Download or read book The Little Peul written by Mariama Barry and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in Dakar but of Guinean origin, Mariama Barry claims both Senegal and Guinea as "her" countries. This dual background lends her significant and widespread visibility not only because she is the first woman writer of Guinea to have gained extensive international recognition but also because Senegalese women novelists were the first African women writing in French to win international acclaim. Barry's autobiographical novel, La petite Peule (2000), is the story of an early Peul childhood spent in Senegal. The Peul are a primarily nomadic people of western Africa. The book opens with a description of the violence and trauma of a young girl's excision at age six. This is but the first of many trials. After a younger brother is almost killed by a truck, the family moves to La Medina, a Dakar neighborhood where rats gnaw on children's toes at night and where children must struggle with adults in order to fetch water or use the communal toilet. Attending school is the one high point in the girl's life, but even there she must stand up to older bullies. Her family life is completely upset when her mother walks out, leaving her to clean, cook, and care for her younger brothers. Then when her father finds it impossible to cope with the children and with his failing business, he withdraws the little Peul from school and relocates the family once again, this time to his mother's village in the mountains of northern Guinea. Indignant that children have no rights and are lied to and deserted by their own parents, the young protagonist rebels against the idea that women should accept suffering and subjugation to men. She is determined to direct her own life and assert her right to do so.
Download or read book The Sailor from Gibraltar written by Marguerite Duras and published by Open Letter Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disaffected, bored with his career at the French Colonial Ministry (where he has copied out birth and death certificates for eight years), and disgusted by a mistress whose vapid optimism arouses his most violent misogyny, the narrator finds himself at the point of complete breakdown while vacationing in Florence. After leaving his mistress and the Ministry behind forever, he joins the crew of The Gibraltar, a yacht captained by Anna, a beautiful American in perpetual search of her sometime lover, a young man known only as the Sailor from Gibraltar.''
Download or read book African Performance Arts and Political Acts written by Naomi Andre and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2021-10-28 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how performance arts, whether staged or in daily life, regularly interface with political action across the African continent
Download or read book Far from My Father written by Véronique Tadjo and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2014-04-07 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "To attain some sort of universal value," Véronique Tadjo has said, "a piece of work has to go deep into the particular in order to reveal our shared humanity." In Far from My Father, the latest novel from this internationally acclaimed author, a woman returns to the Côte d'Ivoire after her father’s death. She confronts not only unresolved family issues that she had left behind but also questions about her own identity that arise amidst the tensions between traditional and modern worlds. The drama that unfolds tells us much about the evolving role of women, the legacy of polygamy, and the economic challenges of daily life in Abidjan. On a more autobiographical level, the author depicts a daughter’s efforts to come to terms with what she knew and did not know about her father. Set against the backdrop of civil strife that has wracked the Côte d'Ivoire since the turn of the century, this story shows Tadjo’s remarkable ability to inhabit a character’s inner world and emotional landscape while creating a narrative of great historic and cultural dimensions. CARAF Books: Caribbean and African Literature Translated from the French
Download or read book The Last Caravan written by Thurston Clarke and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2016-01-12 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Last Caravan is a powerful and dramatic account of how the great African drought of the early 1970s transformed the nomadic Tuareg, the famous blue-veiled men of the Beau Geste legend. Thurston Clarke recounts their story in his words and theirs, allowing them to come to life as they describe their sufferings and wanderings in search of food and comfort. Their story is a powerful one of ecological disaster, of the courage and nobility of an ancient people facing extinction, and of the struggle to preserve their families and way of life.
