Download or read book The Word Behind Bars and the Paradox of Exile written by Kofi Anyidoho and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Word Behind Bars and the Paradox of Exile grew out of a workshop that brought together a group of African writers, including many who suffered imprisonment in their home countries and/or exile abroad. For some, the workshop prompted their first attempt to write about their experiences and to compare them with others whose life and art had come under similar constraints. This collection represents their assessments--in prose, poetry, and drama--of the many facets of the exile experience. The papers are as graphic, eloquent, and thought-provoking as they are varied in their subject matter and mode of communication. A powerful fusion of the personal and the political, The Word Behind Bars and the Paradox of Exile offers a timely perspective on conditions of literary production in many parts of Africa today.
Download or read book Representing Minorities written by Soumia Boutkhil and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-01-14 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The papers in this volume include not only the traditional view of what constitutes a minority but also any individual, or group recalcitrant and reluctant, not to say resistant, to the generalized lobotomy operated by the rampant uniformisation of cultures around the world. For in the ruins of “the end of history” and its context of violence and Manichean politics, any opposition to the “general consensus” could be dismissed as anti-historical and atavistic. The objective of the book is precisely to counter such rhetoric and underscore the necessity of cultural diversity and the right to difference. This book contains what can amount to a critical response to the current context of confusion surrounding the postmodern condition that arguably dominates most societies. It stresses the issue of ethics not only in world politics but also in literature and criticism which are the main focus here. In fact, the interest in minority issues is in itself an ethical concern that contributes to give substance to the idea that postmodernity opens the gates for the long-suppressed identities and sensibilities to emerge and demand recognition. This volume intends, therefore, to contribute to the recent ethical turn that seems to take place in scholarship worldwide. Operated mainly by what is referred to as postcolonial studies this shift turned literary criticism and cultural studies into the site where a sense of literature can be envisioned that is not at all universalist, or reflecting the hegemonic temptations of the new world order. It seeks to present a patchwork of minor literatures, in the sense that besides the “major” literatures/languages, there are myriads of minor voices that express dissimilarity oftentimes under the umbrella of those major languages and literatures themselves.
Download or read book The New African Diaspora in North America written by Kwadwo Konadu-Agyemang and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New African Diaspora in North America brings together sociologists, social workers, geographers, economists, anthropologists and others to explore the African immigrant experience from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The contributors shed light on the factors behind the increasing wave in African immigration to the U.S. and Canada, the socio-economic characteristics of African immigrants, their spatial distribution, obstacles, and contributions. Despite their increasing presence, African immigrant groups in the U.S. and Canada have engendered relatively little scholarly research on their pre- and post-migration experience. This collection helps fill that void, and will be valuable reading for anyone interested in African Diaspora studies.
Download or read book Readings in Syrian Prison Literature written by R. Shareah Taleghani and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-21 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The simple act of inscription, both minute and epic, can be a powerful tool to bear witness and give voice to those who are oppressed, silenced, and forgotten. In the eras of Hafiz al-Asad and his son Bashar, Syrian political dissidents have written extensively about their experiences of detention, both while in prison and afterwards. This body of writing, largely untranslated into English, is essential to understanding the oppositional political culture among dissidents since the 1970s—a culture that laid the foundation for the 2011 Syrian Revolution. The emergence of prison literature as a specific genre helped articulate opposition to authoritarian states, including the Asad regime. However, the significance of Syrian prison literature goes beyond a form of witnessing, expressing creative opposition, and illuminating the larger cultural and historical backstory of the Syrian uprising. Prison literature, in all its diversity, challenges the narrative structures and conventional language of human rights. In doing so, prison literature has played an essential role in generating the "experimental shift" in Arabic literature since the 1960s. Taleghani’s groundbreaking work explores prison writing’s critical role in resistance movements in Syria, the evolution of Arabic literature, and the development of a global human rights.
Download or read book Complicities written by Mark Sanders and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2002-12-25 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Complicities explores the complicated—even contradictory—position of the intellectual who takes a stand against political policies and ideologies. Mark Sanders argues that intellectuals cannot avoid some degree of complicity in what they oppose and that responsibility can only be achieved with their acknowledgment of this complicity. He examines the role of South African intellectuals by looking at the work of a number of key figures—both supporters and opponents of apartheid. Sanders gives detailed analyses of widely divergent thinkers: Afrikaner nationalist poet N. P. van Wyk Louw, Drum writer Bloke Modisane, Xhosa novelist A. C. Jordan, Afrikaner dissident Breyten Breytenbach, and Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko. Drawing on theorists including Derrida, Sartre, and Fanon, and paying particular attention to the linguistic intricacy of the literary and political texts considered, Sanders shows how complicity emerges as a predicament for intellectuals across the ideological and social spectrum. Through discussions of the colonial intellectuals Olive Schreiner and Sol T. Plaatje and of post-apartheid feminist critiques of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Complicities reveals how sexual difference joins with race to further complicate issues of collusion. Complicities sheds new light on the history and literature of twentieth-century South Africa as it weighs into debates about the role of the intellectual in public life.
