Download or read book Culture Society and Politics in Modern African Literature written by Tanure Ojaide and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gap exists between African literary texts and their interpretation for many scholars and readers of African literature today. Unfamiliar with the cultures, societies, and politics of Africa, some readers bring a perspective to the work that is at odds with the worldview embodied by the works themselves. In Culture, Society, and Politics in Modern African Literature, Ojaide and Obi investigate the paradoxes and ironies of a literature produced in Africa and interpreted by readers and scholars (African and non-African) who are living outside the continent. Starting from the premise that literature is a cultural production of a people, they look at some of the factors important for the interpretation and analysis of African literature, including the colonial experience of Africans, the realities of the post-independence era, and the economic conditions of African states. This book, the collaborative work of a literary scholar-poet and a sociologist, addresses the general and specific problems in the understanding of African literature and will be of interest to students and scholars, as well as to general audiences. "In sum, the individual chapters cover a wide range within African literature, geographically and linguistically, with a special focus on current trends in creative production and criticism. The book is well written, with clear and concise explanations of critical terms and concepts." -- African Studies Review

Download or read book Indigeneity Globalization and African Literature written by Tanure Ojaide and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-10-07 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature remains one of the few disciplines that reflect the experiences, sensibility, worldview, and living realities of its people. Contemporary African literature captures the African experience in history and politics in a multiplicity of ways. Politics itself has come to intersect and impact on most, if not all, aspects of the African reality. This relationship of literature with African people’s lives and condition forms the setting of this study. Tanure Ojaide’s Indigeneity, Globalization, and African Literature: Personally Speaking belongs with a well-established tradition of personal reflections on literature by African creative writer-critics. Ojaide’s contribution brings to the table the perspective of what is now recognized as a “second generation” writer, a poet, and a concerned citizen of Nigeria’s Niger Delta area.

Download or read book Youth and Popular Culture in Africa written by Paul Ugor and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2021 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The edited collection focuses on the links between young people and African popular culture. It explores popular culture produced and consumed by young people in contemporary Africa. And by "culture," we mean all kinds of texts or representations-visual, oral, written, performative, fictional, social, and virtual-created by African youth, mostly about their lives and their immediate societies, and for themselves, but also consumed by the larger public, and shared locally and globally. We proceed from the premise that cultural texts not only function as "social facts" as Karin Barber argues, but that they double as "commentaries upon, and interpretations of, social facts. They are part of social reality, but they also take up an attitude to social reality" (2007, 04). So, the work focuses specifically on what African youth produce as popular culture, under what conditions or contexts they produce such work, how they produce those texts, why they produce them, the aesthetic dimensions of these texts as cultural artifacts, and why these textual practices matter as social facts, as interpretive acts, and as cultural symbols of the general cultural activism of young people in a rapidly changing world, a world where the global cultural economy is the prime terrain for the relentless struggles over the meanings that come to shape political-economic and social systems"--

Download or read book Reframing Contemporary Africa written by Peyi Soyinka-Airewele and published by CQ Press. This book was released on 2010-01-19 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is impossible to study Africa without understanding the debate about how to study Africa. At last, a book showcases the complexities and paradoxes of Africa’s recent and more distant history, while avoiding simplistic, Eurocentric conceptualizations of “black Africa.” With this book, Peyi Soyinka-Aiwerele and Rita Kiki Edozie offer students the background and perspectives they need to comprehend the dynamics of the continent as well as a clear path through the current literature and scholarly debate. With a cross-disciplinary approach that features political, historical, and economic analysis as well as popular culture and sociological views on contemporary issues, Reframing Contemporary Africa provides an unparalleled breadth of coverage. Essays written by a distinguished and international group of scholars—including William Ackah, Pius Adesanmi, Susan Craddock, Caroline Elkins, Siba Grovogui, Mahmood Mamdani, Mutua Makau, Celestin Monga, Wole Soyinka, and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza—are designed to distill original scholarship for undergraduate readers. Each contribution helps students engage with the work and arguments of luminaries while exposing them to renowned African thinkers. Contributors deliver analysis that allows students to see beyond the clichés commonly presented in the media (and even in scholarship), and helpful section openers by Soyinka-Airewele and Edozie frame forthcoming chapters, giving important thematic and historical context. Reframing Contemporary Africa will certainly provoke new debate and reflection, not merely about African issues and politics, but also about the West and its framing of Africa.

