Download or read book The African Novel of Ideas written by Jeanne-Marie Jackson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This study focuses on the role of the philosophical novel--a genre that favors abstract concepts, or 'thinking about thinking,' over style, plot, or character development--and the role of philosophy more broadly in the intellectual life of the African continent"

Download or read book Teaching the African Novel written by Gaurav Desai and published by Modern Language Association of America. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the African novel, and how should it be taught? The twenty-three essays of this volume address these two questions and in the process convey a wealth of information and ideas about the diverse regions, peoples, nations, languages, and writers of the African continent. Topics include Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's favoring of indigenous languages and literary traditions over European; the special place of Marxism in African letters;the influence of Frantz Fanon; women writers and the sub-Saharan novel;the Maghrebian novel;the novel and the griot epic in the Sahel;Islam in the West African novel;novels in Spanish from Equatorial Guinea;apartheid and postapartheid fiction;African writers in the diaspora;globalization in East African fiction; teaching Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart to students in different countries;the Onitsha market romance. The volume editor, Gaurav Desai, writes, "The point of the volume is to encourage a reading of Africa that is sensitive to its history of colonization but at the same time responsive to its present multiracial and multicultural condition."

Download or read book Zoo City written by Lauren Beukes and published by Mulholland Books. This book was released on 2016-08-16 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new paperback edition of Lauren Beukes's Arthur C Clarke Award-winning novel set in a world where murderers and other criminals acquire magical animals that are mystically bonded to them. Zinzi has a Sloth on her back, a dirty 419 scam habit, and a talent for finding lost things. When a little old lady turns up dead and the cops confiscate her last paycheck, Zinzi's forced to take on her least favorite kind of job--missing persons. Being hired by reclusive music producer Odi Huron to find a teenybop pop star should be her ticket out of Zoo City, the festering slum where the criminal underclass and their animal companions live in the shadow of hell's undertow. Instead, it catapults Zinzi deeper into the maw of a city twisted by crime and magic, where she'll be forced to confront the dark secrets of former lives--including her own.

Download or read book Chike and the River written by Chinua Achebe and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-08-09 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The more Chike saw the ferry-boats the more he wanted to make the trip to Asaba. But where would he get the money? He did not know. Still, he hoped. Eleven-year-old Chike longs to cross the Niger River to the city of Asaba, but he doesn’t have the sixpence he needs to pay for the ferry ride. With the help of his friend S.M.O.G., he embarks on a series of adventures to help him get there. Along the way, he is exposed to a range of new experiences that are both thrilling and terrifying, from eating his first skewer of suya under the shade of a mango tree, to visiting the village magician who promises to double the money in his pocket. Once he finally makes it across the river, Chike realizes that life on the other side is far different from his expectations, and he must find the courage within him to make it home. Chike and the River is a magical tale of boundaries, bravery, and growth, by Chinua Achebe, one of the world’s most beloved and admired storytellers.

Download or read book Kintu written by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-01-25 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this epic tale of fate, fortune and legacy, Jennifer Makumbi vibrantly brings to life this corner of Africa and this colourful family as she reimagines the history of Uganda through the cursed bloodline of the Kintu clan. The year is 1750. Kintu Kidda sets out for the capital to pledge allegiance to the new leader of the Buganda kingdom. Along the way he unleashes a curse that will plague his family for generations. Blending oral tradition, myth, folktale and history, Makumbi weaves together the stories of Kintu’s descendants as they seek to break free from the burden of their past to produce a majestic tale of clan and country – a modern classic.

Download or read book Things Fall Apart written by Chinua Achebe and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1994-09-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.

