Download or read book The Critical Imagination in African Literature written by Maik Nwosu and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-09 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In African studies, the “Echeruoan ideal” is understood as an intervention or intellectual engagement characterized by a broadness of vision as well as a depth of analysis. The essays gathered in this volume celebrate that ideal and honor Echeruo’s contribution to the African intellectual tradition. Editors Nwosu and Obiwu explore the driving forces in the literature of Africa and the African diaspora. Contributors examine such themes as migration and exile, trauma and repression, violence and rebellion, and gender and human rights. Showcasing a rich diversity of cultural and academic backgrounds, this volume inaugurates a new paradigm for further examination of African literature as world literature and for analysis of African literature through the lens of psychoanalytic semiotics. While varied in modes of inquiry, the essays are unified in their ambition to explore new theoretical directions, reinvigorating the conversation around how African literature is read and studied.
Download or read book The African Imagination written by F. Abiola Irele and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001-09-27 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays from eminent scholar F. Abiola Irele provides a comprehensive formulation of what he calls an "African imagination" manifested in the oral traditions and modern literature of Africa and the Black Diaspora. The African Imagination includes Irele's probing critical readings of the works of Chinua Achebe, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Amadou Hampat'e B^a, and Ahmadou Kourouma, among others, as well as examinations of the growing presence of African writing in the global literary marketplace and the relationship between African intellectuals and the West. Taken as a whole, this volume makes a superb introduction to African literature and to the work of one of its leading interpreters.
Download or read book The Comic Imagination in Modern African Literature and Cinema written by Maik Nwosu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-05 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a seminal study that significantly expands the interdisciplinary discourse on African literature and cinema by exploring Africa’s under-visited carnivalesque poetics of laughter. Focusing on modern African literature as well as contemporary African cinema, particularly the direct-to-video Nigerian film industry known as Nollywood, the book examines the often-neglected aesthetics of the African comic imagination. In modern African literature, which sometimes creatively traces a path back to African folklore, and in Nollywood — with its aesthetic relationship to Onitsha Market Literature — the pertinent styles range from comic simplicitas to comic magnitude with the facilitation of language, characterization, and plot by a poetics of laughter or lightness as an important aspect of style. The poetics at work is substantially carnivalesque, a comic preference or tendency that is attributable, in different contexts, to a purposeful comic sensibility or an unstructured but ingrained or virtual comic mode. In the best instances of this comic vision, the characteristic laughter or lightness can facilitate a revaluation or reappreciation of the world, either because of the aesthetic structure of signification or the consequent chain of signification. This referentiality or progressive signification is an important aspect of the poetics of laughter as the African comic imagination variously reflects, across genres, both the festival character of comedy and its pedagogical value. This book marks an important contribution to African literature, postcolonial literature, world literature, comic imagination, poetics, critical theory, and African cinema.
Download or read book Postcolonial Imagination and Moral Representations in African Literature and Culture written by Chielozona Eze and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2011 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The postcolonial African culture, as it is discoursed in the academia, is largely influenced by Africa's response to colonialism. To the degree that it is a response, it is to considerably reactive, and lacks forceful moral incentives for social critical consciousness and nation-building. Quite on the contrary, it allows especially African political leaders to luxuriate in the delusions of moral rectitude, imploring, at will, the evil of imperialism as a buffer to their disregard of their people. This book acknowledges the social and psychological devastations of colonialism on the African world. It, however, argues that the totality of African intellectual response to colonialism and Western imperialism is equally, if not more, damaging to the African world. In what ways does the average African leader, indeed, the average African, judge and respond to his world? How does he conceive of his responsibility towards his community and society? The most obvious impact of African response to colonialism is the implicit search for a pristine, innocent paradigm in, for instance, literary, philosophical, social, political and gender studies. This search has its own moral implication in the sense that it makes the taking of responsibility on individual and social level highly difficult. Focusing on the moral impact of responses to colonialism in Africa and the African Diaspora, this book analyzes the various manifestations of delusions of moral innocence that has held the African leadership from the onerous task of bearing responsibility for their countries; it argues that one of the ways to recast the African leaders' responsibility towards Africa is to let go, on the one hand, the gaze of the West, and on the other, of the search for the innocent African experience and cultures. Relying on the insights of thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Wole Soyinka, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Achille Mbembe and Wolgang Welsch, this book suggests new approaches to interpreting African experiences. It discusses select African works of fiction as a paradigm for new interpretations of African experiences.
