Download or read book God s Bits of Wood written by Ousmane Sembène and published by Heinemann. This book was released on 1995 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "God's Bits of Wood is a fictionalized account of the Dakar-Niger train strikes which took in the 1940s. The novel looks at both the political and personal sacrifices the strikers and their families made. The political power is portrayed here as the strikers try to win back pensions, annual paid vacations, and family allowances from the Europeans. The novel can be seen as a shift of power between the African strikers and their European bosses. The Europeans have the political process and violence as a leverage of power, which they use both insistently and mindlessly. One of the European delegates for the railway company accidentally shoots young boys who are playing along the tracks. The delegate isn't charged with their murders. The Europeans also prevent the strikers and their families from having access to water. Yet the strikers also have the masses as their power. The strikers gain powerful allies in their own women. In the beginning of the novel, the women are not told the details of the strike, though they are asked to support their men. Only the small child, Ad'jibid'ji, shows any interest and insists that her grandfather take her to a meeting of the strikers. Yet as the novel continues, the women become more and more involved in the strike. This is because the strike has hit home to them in a literal way. There is no water nor food to eat. The women and children begin to starve. The women suffer in silence until they begin to fight back. Two of the more striking sequences in the novel are the siege between the women of N'Diayene and the policemen who have come to arrest Ramatoulaye, and leads to the burning down of the village, and the march the women go on to Dakar to protest their treatment and to support the strikers. The strike breaks down the barriers which cause inequality between men and women, black and white." -- from www.associatedcontent.com (Oct. 22, 2010).
Download or read book God s Bits of Wood written by Sembène Ousmane and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-02-01 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is 1947 and the workers on the Dakar-Niger Railway have come out on strike. Sembène Ousmane, in this vivid and moving novel, evokes all of the colour, passion and tragedy of those decisive years in history. 'Ever since they left Thiès, the women had not stopped singing. As soon as one group allowed the refrain to die, another picked it up, and new verses were born at the hazard of chance or inspiration, one word leading to another and each finding, in its turn, its rhythm and its place. No one was very sure any longer where the song began, or if it had an ending.' God's Bits of Wood is Sembène Ousmane's internationally renowned novel, based on his own experiences of the landmark 1947 railroad strike that spread across French West Africa. 'A classic.' Guardian 'Ousmane Sembène [was] a crucial figure in Africa's postcolonial cultural awakening.' New York Times 'A powerful story.' Kirkus Translated from the French by Francis Price.
Download or read book Xala written by James S. Williams and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-05-02 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Xala (1974) by the pioneering Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene, was acclaimed on its release for its scorching critique of postcolonial African society, and it cemented Sembene's status as a wholly new kind of politically engaged, pan-African, auteur film-maker. Centring on the story of businessman El Hadji and the impotence that afflicts him on his marriage to a young third wife, Xala vividly captures the cultural and political upheaval of 1970s Senegal, while suggesting the radical potential of dissent, solidarity and collective action, embodied by El Hadji's student daughter Rama and the group of urban 'undesirables' who act as a kind of raw chorus to the affairs of the neocolonial elite. James S. Williams's lucid study traces Xala's difficult production history and analyses its daring combination of political and domestic drama, oral narrative, social realism, symbolism, satire, documentary, mysticism and Marxist analysis. Yet from its dazzling extended opening sequence of revolution as performance to its suspended climax of redemption through ritualised spitting, Xala presents a series of conceptual and formal challenges that resist a simple reading of the film as allegory. Highlighting often overlooked elements of Sembene's intricate, experimental film-making, including provocative shifts in mood and poetic, even subversively erotic, moments, Williams reveals Xala as a visionary work of both African cinema and Third Cinema that extended the parameters of postcolonial film practice and still resounds today with its searing inventive power.
Download or read book The Fortunes of Wangrin written by Amadou Hampaté Bâ and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel on the evils of white colonialism in Africa. Set in French-ruled Mali, the hero is a young teacher who plays the white man's idea of a good Black in order to advance his career.