Download or read book The Black History Book written by DK and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-11-23 with total page 759 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn about the most important milestones in Black history in The Black History Book. Part of the fascinating Big Ideas series, this book tackles tricky topics and themes in a simple and easy to follow format. Learn about Black History in this overview guide to the subject, great for novices looking to find out more and experts wishing to refresh their knowledge alike! The Black History Book brings a fresh and vibrant take on the topic through eye-catching graphics and diagrams to immerse yourself in. This captivating book will broaden your understanding of Black History, with: - Covers the most important milestones in Black and African history - Packed with facts, charts, timelines and graphs to help explain core concepts - A visual approach to big subjects with striking illustrations and graphics throughout - Easy to follow text makes topics accessible for people at any level of understanding The Black History Book is a captivating introduction to the key milestones in Black History, culture, and society across the globe – from the ancient world to the present, aimed at adults with an interest in the subject and students wanting to gain more of an overview. Explore the rich history of the peoples of Africa and the African diaspora, and the struggles and triumphs of Black communities around the world, all through engaging text and bold graphics. Your Black History Questions, Simply Explained Which were the most powerful African empires? Who were the pioneers of jazz? What sparked the Black Lives Matter movement? If you thought it was difficult to learn about the legacy of African-American history, The Black History Book presents crucial information in an easy to follow layout. Learn about the earliest human migrations to modern Black communities, stories of the early kingdoms of Ancient Egypt and Nubia; the powerful medieval and early modern empires; and the struggle against colonization. This book also explores Black history beyond the African continent, like the Atlantic slave trade and slave resistance settlements; the Harlem Renaissance and Jazz Age; the Windrush migration; civil rights and Black feminist movements. The Big Ideas Series With millions of copies sold worldwide, The Black History Book is part of the award-winning Big Ideas series from DK. The series uses striking graphics along with engaging writing, making big topics easy to understand.

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 The Swahili Novel written by Xavier Garnier and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2013 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than fifty years a dynamic modern literature has been developing in the Kiswahili language. The political weight that Kiswahili carries as the emerging national and pan-national language of many East African countries places this literature, much of it in the form of novels, at the centre of heated literary debates on the social function of literature in the context of rapid global social change. Garnier provides new insights into the Swahili novel form with all its vibrancy and capacity for experimentation. Its obsession with social issues relates to larger, all-pervasive political debates running through East Africa: in its press, its streets, its public and private places. The novels both record and provoke these debates. Based on the study of more than 175 Swahili novels by almost 100 authors, Garnier brings to light a body of work much neglected by African literary critics, but which looks outwards to the wider world. Xavier Garnier teaches African Literature at the Universit Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle and is former director of the Centre d'Etudes des Nouveaux Espaces Litt raires, Universit Paris 13.

Download or read book Not My Idea written by Anastasia Higginbotham and published by Ordinary Terrible Things. This book was released on 2018-09 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People of color are eager for white people to deal with their racial ignorance. White people are desperate for an affirmative role in racial justice. Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness helps with conversations the nation is, just now, finally starting to have.

Download or read book The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms written by N. K. Jemisin and published by Orbit. This book was released on 2010-02-25 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After her mother's mysterious death, a young woman is summoned to the floating city of Sky in order to claim a royal inheritance she never knew existed in the first book in this award-winning fantasy trilogy from the NYT bestselling author of The Fifth Season. Yeine Darr is an outcast from the barbarian north. But when her mother dies under mysterious circumstances, she is summoned to the majestic city of Sky. There, to her shock, Yeine is named an heiress to the king. But the throne of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is not easily won, and Yeine is thrust into a vicious power struggle with cousins she never knew she had. As she fights for her life, she draws ever closer to the secrets of her mother's death and her family's bloody history. With the fate of the world hanging in the balance, Yeine will learn how perilous it can be when love and hate -- and gods and mortals -- are bound inseparably together.

Download or read book Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe written by Ernest Emenyo̲nu and published by Africa World Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chinua Achebe's influence on contemporary African literature is as much in evidence in his art of the novel as his theory of African literature and literary criticism. ISINKA (Igbo term for artistic purpose') establishes Achebe's legacy as a literary theorist and critic. In these essays scholars from around the globe assess and establish how much Achebe's extra-fictional ideas about African literature and literature in general are justified in his own creative works.'