Download or read book A Future for Africa written by Emmanuel M. Katongole and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Civil war, famine, genocide, AIDS--the peoples of Africa have endured horrific human tragedies. Those crises plus widespread economic, political, and social instability have combined to produce what some consider a dire and nearly hopeless situation. Even as this book was going to press, the leaders of the G-8 nations were meeting to talk about what could be done to "aid Africa" in these critical times. A careful look at history would indicate that the answer must come from within Africa and from the African people themselves, not from other nations or the economic programs and solutions they propose. The rapid rise of a Christian social ethics movement as an alternative perspective focused precisely on addressing Africa's challenges using the spiritual resources of its own people is providing a hopeful solution and a timely and powerful coping mechanism for African peoples. One of the leaders of this movement is Emmanuel Katongole, a Catholic priest from Uganda. In A Future for Africa, Katongole wrestles with concrete problems like the AIDS epidemic and widespread military conflicts, as well as fundamental, systemic ones, like poverty, corruption, and tribalism. He then offers faith-filled solutions based on the power and example of Christian community and Christian moral imagination. Katongole's radical message is that a political ethic based on Christian principles as taught in the Scriptures is the necessary foundation for healing, reconciliation, and rebuilding the continent.
Download or read book Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa written by John L. Comaroff and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this important new collection explore the diverse, unexpected, and controversial ways in which the idea of civil society has recently entered into populist politics and public debate throughout Africa. In a substantial introduction, anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff offer a critical theoretical analysis of the nature and deployment of the concept—and the current debates surrounding it. Building on this framework, the contributors investigate the "problem" of civil society across their regions of expertise, which cover the continent. Drawing creatively on one another's work, they examine the impact of colonial ideology, postcoloniality, and development practice on discourses of civility, the workings of everyday politics, the construction of new modes of selfhood, and the pursuit of moral community. Incisive and original, the book shows how struggles over civil society in Africa reveal much about larger historical forces in the post-Cold War era. It also makes a strong case for the contribution of historical anthropology to contemporary discourses on the rise of a "new world order."
Download or read book The African Imagination written by Professor of African French and Comparative Literature F Abiola Irele and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2001 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: F. Abiola Irele is an expert on the anglophone and francophone traditions in post-colonial African literature. This collection of his essays examines African literary traditions in the broad sense, and places the work of individual authors in context.
Download or read book Postcolonial African Writers written by Siga Fatima Jagne and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This reference book surveys the richness of postcolonial African literature. The volume begins with an introductory essay on postcolonial criticism and African writing, then presents alphabetically arranged profiles of some 60 writers, including Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Doris Lessing, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Tahbar Ben Jelloun, among others. Each entry includes a brief biography, a discussion of major works and themes that appear in the author's writings, an overview of the critical response to the author's work, and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. These profiles are written by expert contributors and reflect many different perspectives. The volume concludes with a selected general bibliography of the most important critical works on postcolonial African literature.
Download or read book The African Imagination written by F. Abiola Irele and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: F. Abiola Irele is an expert on the anglophone and francophone traditions in post-colonial African literature. This collection of his essays examines African literary traditions in the broad sense, and places the work of individual authors in context.
Download or read book Critical Theory and African Literature written by Ernest Emenyo̲nu and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Critical Evaluation of African Literature written by Edgar Wright and published by Heinemann Educational Publishers. This book was released on 1973 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Playing in the Dark written by Toni Morrison and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-07-24 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race—and promises to change the way we read American literature—from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison "reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." Her brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. Written with the artistic vision that has earned the Nobel Prize-winning author a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark is an invaluable read for avid Morrison admirers as well as students, critics, and scholars of American literature.
