This volume charts the widening frontiers of black literary aesthetics using the prose and dramatic fictions of writers from Africa and the African diaspora. The chapters come in two interactive phases of current critical discourses involving rejoinders from past-present concerns and issues of cultural and contemporary modernity. These studies stress the argument that African literature is hardly discussed outside contemporary history and that the reason for the apparent disconnection among groups in Africa and the diaspora can be traced to the disparate elements within the continent and diaspora.
The African novel occupies a central position in the criticism of colonial portrayal of the African continent and her people. [...] What is primary on his mind and central to his work is the urge to put the record straight and illuminate the threshold between past and present, thought and action, self and Other, and Africa and the world. [...] It is on the basis of the foregoing background that in this paper I propose to examine how post-colonial African novelists use their novels to facilitate the transgression of boundaries and subversion of hegemonic rigidities previously mapped out in precursor literary canonical texts about Africa and her people. [...] In Robinson Crusoe, Defoe leaps into the realm of ignorance about Africa and Africans, conceiving the terrain of the continent as peopled with cannibals, heathenism and rustic specimens in a primordial state of existence, and whose only knowledge of the spoken language is a chain of gibberish utterances. [...] In summary, the paper attempts to look at Coetzee, an African novelist who occupies a distinguished place at the very apex of the emerging counter-canon in African fiction and at only one of his books, Foe, which has already become something of a classic of this counter-canon.
This book discusses the psychological topography of Korean, Nigerian, and Indian people by exploring the counter-colonial discourse through the study of works by three writers - Yom Sang-Sop, Chinua Achebe and Salman Rushdie - counter-colonial discourse in the works of these three writers strikes back at powerful colonial discourses, Soonsik Kim successfully brings out the Third World «voice» against the colonial legacy of the West and gives readers a taste of being «the Other». This book marks a significant transition in the critical attention of Third World discourse from mere projection to subjective viewpoint.
Confluences looks at the prospects for and the potential rewards of breaking down theoretical and disciplinary barriers that have tended to separate African American and postcolonial studies. John Cullen Gruesser’s study emphasizes the confluences among three major theories that have emerged in literary and cultural studies in the past twenty-five years: postcolonialism, Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Signifyin(g), and Paul Gilroy’s black Atlantic. For readers who may not be well acquainted with one or more of the three theories, Gruesser provides concise introductions in the opening chapter. In addition, he urges those people working in postcolonial or African American literary studies to attempt to break down the boundaries that in recent years have come to isolate the two fields. Gruesser then devotes a chapter to each theory, examining one literary text that illustrates the value of the theoretical model, a second text that extends the model in a significant way, and a third text that raises one or more questions about the theory. His examples are drawn from the writings of Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul, Walter Mosley, Pauline Hopkins, Toni Morrison, Harry Dean, Harriet Jacobs, and Alice Walker. Cautious not to conflate postcolonial and African American studies, Gruesser encourages critics to embrace the black Atlantic’s emphases on movement through space (routes rather than roots) and intercultural connections and to expand and where appropriate to emend Gilroy’s efforts to bridge the two fields.
Post Colonial Identities revisits issues regarding the newer literature within the expansive African heritage of diverse regional and national groupings. It is poised at substantiating the uniformity of Africa in terms of literary and cultural movements, and lending some inter-disciplinary insights on the whole body of literature through twentieth century history.
The postcolonial African culture, as it is discoursed in the academia, is largely influenced by Africa’s response to colonialism. To the degree that it is a response, it is to considerably reactive, and lacks forceful moral incentives for social critical consciousness and nation-building. Quite on the contrary, it allows especially African political leaders to luxuriate in the delusions of moral rectitude, imploring, at will, the evil of imperialism as a buffer to their disregard of their people. This book acknowledges the social and psychological devastations of colonialism on the African world. It, however, argues that the totality of African intellectual response to colonialism and Western imperialism is equally, if not more, damaging to the African world. In what ways does the average African leader, indeed, the average African, judge and respond to his world? How does he conceive of his responsibility towards his community and society? The most obvious impact of African response to colonialism is the implicit search for a pristine, innocent paradigms in, for instance, literary, philosophical, social, political and gender studies. This search has its own moral implication in the sense that it makes the taking of responsibility on individual and social level highly difficult. Focusing on the moral impact of responses to colonialism in Africa and the African Diaspora, this book analyzes the various manifestations of delusions of moral innocence that has held the African leadership from the onerous task of bearing responsibility for their countries; it argues that one of the ways to recast the African leaders’ responsibility towards Africa is to let go, on the one hand, the gaze of the West, and on the other, of the search for the innocent African experience and cultures. Relying on the insights of thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Wole Soyinka, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Achille Mbembe and Wolgang Welsch, this book suggests new approach to interpreting African experiences. It discusses select African works of fiction as a paradigm for new interpretations of African experiences.
Provides an in-depth introduction to debates within post-colonial theory and criticism. The many contributors include Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, Anthony Giddens, Anne McClintock, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and bell hooks.
In her focus on irony and meaning in postcolonial African fiction, Gloria Nne Onyeoziri refers to an internal subversion of the discourse of the wise and the powerful, a practice that has played multiple roles in the circulation of knowledge, authority, and opinion within African communities; in the interpretation of colonial and postcolonial experience; and in the ongoing resistance to tyrannies in African societies. But irony is always reversible and may be used to question the oppressed as well as the oppressor, shaking all presumptions of wisdom. Although the author cites numerous African writers, she selects six works by Chinua Achebe, Ahmadou Kourouma, and Calixthe Beyala for her primary analysis. Modern Language Initiative
Essay from the year 2016 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, , language: English, abstract: This essay details how colonialism unfolds in Africa and how post colonial writers and critics try to reverse the socio-economic imbalances and other resulting effects.
In recent years works such as Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, J.M. Coetzee's Foe and Peter Carey's Jack Maggs, which 'write back' to classic English texts, have attracted considerable attention as offering a paradigm for the relationship between post-colonial writing and the 'canon'. Thieme's study provides a broad overview of such writing, focusing both on responses to texts that have frequently been associated with the colonial project or the construction of 'race' (The Tempest, Robinson Crusoe, Heart of Darkness and Othello) and texts where the interaction between culture and imperialism is slightly less overt (Great Expectations, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights). The post-colonial con-texts examined are located within their particular social and cultural backgrounds with emphasis on the different forms their responses to their pre-texts take and the extent to which they create their own discursive space. Using Edward Said's models of filiative relationships and affiliative identifications, the book argues that 'writing back' is seldom adversarial, rather that it operates along a continuum between complicity and oppositionality that dismantles hierarchical positioning. It also suggests that post-colonial appropriations of canonical pre-texts frequently generate re-readings of their 'originals'. It concludes by considering the implications of this argument for discussions of identity politics and literary genealogies more generally. Authors examined include Chinua Achebe, Margaret Atwood, Kamau Brathwaite, Peter Carey, J.M. Coetzee, Robertson Davies, Wilson Harris, Elizabeth Jolley, Robert Kroetsch, George Lamming, Margaret Laurence, Pauline Melville, V.S. Naipaul, Caryl Phillips, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Jean Rhys, Salman Rushdie, Djanet Sears, Sam Selvon, Olive Senior, Jane Urquhart and Derek Walcott.