Download or read book I Die by This Country written by Fawzia Zouari and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2018-04-11 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first novel available to English readers by Fawzia Zouari, one of the most important North African authors writing today, begins with an emergency crew’s arrival at a Parisian apartment. Two emaciated young women, sisters, are brought out on stretchers. To the crowd of onlookers the women’s condition is mystifying; for the two sisters, this is the inescapable end to a tragic series of events. Inspired by an actual news story from the French headlines, I Die by This Country introduces us to Nacéra and Amira. Casting her mind back in the midst of the opening pages’ upheaval, Nacéra pieces together her fragmentary knowledge of her parents’ lives in rural French Algeria and their immigration to Paris in the years following Algeria’s war for independence. Her memories of how both she and Amira struggled to find their place as children of immigrants reveals the enormous stress of social exclusion and identity conflicts facing immigrant youth. Nacéra and her family yearn for acceptance, but the reader sees this dream becoming increasingly unattainable. Zouari’s frank prose and penetrating storytelling deftly relates the multigenerational experience of Franco-Algerian immigration during the last quarter of the twentieth century. As France continues, like so many western countries, to struggle with questions regarding national identity, immigration, and its colonial past, the experiences depicted in this novel resonate more than ever.
Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Minority Discourses in African Literature written by Tanure Ojaide and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-04-29 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook provides a critical overview of literature dealing with groups of people or regions that suffer marginalization within Africa. The contributors examine a multiplicity of minority discourses expressed in African literature, including those who are culturally, socially, politically, religiously, economically, and sexually marginalized in literary and artistic creations. Chapters and sections of the book are structured to identify major areas of minority articulation of their condition and strategies deployed against the repression, persecution, oppression, suppression, domination, and tyranny of the majority or dominant group. Bringing together diverse perspectives to give a holistic representation of the African reality, this handbook is an important read for scholars and students of comparative and postcolonial literature and African studies.
Download or read book The Other Side of the Sea written by Louis-Philippe Dalembert and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2014-11-11 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Other Side of the Sea, the first novel by this major Haitian author to be translated into English, is riveted on the other shore--whether it is the ancestral Africa that still haunts Haitians, the America to which so many have emigrated, or even that final shore, the uncertain afterlife awaiting us all. With a grandmother and her grandson sharing the narration, this rich and concise tale covers an impressive span of Haitian history and emotion. Too old to leave her veranda, Noubòt reflects on her past, touching on the 1937 Parsley Massacre, in which thousands of Haitians died at the hands of Dominican soldiers, and laments the exodus of so many young people from Haiti, although, ironically, she dreamed of making the trip herself (her name means New Boat in Creole). Her story is juxtaposed with that of her grandson, Jonas, as he suffers the abandonment of friends--including his lover--who emigrated during the Duvalier dictatorships, even feeling an urge to join them. Perhaps most striking is the addition of a third voice--that of an anonymous passenger in steerage recounting a slave ship’s progress to the New World from Africa. This voice from long ago provides a powerful depiction of the sights, sounds, and smells of the Middle Passage and a fascinating counterpoint to the evocations of modern Haiti. CARAF Books: Caribbean and African Literature Translated from French
Download or read book Arabic as a Secret Song written by Leïla Sebbar and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2015-06-17 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The celebrated and highly versatile writer Leïla Sebbar was born in French colonial Algeria but has lived nearly her entire adult life in France, where she is recognized as a major voice on the penetrating effects of colonialism in contemporary society. The dramatic contrast between her past and present is the subject of the nine autobiographical essays collected in this volume. Written between 1978 and 2006, they trace a journey that began in Aflou, Algeria, where her father ran a schoolhouse, and continued to France, where Sebbar traveled, alone, as a graduate student before eventually realizing her powerful creative vision. The pieces collected in this book capture an array of experiences, sensations, and sentiments surrounding the French colonial presence in Algeria and offer an intimate and prismatic reflection on Sebbar’s bicultural upbringing as the child of an Algerian father and French mother. Sebbar paints an unflinching portrait of her original disconnection from her father’s Arabic language and culture, depicting her struggle to revive a cultural heritage that her family had deliberately obscured and to convey the vibrant yet muted Arabic of her father and of Algeria. Looking back from numerous vantage points throughout her life, she presents the complicated and divisive dynamics of being raised "between two shores"--the colonized and the colonizer. CARAF Books: Caribbean and African Literature Translated from French
Download or read book The Eastern Sudanic Languages written by A. N. Tucker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-22 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1940 this book focusses on the three main groups of Eastern Sudanic languages, namely Moru-Madi, Bong-Baka-Bagirmi and Ndogo-Sere. The term 'Eastern Sudanic Languages' is used here primarily in a geographical sense: the dialects in the Southern Sudan form the eastern boundary of sudanic speech, where it borders on the Nilotic wedge which, in turn divides it from Hamitic speech. Despite being described because of their geographical position, the languages discussed in this book will be grouped linguistically under the names of their best known representative dialects. As well as providing some history of the Eastern Sudanic tribes, this book also contains sections on vocabulary and grammar.