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 Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique written by Seyla Benhabib and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book of tightly woven dialogues engages prominent thinkers in a discussion about the role of culture-broadly construed-in contemporary society and politics. Faced with the conceptual inflation of the notion of 'culture, ' which now imposes itself as an indispensable issue in contemporary moral and political debates, these dynamic exchanges seek to rethink culture and critique beyond the schematic models that have often predominated, such as the opposition between "mainstream multiculturalism" and the "clash of civilizations." Prefaced by an introduction relating current cultural debates to the critical theory tradition, this book examines the politics of culture and the spirit of critique from three different vantage points. To begin, Gabriel Rockhill and Alfredo Gomez-Muller provide a stage-setting dialogue, followed by discussions with two major representatives of contemporary critical theory: Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser. Working at the horizons of this tradition, Judith Butler, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Cornel West then provide important critical perspectives on cultural politics. The book's concluding section engages with Michael Sandel and Will Kymlicka, who work out of the Rawlsian tradition yet are uniquely concerned with the issue of culture, broadly understood. The epilogue, an interview with Axel Honneth, returns to the core issue of critical theory in cultural politics. Ranging from recent developments and progressive interventions in critical theory to dialogues that incorporate its insights into larger discussions of social and political philosophy, this book sharpens old critical tools while developing new strategies for rethinking the role of 'culture' in contemporary society.

Download or read book The Rise of the African Novel written by Mukoma Wa Ngugi and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2018-03-27 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engaging questions of language, identity, and reception to restore South African and diaspora writing to the African literary tradition

Download or read book Against Decolonisation written by Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò and published by Hurst Publishers. This book was released on 2022-06-30 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decolonisation has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West’s direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing ‘morality’ or ‘authenticity’; it suffocates African thought and denies African agency. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò fiercely rejects the indiscriminate application of ‘decolonisation’ to everything from literature, language and philosophy to sociology, psychology and medicine. He argues that the decolonisation industry, obsessed with cataloguing wrongs, is seriously harming scholarship on and in Africa. He finds ‘decolonisation’ of culture intellectually unsound and wholly unrealistic, conflating modernity with coloniality, and groundlessly advocating an open-ended undoing of global society’s foundations. Worst of all, today’s movement attacks its own cause: ‘decolonisers’ themselves are disregarding, infantilising and imposing values on contemporary African thinkers. This powerful, much-needed intervention questions whether today’s ‘decolonisation’ truly serves African empowerment. Táíwò’s is a bold challenge to respect African intellectuals as innovative adaptors, appropriators and synthesisers of ideas they have always seen as universally relevant.

Download or read book African Politics written by Ian Taylor and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Africa is a continent of 54 countries and over a billion people. However, despite the rich diversity of the African experience, it is striking that continuations and themes seem to be reflected across the continent, particularly south of the Sahara. Questions of underdevelopment, outside exploitation, and misrule are characteristic of many - if not most-states in Sub-Saharan Africa. In this Very Short Introduction Ian Taylor explores how politics is practiced on the African continent, considering the nature of the state in Sub-Saharan Africa and why its state structures are generally weaker than elsewhere in the world. Exploring the historical and contemporary factors which account for Africa's underdevelopment, he also analyses why some African countries suffer from high levels of political violence while others are spared. Unveilling the ways in which African state and society actually function beyond the formal institutional façade, Taylor discusses how external factors - both inherited and contemporary - act upon the continent. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Download or read book A Companion to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie written by Ernest Emenyo̲nu and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2017 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frontcover -- Contents -- Notes on Contributors -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1. Narrating the Past: Orality, History & the Production of Knowledge in the Works of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -- 2. Deconstructing Binary Oppositions of Gender in Purple Hibiscus: A Review of Religious/Traditional Superiority & Silence -- 3. Adichie & the West African Voice: Women & Power in Purple Hibiscus -- 4. Reconstructing Motherhood: A Mutative Reality in Purple Hibiscus -- 5. Ritualized Abuse in Purple Hibiscus -- 6. Dining Room & Kitchen: Food-Related Spaces & their Interfaces with the Female Body in Purple Hibiscus -- 7. The Paradox of Vulnerability: The Child Voice in Purple Hibiscus -- 8. 'Fragile Negotiations': Olanna's Melancholia in Half of a Yellow Sun -- 9. The Biafran War & the Evolution of Domestic Space in Half of a Yellow Sun -- 10. Corruption in Post-Independence Politics: Half of a Yellow Sun as a Reflection of A Man of the People -- 11. Contrasting Gender Roles in Male-Crafted Fiction with Half of a Yellow Sun -- 12. 'A Kind of Paradise': Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Claim to Agency, Responsibility & Writing -- 13. Dislocation, Cultural Memory & Transcultural Identity in Select Stories from The Thing Around Your Neck -- 14. 'Reverse Appropriations' & Transplantation in Americanah -- 15. Revisiting Double Consciousness & Relocating the Self in Americanah -- 16. Adichie's Americanah: A Migrant Bildungsroman -- 17. 'Hairitage' Matters: Transitioning & the Third Wave Hair Movement in 'Hair', 'Imitation' & Americanah -- Appendix: The Works of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -- Index

Download or read book New Black and African Writing Volume 2 written by Smith, Charles and published by Handel Books. This book was released on 2015-10-07 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW BLACK AND AFRICAN WRITING Vol. 2 is our concluding edition of a series that has featured many critical entries and reviews on canonical African fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction. This second edition explores intricacies of relationships and associations, the recurrent tropes for the interpretation and understanding of historical connections, and the shaping of thought brought into fictional and cultural renditions that are evolving and continually reassessed although around the periphery of older canons. The quest for a meaningful heuristic for approaching contemporary arts is almost totally redefined by the contributions of eminent scholars of our time whose balancing and correspondence create room for complementarity of values and toward cultural understanding and value appreciation in contemporary society.