Download or read book The Op Ed Novel written by Bécquer Seguín and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-09 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The Op-Ed Novel not only elegantly recounts a vital intellectual and cultural history of post-Franco Spain. Carefully exploring the careers of Spain’s most eminent writers, it demonstrates, too, the osmotic links between political journalism and literary fiction—salutary reading in the English-speaking countries, where politics and literature are still regarded as strangers to each other.”—Pankaj Mishra, author of Run and Hide A new history of contemporary Spanish fiction through the prism of novelists’ newspaper columns. Public intellectuals come in many different stripes, but most of them gain a following at least in part from their writing, whether in the form of magazine articles, newspaper columns, or full-length nonfiction. A few—James Baldwin and Joan Didion are celebrated examples—start out as novelists before turning to the rough-and-tumble of current affairs. In The Op-Ed Novel, Bécquer Seguín undertakes the first book-length study of how contemporary literature is shaped by opinion journalism, focusing on fiction writers who took to the papers in post-Franco Spain and became stewards of their country’s cultural, economic, and political future. Following Spain’s transition to democracy in the late 1970s and early 1980s, internationally acclaimed novelists such as Javier Cercas, Antonio Muñoz Molina, and Javier Marías seized the opportunity to populate the opinion pages of the newly legal free press. The Op-Ed Novel analyzes how the argumentative styles and preoccupations of their columns in El País, Spain’s most widely read daily, bled into their fiction. These and other authors used their novels to settle scores with fellow intellectuals, make speculative historical claims, and advance partisan political projects. At the same time, their literary technique greatly invigorated opinion journalism. A lively guide to the terroir of contemporary Spanish literature, The Op-Ed Novel offers a bird’s-eye view of both the post-Franco intellectual climate and the changing role of the novelist in public life.

Download or read book The Postcolonial African Genocide Novel written by Chigbo Arthur Anyaduba and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Postcolonial African Genocide Novel, Chigbo Anyaduba examines fictional responses to mass atrocities occurring in postcolonial Africa. Through a comparative reading of novels responding to the genocides of the Igbo in Nigeria (1966-1970) and the Tutsi in Rwanda (1990-1994), the book underscores the ways that literary encounters with genocides in Africa's postcolonies have attempted to reimagine the conditions giving rise to exterminatory forms of mass violence. The book concretizes and troubles one of the apparent truisms of genocide studies, especially in the context of imaginative literature: that the reality of genocide more often than not resists meaningfulness. Particularly given the centrality of this truism to artistic responses to the Holocaust and to genocides more generally, Anyaduba tracks the astonishing range of meanings drawn by writers at a series of (temporal, spatial, historical, cultural and other) removes from the realities of genocide in Africa's postcolonies, a set of meanings that are often highly-specific and irreducible to maxims or foundational cases. The book shows that in the artistic projects to construct meanings against genocide's nihilism writers of African genocides deploy tropes that while significantly oriented to African concerns are equally shaped by the representational conventions and practices associated with the legacies of the Holocaust.

Download or read book Cultural identity in the East African novel written by Regina Hartmann and published by diplom.de. This book was released on 2014-04-11 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: As the Black African writers have taught us, we must dance our word, for in human speech as in dance, lies an offering; to speak and to write is also to offer oneself to the other; it is to be reborn together . This quotation by M. Rombaut locates African literature close to the performing arts. According to his statement African literature seems to transcend the conventional European conception of writing, which is conceiving literature as something planned and permanent. The idea of a literary performance in African writing places the author much closer to the story-teller, who is dependent on his audience and trying to keep in touch with them. By processing their feelings in his performance he gives expression to a common consciousness. In contrast to the Western author who often wants to stand apart from his society, African authors tend to aim their participation in the formation of a shared identity. This paper tries to find out how authors from the framework of East Africa conceive of cultural identity. Basically, I will proceed in two steps: part A is dedicated to the development of a pattern within which the complex issue of identity can be adequately discussed in an East African context. In Part B I will then apply this discussion scheme to three novels which as I will explain are representative for East African writing, in far as this term is justified. Part A starts off from some basic observations about identity, on the foundation of which I want to deduce the structure of my analysis. I will argue that identity is based on ones observation of the environment and on the influence of outsiders. All this is to some extent true for two concepts: individual and cultural identity. The latter develops when a group of individuals feels or is ascribed a common bond apt to correspond to several individual self-concepts. These individuals may then share a feeling of home, which can act as a physical but also mental commitment. Departing form these ideas I will show that four issues might be interesting in dealing with cultural identity, which can be expressed by some central questions: 1.Identity imposed and adopted: In how far can others influence our identity? 2.Identity rediscovered and reinvented:To what extent does our history work on identity? 3.Identity displaced: How does our feeling of physical or mental bond to a physical or mental space I will call home work on identity? 4.Identity integrated: How [...]