Download or read book Lyrical Iowa written by and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book I Am Alive written by Kettly Mars and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2022-09-08 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I Am Alive (Je suis vivant) is celebrated Haitian author Kettly Mars’s latest novel, telling the story of a bourgeois Caribbean family as it wrestles with issues of mental illness, unconventional sexuality, and the difficulty of returning home and rediscovery following the devastating 2010 earthquake. Mars, herself a survivor of the disaster, has crafted a complex, at times disorienting, but ultimately enthralling and powerfully evocative work of literature that adds to her reputation as one of the leading voices of the francophone world. When the mental health facility where he has been living for decades is severely damaged, Alexandre Bernier must return home to Fleur-de-Chêne. His sister Marylène has also come home, leaving behind a flourishing career as a painter in Brussels, and begins to explore her sexuality with her artist’s model Norah, who poses for her in secret. These homecomings are both a lift and a burden to the family matriarch, Éliane, a steadfast and resourceful widow. Over the course of the novel, past and present blend together as each character has an opportunity to narrate the story from their own perspective. In the end, it is the resilience of the Haitian people that allows them to navigate the seismic shifts in their family and in the land.
Download or read book Francophone African Narratives and the Anglo American Book Market written by Vivan Steemers and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-03-01 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, the material circumstances governing the production of African literature have been analyzed from a variety of angles. This study goes one step further by charting the trajectories of a corpus of francophone African (sub-Saharan) narratives subsequently translated into English. It examines the role of various institutional agents and agencies—publishers, preface writers, critics, translators, and literary award committees—involved in the value-making process that accrues visibility to these texts that eventually reach the Anglo-American book market. The author evinces that over time different types of publishers dominated, both within the original publishing space as in the foreign literary field, contingent on their specific mission—be it commercial, ideological or educational—as well as on socioeconomic and political circumstances. The study addresses the influence of the editorial paratextual framing—pandering to specific Western readerships—the potential interventionist function of the translator, and the consecrating mechanisms of literary and translation awards affecting both gender and minority representation. Drawing on the work by key sociologists and translation theorists, the author uses an innovative interdisciplinary methodology to analyze the corpus narratives.
Download or read book D zafi written by Frankétienne and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2018-10-30 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dézafi is no ordinary zombie novel. In the hands of the great Haitian author known simply as Frankétienne, zombification takes on a symbolic dimension that stands as a potent commentary on a country haunted by a history of slavery. Now this dynamic new translation brings this touchstone in Haitian literature—the first book ever published in Haitian Creole—to English-language readers for the first time. Written in a provocative experimental style, with a myriad of voices and combining myth, poetry, allegory, magical realism, and social realism, Dézafi tells the tale of a plantation that is run and worked by zombies for the financial benefit of the living owner. The owner's daughter falls in love with a zombie and facilitates his transformation back into fully human form, leading to a rebellion that challenges the oppressive imbalance that had robbed the workers of their spirit. With the walking dead and bloody cockfights (the "dézafi" of the title) as cultural metaphors for Haitian existence, Frankétienne’s novel is ultimately a powerful allegory of political and social liberation.
