, 1821-33 -- The expansion of the European presence at Maputo Bay, 1821-33 -- Southern African kingdoms on the eve of colonization.

Download or read book The Tongue Is Fire written by Harold Scheub and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1996-10-15 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the years between the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and the Soweto Uprising of 1976—a period that was both the height of the apartheid system in South Africa and, in retrospect, the beginning of its end—Harold Scheub went to Africa to collect stories. With tape-recorder and camera in hand, Scheub registered the testaments of Swati, Xhosa, Ndebele, and Zulu storytellers, farming people who lived in the remote reaches of rural South Africa. While young people fought in the streets of Soweto and South African writers made the world aware of apartheid’s evils, the rural storytellers resisted apartheid in their own way, using myth and metaphor to preserve their traditions and confront their oppressors. For more than 20 years, Scheub kept the promise he made to the storytellers to publish his translations of their stories only when freedom came to South Africa. The Tongue Is Fire presents these voices of South African oral tradition—the historians, the poets, the epic-performers, the myth-makers—documenting their enduring faith in the power of the word to sustain tradition in the face of determined efforts to distort or eliminate it. These texts are a tribute to the storytellers who have always, in periods of crisis, exercised their art to inspire their own people.

Download or read book Things Fall Apart written by Chinua Achebe and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1994-09-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.

Download or read book The Cambridge History of South African Literature written by David Attwell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-12 with total page 1451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: South Africa's unique history has produced literatures in many languages, in both oral and written forms, reflecting the diversity in the cultural histories and experiences of its people. The Cambridge History offers a comprehensive, multi-authored history of South African literature in all eleven official languages (and more minor ones) of the country, produced by a team of over forty international experts, including contributors from all of the major regions and language groups of South Africa. It will provide a complete portrait of South Africa's literary production, organised as a chronological history from the oral traditions existing before colonial settlement, to the post-apartheid revision of the past. In a field marked by controversy, this volume is more fully representative than any existing account of South Africa's literary history. It will make a unique contribution to Commonwealth, international and postcolonial studies and serve as a definitive reference work for decades to come.

Download or read book Oral Tradition in Southern Africa written by Ngwabi Bhebe and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A History of the Church in Africa written by Bengt Sundkler and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-05-04 with total page 1268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bengt Sundkler's long-awaited book on African Christian churches will become the standard reference for the subject.

Download or read book Oral Traditions in Ethiopian Studies written by Dirk Bustorf and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Oral Literature in the Digital Age written by Mark Turin and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2013 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thanks to ever-greater digital connectivity, interest in oral traditions has grown beyond that of researcher and research subject to include a widening pool of global users. When new publics consume, manipulate and connect with field recordings and digital cultural archives, their involvement raises important practical and ethical questions. This volume explores the political repercussions of studying marginalised languages; the role of online tools in ensuring responsible access to sensitive cultural materials; and ways of ensuring that when digital documents are created, they are not fossilised as a consequence of being archived. Fieldwork reports by linguists and anthropologists in three continents provide concrete examples of overcoming barriers -- ethical, practical and conceptual -- in digital documentation projects. Oral Literature In The Digital Age is an essential guide and handbook for ethnographers, field linguists, community activists, curators, archivists, librarians, and all who connect with indigenous communities in order to document and preserve oral traditions.

Download or read book The World and the Word written by Nongenile M. Zenani and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1992-10-01 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A master storyteller of the Xhosa people of South Africa, Nongenile Masithathu Zenani gives us an unprecedented view of an oral society from within. Twenty-four of her complex and beautiful tales about birth, puberty, marriage, and work, as told to the renowned collector of African oral tradition, Harold Scheub, are gathered here. Accompanying the stories are Zenani’s detailed commentaries and analyses and Scheub’s striking photographs of her in performance. The combination of these historical and cultural observations with a richly symbolic collection of tales from a single traditional storyteller make The World and the Word a remarkable document. “The storyteller’s materials are simple,” Zenani told Scheub, “the world, and the word.” She presents to us the entire world of the Xhosa people, how they first came to be, the origins of their customs, how they order their world and deal with transgressors, how they manage all of life’s transitions from birth to death. She depicts both the world as it exists and as it is shaped in the words of the storyteller. Inheriting tales from the Xhosa tradition, Zenani has transformed them into imaginative new stories marked by her own artistry. Scheub’s introduction to The World and the Word discusses Xhosa oral tradition and Zenani’s particular characteristics as an artist within that tradition; Zenani’s personal history and her work as both a storyteller and a healer; and Scheub’s friendship with her and his role in recording her legacy.

Download or read book Shattered Dreams written by Gerald M. Oppenheimer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-06-04 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shattered Dreams? is an oral history of how physicians and nurses in South Africa struggled to ride the tiger of the world's most catastrophic AIDS epidemic. Based on interviews-not only from the great urban centers of Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban-but from provincial centers and rural villages, this book captures the experience of health care workers as they confronted indifference from colleagues, opposition from superiors, unexpected resistance from the country's political leaders, and material scarcity that was both the legacy of Apartheid and a consequence of the global power of the international pharmaceutical industry.

Download or read book Five Hundred Years Rediscovered written by Natalie Swanepoel and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2008-08-01 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the age of the African Renaissance, southern Africa has needed to reinterpret the past in fresh and more appropriate ways. The last 500 years represent a strikingly unexplored and misrepresented period which remains disfigured by colonial/apartheid assumptions, most notably in the way that African societies are depicted as fixed, passive, isolated, un-enterprising and unenlightened. This period is one the most formative in relation to southern Africa’s past while remaining, in many ways, the least known. Key cultural contours of the sub-continent took shape, while in a jagged and uneven fashion some of the features of modern identities emerged. Enormous internal economic innovation and political experimentation was taking place at the same time as expanding European mercantile forces started to press upon southern African shores and its hinterlands. This suggests that interaction, flux and mixing were a strong feature of the period, rather than the homogeneity and fixity proposed in standard historical and archaeological writings. Five Hundred Years Rediscovered represents the first step, taken by a group of archaeologists and historians, to collectively reframe, revitalise and re-examine the last 500 years. By integrating research and developing trans-frontier research networks, the group hopes to challenge thinking about the region’s expanding internal and colonial frontiers, and to broaden current perceptions about southern Africa’s colonial past.