Download or read book In This Land of Plenty written by Benjamin Talton and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2019-08-23 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On August 7, 1989, Congressman Mickey Leland departed on a flight from Addis Ababa, with his thirteen-member delegation of Ethiopian and American relief workers and policy analysts, bound for Ethiopia's border with Sudan. This was Leland's seventh official humanitarian mission in his nearly decade-long drive to transform U.S. policies toward Africa to conform to his black internationalist vision of global cooperation, antiracism, and freedom from hunger. Leland's flight never arrived at its destination. The plane crashed, with no survivors. When Leland embarked on that delegation, he was a forty-four-year-old, deeply charismatic, fiercely compassionate, black, radical American. He was also an elected Democratic representative of Houston's largely African American and Latino Eighteenth Congressional District. Above all, he was a self-proclaimed "citizen of humanity." Throughout the 1980s, Leland and a small group of former radical-activist African American colleagues inside and outside Congress exerted outsized influence to elevate Africa's significance in American foreign affairs and to move the United States from its Cold War orientation toward a foreign policy devoted to humanitarianism, antiracism, and moral leadership. Their internationalism defined a new era of black political engagement with Africa. In This Land of Plenty presents Leland as the embodiment of larger currents in African American politics at the end of the twentieth century. But a sober look at his aspirations shows the successes and shortcomings of domestic radicalism and aspirations of politically neutral humanitarianism during the 1980s, and the extent to which the decade was a major turning point in U.S. relations with the African continent. Exploring the links between political activism, electoral politics, and international affairs, Benjamin Talton not only details Leland's political career but also examines African Americans' successes and failures in influencing U.S. foreign policy toward African and other Global South countries.

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 Culture of Politics in Modern Kenya written by Angelique Haugerud and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-05-13 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once the major success story of a troubled continent,by the early 1990s Kenya came to be regarded as its fallen star. This book challenges such images of reversal and the analytical polarities which sustain them. The analysis ranges from telescopic to microscopic fields, and combining many disciplines and perspectives to give a rich and varied picture of the culture of politics in twentieth-century Kenya.'...a highly perceptive and interesting analysis, deconstruction is not too strong a term, of Kenya's politics....[A] well researched, documented and enlightening book' African Affairs

Download or read book Student Encyclopedia of African Literature written by Douglas Killam and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2007-12-30 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African literature is a vast subject of growing output and interest. Written especially for students, this book selectively surveys the topic in a clear and accessible way. Included are roughly 600 alphabetically arranged entries on writers, genres, and major works. Many entries cite works for further reading, and the volume closes with a selected, general bibliography. Africa is a land of contrasts and of diverse cultures and traditions. It is also a land of conflict and creativity. The literature of the continent draws upon a fascinating body of oral traditions and lore and also reflects the political turmoil of the modern world. With the increased interest in cultural diversity and the growing centrality of Africa in world politics, African literature is figuring more and more prominently in the curriculum. This book helps students learn about the African literary achievement. Written expressly for students, this book is far more accessible than other reference works on the subject. Included are nearly 600 alphabetically arranged entries on authors, such as Chinua Achebe, Athol Fugard, Buchi Emecheta, Nadine Gordimer, and Wole Soyinka; major works, such as Things Fall Apart and Petals of Blood; and individual genres, such as the novel, drama, and poetry. Many entries cite works for further reading, and the volume closes with a selected, general bibliography.

Download or read book African Literature and the Politics of Culture written by James Tar Tsaaior and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book essentially negotiates African literature as a veritable site of artistic and cultural production and situates it within the dynamic of postcolonial cultural politics. It critically evaluates African literature as a contour of cultural contestation with the imperial politics of knowledge production about others and as an ideological strategy for knowing them. The book’s main contribution to the critical discourse on African literature and culture inheres in the fact that politics constitutes the enduring concern of society as it re/shapes and over-determines discourses which have continued to remain crucial to societal engineering. It, however, imagines the discursive existence as necessary for the evolving of a dynamic African literary tradition with an abiding fidelity to the verities of history. The book is useful for literary scholars, historians, critics, experts and students of postcolonial/cultural studies as well as general readership interested in African studies.

Download or read book The Journal of Commonwealth Literature written by and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 694 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One number each year includes Annual bibliography of Commonwealth literature.