Download or read book Preserving the Landscape of Imagination written by Raoul Granqvist and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 1997 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Routledge Handbook of African Literature written by Moradewun Adejunmobi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-13 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed an expansion of critical approaches to African literature. The Routledge Handbook of African Literature is a one-stop publication bringing together studies of African literary texts that embody an array of newer approaches applied to a wide range of works. This includes frameworks derived from food studies, utopian studies, network theory, eco-criticism, and examinations of the human/animal interface alongside more familiar discussions of postcolonial politics. Every chapter is an original research essay written by a broad spectrum of scholars with expertise in the subject, providing an application of the most recent insights into analysis of particular topics or application of particular critical frameworks to one or more African literary works. The handbook will be a valuable interdisciplinary resource for scholars and students of African literature, African culture, postcolonial literature and literary analysis. Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781138713864_oachapter4.pdf
Download or read book African Literature and the Future written by Gbemisola Adeoti and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many African countries achieved independence from their colonisers over five decades ago, but the people and the continent largely remain mere spectators in the arena of their own dance. The post-independence states are supposed to be sovereign, but the levers of economic and political powers still reside in the donor states. Not in many fora is the complex reality that defines Africa more trenchantly articulated than in imaginative literature produced about and on the continent. This is the crux of the essays collected in African Literature and the Future. The book reflects on Africas past and present, addressing anxieties about the future through the epistemological lens of literature. The contributors peep ahead from a backward glance. They dissect the trend and tenor of politics and their impact on the socio-cultural and economic development of the continent as portrayed in imaginative writings over the years. One salient feature of African literature is the close affinity between art and politics in its polemics. This is well established in all the six essays in the book as the authors stress the interconnections between literature and society in their textual analyses. On the whole, there is an overwhelming feeling of angst and pessimism, but the authors perceive a glimmer of hope despite daunting odds, under different conditions. Thus, they depict the plausible fate of Africa in the twenty-first century, as informed by its ancient and recent past, gleaned from primary texts.
Download or read book The Comic Imagination in Modern African Literature and Cinema written by Maik Nwosu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-05 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a seminal study that significantly expands the interdisciplinary discourse on African literature and cinema by exploring Africa’s under-visited carnivalesque poetics of laughter. Focusing on modern African literature as well as contemporary African cinema, particularly the direct-to-video Nigerian film industry known as Nollywood, the book examines the often-neglected aesthetics of the African comic imagination. In modern African literature, which sometimes creatively traces a path back to African folklore, and in Nollywood — with its aesthetic relationship to Onitsha Market Literature — the pertinent styles range from comic simplicitas to comic magnitude with the facilitation of language, characterization, and plot by a poetics of laughter or lightness as an important aspect of style. The poetics at work is substantially carnivalesque, a comic preference or tendency that is attributable, in different contexts, to a purposeful comic sensibility or an unstructured but ingrained or virtual comic mode. In the best instances of this comic vision, the characteristic laughter or lightness can facilitate a revaluation or reappreciation of the world, either because of the aesthetic structure of signification or the consequent chain of signification. This referentiality or progressive signification is an important aspect of the poetics of laughter as the African comic imagination variously reflects, across genres, both the festival character of comedy and its pedagogical value. This book marks an important contribution to African literature, postcolonial literature, world literature, comic imagination, poetics, critical theory, and African cinema.
Download or read book Futurism and the African Imagination written by Dike Okoro and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-31 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates how African authors and artists have explored themes of the future and technology within their works. Afrofuturism was coined in the 1990s as a means of exploring the intersection of African diaspora culture with technology, science and science fiction. However, this book argues that literature and other arts within Africa have always reflected on themes of futurism, across diverse forms of speculative writing (including science fiction), images, spirituality, myth, magical realism, the supernatural, performance and other forms of oral resources. This book reflects on themes of African futurism across a range of literary and artistic works, also investigating how problems such as racism, sexism, social injustice and postcolonialism are reflected in these narratives. Chapters cover authors, artists, movements and performers such Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Elechi Amadi, Mazisi Kunene, Nnedi Okorafor, Lauren Beukes, Leslie Nneka Arimah and the New African Movement. The book also includes a range of original interviews with prominent authors and artists, including Tanure Ojaide, Lauren Beukes, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Benjamin Kwakye, Ntongela Masilela and Bruce Onobrakpeya. Interdisciplinary in its approach, this book will be an important resource for researchers across the fields of African literature, philosophy, culture and politics.