Download or read book Black Docker written by Ousmane Sembène and published by Heinemann Educational Books. This book was released on 1987 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in the 1950s, this book tells of Diaw Falla, a docker for whom work exists merely to finance his true obsession - his writing. As his novel nears completion, he meets Ginette Tontisanne whose good connections ensure he is published - but, to his dismay, under her name.
Download or read book Tribal Scars and Other Stories written by Ousmane Sembène and published by Heinemann Educational Books. This book was released on 1974 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Abina and the Important Men written by Trevor R. Getz and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2016 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an illustrated "graphic history" based on an 1876 court transcript of a West African woman named Abina, who was wrongfully enslaved and took her case to court. The main scenes of the story take place in the courtroom, where Abina strives to convince a series of "important men"--A British judge, two Euro-African attorneys, a wealthy African country "gentleman," and a jury of local leaders --that her rights matter.--Publisher description.
Download or read book The Conscript written by Gebreyesus Hailu and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-23 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eloquent and thought-provoking, this classic novel by the Eritrean novelist Gebreyesus Hailu, written in Tigrinya in 1927 and published in 1950, is one of the earliest novels written in an African language and will have a major impact on the reception and critical appraisal of African literature. The Conscript depicts, with irony and controlled anger, the staggering experiences of the Eritrean ascari, soldiers conscripted to fight in Libya by the Italian colonial army against the nationalist Libyan forces fighting for their freedom from Italy’s colonial rule. Anticipating midcentury thinkers Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, Hailu paints a devastating portrait of Italian colonialism. Some of the most poignant passages of the novel include the awakening of the novel’s hero, Tuquabo, to his ironic predicament of being both under colonial rule and the instrument of suppressing the colonized Libyans. The novel’s remarkable descriptions of the battlefield awe the reader with mesmerizing images, both disturbing and tender, of the Libyan landscape—with its vast desert sands, oases, horsemen, foot soldiers, and the brutalities of war—uncannily recalled in the satellite images that were brought to the homes of millions of viewers around the globe in 2011, during the country’s uprising against its former leader, Colonel Gaddafi.
Download or read book Postcolonial African cinema written by David Murphy and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-04 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first introduction of its kind to an important cross-section of postcolonial African filmmakers from the 1950s to the present. Building on previous critical work in the field, this volume will bring together ideas from a range of disciplines – film studies, African cultural studies, and, in particular, postcolonial studies – in order to combine the in-depth analysis of individual films and bodies of work by individual directors with a sustained interrogation of these films in relation to important theoretical concepts. Structurally, the book is straightforward, though the aim is to incorporate diversity and complexity of approach within the overall simplicity of format. Chapters provide both an overview of the director’s output to date, and the necessary background – personal or national, cultural or political – to enable readers to achieve a better understanding of the director’s choice of subject matter, aesthetic or formal strategies, or ideological stance. They also offer a particular reading of one or more films, in which the authors aim to situate African cinema in relation to important critical and theoretical debates. This book thus constitutes a new departure in African film studies, recognising the maturity of the field, and the need for complex yet accessible approaches to it, which move beyond the purely descriptive while refusing to get bogged down in theoretical jargon. Consequently, the volume should be of interest not only to specialists but also to the general reader.
Download or read book God Is Great God Is Good written by William Lane Craig and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2010-08-24 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this magisterial collection, the contemporary complaints against belief in God are addressed with intellectual passion and rigor by some of the most astute theological and philosophical minds of the day. Including an interview by Gary Habermas with noted convert to theism Antony Flew, and a direct critical response to Richard Dawkins's God Delusion by Alvin Plantinga, God Is Great, God Is Good offers convincing and compelling reassurance that though the world has changed, God has not.