Download or read book Oliver Tambo written by Luli Callinicos and published by New Africa Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 692 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Updated and revised biography that explores the complex relationship between Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo, and Tambo "s influence on the Mandela we revere today.
Download or read book African Literature and the Future written by Adeoti, Gbemisola and published by CODESRIA. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 112 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 Africa's 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 Exiled in East Germany written by Sebastian Pampuch and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-04-22 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The presence of Africans in the German Democratic Republic is very rarely thought of in connection with the experience of exile. Instead, Africans in the GDR are predominantly viewed through the prism of educational and labor migration. While such research has undoubtedly produced valuable insights, it often fails to adequately account for the implicit Eurocentrism, methodological nationalism, and anti-communist bias inherent in Western knowledge production. This study offers a different approach. Through biographical portrayal, it unfolds the life stories of African freedom fighters who lived in exile in the GDR and, ultimately, remained in reunified Germany, with the main case study being a Malawian activist who was expelled from East to West Berlin. Recounting his experiences along with those of some South African exiles, chief among them a former medical worker for the ANC’s armed wing, the study ethnographically reconstructs the multiple entanglements between the “Second” and “Third” worlds from the vantage point of the politically displaced within the concrete historical contexts of African decolonization, the struggle against the Malawian Banda dictatorship, and the struggle against South African apartheid.
Download or read book Nation power and dissidence in third generation Nigerian poetry in English written by Egya, Sule E. and published by NISC (Pty) Ltd. This book was released on 2019-04-15 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nation, Power and Dissidence in Third Generation Nigerian Poetry in English is a theoretical and analytical survey of the poetry that emerged in Nigeria in the 1980s. Hurt into poetry, the poets collectively raise aesthetics of resistance that dramatises the nationalist imagination bridging the gap between poetry and politics in Nigeria. The emerging generation of poetic voices raises an outcry against the repressive military regimes of the 1980s and 1990s. Ingrained in the tradition of protest literature in Africa, the third-generation poetry is presented here as part of the cultural struggles that unseat military despotism and envisage a democratic society. Not only does Egya place emphasis on the poetry's interaction with the culture and history of military oppression in Nigeria − an interaction that sees the poetry not only feeding from the history but also feeding it; he also contextualises the generational consciousness of these poets. Scholars of Nigerian literature, African literature, and researchers interested in world literatures will welcome Nation, Power and Dissidence in Third Generation Nigerian Poetry in English as an invaluable contribution to indigenous knowledge, critical studies in Africa, and the rehabilitation and production of an African aesthetic.
Download or read book Literary Environments written by Britta Olinder and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2006 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Selection of the literary articles presented at the 7th triennial conference of the Nordic Association for Canadian Studies ... held in Stockholm, Sweden, in August 2002"--P. 9.
Download or read book Generations of Dissent written by Alexa Firat and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-23 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Situated in the fields of contemporary literary and cultural studies, the ten essays collected in Generations of Dissent shed light on the artistic creativity, cultural production, intellectual movements, and acts of political dissidence across the Middle East and North Africa. Born of the contributors’ research on dissidence and state co-option in a variety of artistic and creative fields, the volume’s core themes reflect the notion that the recent Arab uprisings did not appear in a cultural, political, or historical vacuum. Rather than focus on how protestors "finally" broke the walls of fear created by authoritarian regimes in the region, these essays show that the uprisings were rooted in multiple generations and various acts of resistance decades prior to 2010–11. Firat and Taleghani’s volume maps the complicated trajectories of artistic and creative dissent across time and space, showing how artists have challenged institutions and governments over the past six decades.
Download or read book Irish Migrants in New Communities written by Mícheál Ó hAodha and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2014-05-16 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Irish migrants in new communities: Seeking the Fair Land? comprises the second collection of essays by these editors exploring fresh aspects and perspectives on the subject of the Irish diaspora. This volume, edited by Máirtín Ó Catháin and Mícheál Ó hAodha, develops many of the oral history themes of the first book and concentrates more on issues surrounding the adaptation of migrants to new or host environments and cultures. These new places often have a jarring effect, as well as a welcoming air, and the Irish bring their own interpretations, hostilities, and suspicions, all of which are explored in a fascinating and original number of new perspectives.