Download or read book Novel Ideas written by Paul Williams and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-12-24 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This concise yet comprehensive study explores innovative practice in the novel and, from the perspective of creative writing, the astonishing resilience of the novel form. It offers a practical guide to the many possibilities available to the writer of the novel, with each chapter offering exercises to encourage innovation and to expand the creative writer's narrative skills. Beginning with early iterations of the novel in the 17th century, this book follows the evocation of innovation in the novel through Realism, Modernism, Postmodernism and into today's dizzying array of digital and interactive possibilities. While guiding the reader through the possibilities available (in both genre and literary fiction), this book encourages both aspiring and established writers to produce novels with imagination, playfulness and gravitas. Dynamic and interactive, this text is distinctive in offering a grounding in the literary history of the novel, while also equipping readers to write in the form themselves. It is an essential resource for any student of creative writing, or anyone with an interest in writing their own novel.

Download or read book Narrating the Nation in the African Novel written by Abdelkader Babkar and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-07-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of the nation or nationalism in relation to Africa and African literature has been widely dealt with in modern African literature, arising from the fact that writers are bent on expressing their concern about the future of their countries. Chinua Achebe, Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Kofi Awoonor are such writers who have made great artistic efforts to portray an Afrotopia, or at best viable socio-political systems in the wake of colonial situation. The present work aims to examine closely these novelists' ideological convictions as they are expressed in their fictions and often shown to be in opposition to the practices established by the state apparatuses in place. This book shows how the African situation has been characterised in the African novels by both a common continental experience and a number of facts that dramatise the historical predicament of slavery, colonialism and a problematic independence. These representations carry dialogical voices which underpin the authoritative voice of the authors. The narratives of the nation are shown to be ambivalent, for they seem to act in defence of the novelists' culture, yet they jettison its very quintessence by the sceptical view they reflect about its significance in modern times. Caught between the imperatives of modernity and the nostalgic drives of the past, the novelists are somehow drawn to condemn the metropolis and to celebrate it at the same time. The point is to accept the construction of the nation-state in connection with universal concepts developed by the Western world and Europe essentially. The different 'utopias' offered by the writers under scrutiny cannot be divorced from the theory and practice that have led to the construction of European models of nation-states. Hence our reliance on important scholarly works in the field, particularly Elie Kedourie's Nationalism, Eric Hobsbawm's Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, Ernest Gellner's Nations and Nationalsim. But for the theoretical link between nationalism and literary interpretation, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, Homi Bhabha's Nation and Narration and The Location of Culture, Edward Said's Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism and Bakhtin's The dialogical Imagination are fundamental supports for my discussion. Critics that have approached this subject are restrictive in number, but I have taken account of the studies carried out by James Ogude on Ngugi, Leif Lorentzon on Armah, for example, or general works like Abiola Irele's The African Experience in Literature and Ideology or Kanneh Kadiatu's African Identities, amongst others, to substantiate the discussion Due appreciation of the different styles used by the writers is expressed here from a modernism used by early Armah and Awoonor, to the realism of Achebe and Marxist-populist treatment of fiction and nation-building of Ngugi, as well as the essentialist slant that can be studied in Armah's later fiction. Concepts such as hybridity, ambivalence, liminality, developed by Bhabha, are useful elements of analysis in the examination of the evolution of prose fiction in Africa from the early writings of Achebe to the later works of Armah and Ngugi. They allow us to see how the African novelists produce meanings that underscore the realities and difficulties met in the construction of stable and genuinely independent nation-states in Africa.