Download or read book Niiwam And Taaw written by Ousmane Sembène and published by New Africa Books. This book was released on 1991 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Street of Riches written by Gabrielle Roy and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Semiautobiographical and universal in appeal, Street of Riches is about a young girl's growing up in a suburb of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Here is Christine, the perceptive narrator of The Road Past Altamont (also a Bison Book), awakening to natural and sometimes terrifying beauty, to family history, to the nuances of social life, to sexuality, to selfhood. A mother's romantic yearning for freedom, a father's roving career as an immigration officer, a beautiful sister's early demise, a host of others in very human situations - all contribute to the way Christine will view the world as a writer. Gabrielle Roy has been called the Canadian Willa Cather because of their affinity in style and theme. Street of Riches won both the Governor-General's Award for Fiction and the French Prix Duvernay.
Download or read book GraceLand written by Chris Abani and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2005-01-26 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Graceland is a dazzling debut by a singular new talent The sprawling, swampy, cacophonous city of Lagos, Nigeria, provides the backdrop to the story of Elvis, a teenage Elvis impersonator hoping to make his way out of the ghetto. Broke, beset by floods, and beatings by his alcoholic father, and with no job opportunities in sight, Elvis is tempted by a life of crime. Thus begins his odyssey into the dangerous underworld of Lagos, guided by his friend Redemption and accompanied by a restless hybrid of voices including The King of Beggars, Sunday, Innocent and Comfort. Ultimately, young Elvis, drenched in reggae and jazz, and besotted with American film heroes and images, must find his way to a GraceLand of his own. Nuanced, lyrical, and pitch perfect, Abani has created a remarkable story of a son and his father, and an examination of postcolonial Nigeria where the trappings of American culture reign supreme. "A richly detailed, poignant, and utterly fascinating look into another culture and how it is cross-pollinated by our own. It brings to mind the work of Ha Jin in its power and revelation of the new."--T. Coraghessan Boyle
Download or read book God s Bits of Wood Semene Ousmane Translated by Francis Price written by Ousmane Sembène and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ousmane Semb ne written by Annett Busch and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2008 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collected interviews with the African filmmaker who directed Black Girl, Mandabi, Xala, Ceddo, Faat Kine, and Moolaade
Download or read book African Literature as Political Philosophy written by Mary Stella Chika Okolo and published by Zed Books Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-07-04 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The politics of development in Africa have always been central concerns of the continent's literature. Yet ideas about the best way to achieve this development, and even what development itself should look like, have been hotly contested. African Literature as Political Philosophy looks in particular at Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah and Petals of Blood by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, but situates these within the broader context of developments in African literature over the past half-century, discussing writers from Ayi Kwei Armah to Wole Soyinka. M.S.C. Okolo provides a thorough analysis of the authors' differing approaches and how these emerge from the literature. She shows the roots of Achebe's reformism and Ngugi's insistence on revolution and how these positions take shape in their work. Okolo argues that these authors have been profoundly affected by the political situation of Africa, but have also helped to create a new African political philosophy.
Download or read book Dew in the Morning written by Shimmer Chinodya and published by African Books Collective. This book was released on 2019-02-11 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dew in the Morning was written when the author, Shimmer Chinodya, was eighteen. The intensity of childhood memory is sharp and immediate. Godi, the young boy whose life we experience as he grows up, perceives more than he understands. The ambivalence or instability of the text lies at the juncture between the felt experience of the child, and the rational, interpretative, analysis of the adult. A Bildungsroman, Chinodya captures the centrality of land in the national consciousness: its beauty, its rhythms, its seasons and its fertility. But he does not romanticise the hardships: the droughts, poor harvests, over-crowding particularly as a result of the inflow of resettled people and the tensions over land and between peoples as they struggle to survive. Good humour, strict morality, hard work, and mutual support can be undermined by corrupt practice, or tainted by traditional ceremonies that are as frightening as they are powerful, and raise essential questions of belief and validity. Dew in the Morning, is a tender, evocative novel of growing up, but in it we see the seeds of many issues which Chinodya will dwell on in his later novels: familial tensions, the taut interplay of tradition and modernity, ancestral beliefs and Christianity.