Download or read book At Home In Diaspora written by Wendy W. Walters and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although he never lived in Harlem, Chester Himes commented that he experienced “a sort of pure homesickness” while creating the Harlem-set detective novels from his self-imposed exile in Paris. Through writing, Himes constructed an imaginary home informed both by nostalgia for a community he never knew and a critique of the racism he left behind in the United States. Half a century later, Michelle Cliff wrote about her native Jamaica from the United States, articulating a positive Caribbean feminism that at the same time acknowledged Jamaica’s homophobia and color prejudice. In At Home in Diaspora, Wendy Walters investigates the work of Himes, Cliff, and three other twentieth-century black international writers—Caryl Phillips, Simon Njami, and Richard Wright—who have lived in and written from countries they do not call home. Unlike other authors in exile, those of the African diaspora are doubly displaced, first by the discrimination they faced at home and again by their life abroad. Throughout, Walters suggests that in the absence of a recoverable land of origin, the idea of diaspora comes to represent a home that is not singular or exclusionary. In this way, writing in exile is much more than a literary performance; it is a profound political act. Wendy W. Walters is assistant professor of literature at Emerson College.
Download or read book Die Romische Republik written by EPUB 2-3 and published by Infobase Learning. This book was released on 2015-04-22 with total page 1899 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a comprehensive introduction to 20th- and 21st-century world poets and their most famous, most distinctive, and most influential poems.
Download or read book Black African Literature in English 1997 1999 written by Bernth Lindfors and published by James Currey Publishers. This book was released on 2003 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume lists the work produced on anglophone black African literature between 1997 and 1999. This bibliographic work is a continuation of the highly acclaimed earlier volumes compiled by Bernth Lindfors. Containing about 10,000 entries, some of which are annotated to identify the authors discussed, it covers books, periodical articles, papers in edited collections and selective coverage of other relevant sources.
Download or read book Critical Engagements on African Literature written by Abba A. Abba and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond the critical examination of Isidore Diala’s award-winning poetry and drama, the essays in this collection offer fresh insights on the complex methodological and theoretical patterns underlying the readings of African literary landscapes. This is the first book to devote considerable attention to the study of Diala’s creative works The Pyre (drama) and The Lure of Ash (poetry). The majority of the contributors here are selected from among the finest of Diala’s former teachers, colleagues and students who know him very closely. The collection addresses fertile areas of African literary expression, such as the relationship between literature and national history, African ritual aesthetics; affirmation, denial and ambivalence as products of social constructions; and exile, migration and home-coming. Contributions also explore poetry and poetic truths; semiotics; anticolonial revolutions and postcolonial implosions; oil politics; discontent and militancy; and feminism and gender politics. The book stands out among its peers, and offers great insights to scholars, researchers and teachers working in the fields of African literature, cultures and aesthetics.
Download or read book Transnational Narratives from the Caribbean written by Elvira Pulitano and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-10 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a timely intervention in current debates on diaspora and diasporic identity by affirming the importance of narrative as a discursive mode to understand the human face of contemporary migrations and dislocations. Focusing on the Caribbean double-diaspora, Pulitano offers a close-reading of a range of popular works by four well-known writers currently living in the United States: Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, Edwidge Danticat, and Caryl Phillips. Navigating the map of fictional characters, testimonial accounts, and autobiographical experiences, Pulitano draws attention to the lived experience of contemporary diasporic formations. The book offers a provocative re-thinking of socio-scientific analyses of diaspora by discussing the embodied experience of contemporary diasporic communities, drawing on disciplines such as Caribbean, Postcolonial, Diaspora, and Indigenous Studies along with theories on "border thinking" and coloniality/modernity. Contesting restrictive, national, and linguistic boundaries when discussing literature originating from the Caribbean, Pulitano situates the transnational location of Caribbean-born writers within current debates of Transnational American Studies and investigates the role of immigrant writers in discourses of race, ethnicity, citizenship, and belonging. Exploring the multifarious intersections between home, exile, migration and displacement, the book makes a significant contribution to memory and trauma studies, human rights debates, and international law, aiming at a wide range of scholars and specialized agents beyond the strictly literary circle. This volume affirms the humanity of personal stories and experiences against the invisibility of immigrant subjects in most theoretical accounts of diaspora and migration.