Download or read book The Virtues of Abandon written by Charly Coleman and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: France in the eighteenth century glittered, but also seethed, with new goods and new ideas. In the halls of Versailles, the streets of Paris, and the soul of the Enlightenment itself, a vitriolic struggle was being waged over the question of ownership—of property, of position, even of personhood. Those who championed man's possession of material, spiritual, and existential goods faced the successive assaults of radical Christian mystics, philosophical materialists, and political revolutionaries. The Virtues of Abandon traces the aims and activities of these three seemingly disparate groups, and the current of anti-individualism that permeated theology, philosophy, and politics throughout the period. Fired by the desire to abandon the self, men and women sought new ways to relate to God, nature, and nation. They joined illicit mystic cults that engaged in rituals of physical mortification and sexual license, committed suicides in the throes of materialist fatalism, drank potions to induce consciousness-altering dreams, railed against the degrading effects of unfettered consumption, and ultimately renounced the feudal privileges that had for centuries defined their social existence. The explosive denouement was the French Revolution, during which God and king were toppled from their thrones.
Download or read book The Anglophone Cameroon Predicament written by Mufor Atanga and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2011-08-25 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explores the predicament of Anglophone Cameroon from the experiment in federation from 1961 to the political liberalisation struggles of the 1990s to challenge claims of a successful post-independence Cameroonian integration process. Focusing on the perceptions and actions of people in the Anglophone region, Atanga argues that what has come to be called the Anglophone Problem constitutes one of the severest threats to the post-colonial nation-state project in Cameroon. As a linguistic and cultural minority, Anglophone Cameroonians realised that the Francophone-led state and government were keener in assimilation than in implementing the federal and bilingual nation agreed upon at reunification in 1960. Calls for national integration became simply a subterfuge for the assimilation of Anglophones by Francophones who dominated the state and government. The book details the various measures undertaken to exploit the Anglophone regions economy and marginalise its people. Principally the economic structures meant to facilitate self-reliant development were undermined and destroyed. Institutionalised discrimination took the form of the exclusion of Anglophones from positions of real authority, and depriving the region of any meaningful development. With the advent of multi-party politics, most Anglophone Cameroonians increasingly have made vocal demands for a return to a federation, in order to adequately guarantee their rights and recognition for them as a political and cultural minority. Actively encouraged by France, the Francophone-led regime in Cameroon has refused to yield to such demands, despite the grave danger of violent conflict and possible secession.
Download or read book Resistance to Modernization in Africa written by Giordano Sivini and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-28 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giordano Sivini has been an international aid consultant for over twenty-five years. Here he channels a 1960s and 1970s idealistic political commitment into fieldwork and the sphere of development from the 1980s to the present. Sivini writes with both passion and cynicism about his experiences with the numerous African aid projects he has been involved with over the years.While the fathers of independence of British and French decolonization wanted to change the colonial conditions of exploitation, Sivini finds that their good intentions have been shipwrecked. Ironically, the longer Sivini served as an aid consultant, the more he found himself dismayed at the various projects that were under way or slated to begin. He perceived some of the projects as grotesque, and, almost all ineffective. The money was wasted on such ventures not because of a particular government's interest in the social effects they would have on the local populace, but because of the direct and indirect benefits the government would receive.Sivini sees international development aid as its own market: development is a commodity that takes the form of large and small projects, and is traded for loans and gifts to generate political and economic advantages for the institutional participants in the exchange. Ultimately, governmental and aid projects often stimulate resistance from the local populace as agencies upset their usual system of production by regimenting peasants to produce for the market, then appropriate the cattle of nomadic pastoralists, villagizing and resettling peasants in areas of high productivity, and exploiting laborers in large farms. This creates social disintegration, mass migration in urban informal economy, and poverty.This is a dynamic and moving analysis of foreign aid that will be of interest to students of African studies, governmental programs, rural development, and political economy.
