Daniel Chukwuemeka | Northumbria University (original) (raw)

Thesis Chapters by Daniel Chukwuemeka

Master's Degree Dissertation

Nationalist consciousness is the shared sense of national communality of a group of people who up... more Nationalist consciousness is the shared sense of national communality of a group of people who uphold a common background despite cultural and linguistic differences. This they do by belonging to an entity much larger than their various ethnic groups. This study is set out to establish that a nation’s history is one factor that can evoke a sense of nationalist consciousness. Apart from national history, other elements of national consciousness are language, culture, cuisine, music, etc., and these have been engaged by researchers in Caribbean literature without accounting for the extent to which they can excite nationalist consciousness. Intertextual approach is therefore employed in the textual analysis, as it would trace the relationship Omeros shares with its pretexts and as well trace the extent to which this relationship is appropriated in the hypertext, the extent to which it adds to the declaration of the research purpose—to show that a nation’s history is an element of nationalist consciousness. The history of St. Lucia, as obtains in the text, is examined by detailing how it embodies both nation-creation and nation-building. Thus, by exploring these two concepts, the nation’s history is highlighted as an element that can evoke a sense of nationalist consciousness in Omeros.

"This is an excellent study, employing the theoretical model of intertextuality to establish how a literary text Omeros achieves nation-creation and nation-building. The researcher's mature handling of the subject, familiarity with subject/literature and mature control of the metalanguage and the mechanics of the language as well as mature expression make this work an invaluable contribution both to the literature on Omeros and to studies on historicity and intertextuality." ~ Prof. D. I. Teilanyo, Professor of English and Literary Studies, University of Benin, Nigeria.

Papers by Daniel Chukwuemeka

Research in African Literatures

This article identifies the figure of the e-fraud hustler as a contemporary iteration of an afric... more This article identifies the figure of the e-fraud hustler as a contemporary iteration of an african discourse of masculinity. Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s I Do Not Come to You by Chance and Chuma Nwokolo’s Diaries of a Dead African represent men’s engagement in the e-fraud hustle as a neoliberal gamble to monetize their masculinity. As men’s pecuniary agency is threatened and limited by the vagaries of neoliberal capitalism, it is equally mediated by yet another paradigm of neoliberal capitalist ideology, namely, (the criminal redefinition of) entrepreneurship. To be a man thus necessitates an evershifting performance of terminal and complicit masculinity, a paradoxical development in which men take risks to circumvent economic exclusion by imitating the expediencies of neoliberal capitalism. The novels register this money-governed sense of masculinity through gender discourses and narrative strategies that resist fixed constructions of African masculinity in favor of an ever-vigilant logic of its contingency and plurality.

Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2023

“Narratives of Capital” seeks to highlight economic theories that underpin artistic productions f... more “Narratives of Capital” seeks to highlight economic theories that underpin artistic productions from the Global South. Through contributions across literary theory, art history, and cultural sociology, the special issue curates an interdisciplinary conversation that investigates how literary artists in postcolonial African economies respond to and help to investigate the economics of literary production.

Research in African Literatures, Volume 53, Number 2, pp. 21-40, Summer, 2022

Journal of Postcolonial Writing vol. 58, no. 2, pp. 278-279, 2021.

Regenia Gagnier’s Literatures of Liberalization is a robust exploration of the interaction betwee... more Regenia Gagnier’s Literatures of Liberalization is a robust exploration of the interaction between literature and liberalism, liberalization, and neoliberalism. In eight chapters, the project makes use of the global circulation of Victorian literature to track literary accounts of the technological and ideological advancements of the long 19th century through to the liberal and neoliberal modernity of the 21st. In so doing, Gagnier delineates the extent to which Victorian writing plays a major conceptual and contextual role in the establishment of what we have come to regard as global modernity today.

Wasafiri vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 102-104, 2021

In a period when the prominence of the field of Humanities is being downplayed by governments and... more In a period when the prominence of the field of Humanities is being downplayed by governments and stakeholders around the world, critics Ashleigh Harris and Carli Coetzee are not distracted from insisting on the need to examine the institutions that legitimise the way we articulate our present realities and the conventional structures that determine how we think about and respond to our ever-present past.

Journal of Postcolonial Writing vol. 58, no. 1, pp. 142-143, 2021

The notion of the public in West African literary spaces has been a recurrent theme in Stephanie ... more The notion of the public in West African literary spaces has been a recurrent theme in Stephanie Newell’s oeuvre. She has long insisted on recuperating the ephemeral and peripheral media of literary expression, such as Onitsha market literature and newspaper archives, most of which had been confined to obscurity by African literary scholarship. Histories of Dirt continues this work, begun in Newell’s 2013 project, The Power to Name, by focusing on Lagos, West Africa’s largest economic hub.

The Black Scholar vol. 51, no. 4, 2021

Christopher E.W. Ouma’s Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic African Literature examines how exper... more Christopher E.W. Ouma’s Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic African Literature examines how experiences of childhood are capable of inaugurating contemporary and diasporic modes of re-imagining Africa.

The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 8.3, pp. 429-31, 2021

The relationship between translation studies and world literature is complex if not vexed. Tobias... more The relationship between translation studies and world literature is complex if not vexed. Tobias Warner’s erudite revisitation of the topic in The Tongue-Tied Imagination invites us to imagine the potential for translation studies to chart a new course in literary criticism and comparative literature.

Journal of the African Literature Association vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 30 - 47, 2021

The different categories of African hustler narratives represent particular ways of addressing th... more The different categories of African hustler narratives represent particular ways of addressing the shortcomings of the African postcolonial economy from the perspective of the ultimately self-defeating responses of individual characters. This article examines the narrative significance of e-fraud literature as a subset of African hustler narratives. As an e-fraud novel, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s I Do Not Come to You by Chance follows the lives of e-scammers for whom e-fraud practice is an alternative to the exclusionary Nigerian postcolonial economy. However, in embracing e-fraud as an alternative to their economic exclusion, e-fraudsters in Nwaubani’s novel appropriate a deceptive digital geography that is in dialogue with the same exploitative and extractive Nigerian postcolonial economic landscape which they seek to circumvent. In this way, the novel articulates the extent to which the performance of e-fraud economy as a hustle economy intersects with the arbitrariness and decline of Nigerian postcolonial economy.

Humanities Bulletin, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 145 - 157, 2019

Contemporary critique of trope of sexual liberation in African literature is mostly replete with ... more Contemporary critique of trope of sexual liberation in African literature is mostly replete with analysis of prostitution narratives, giving rise to an assumption and monolithic view of what sexual freedom or self-determination could mean. Such narratives, however, often do not yield arguments related to the critical capital of the salacious, since prostitution primarily involves transactional sex and not necessarily an inordinate sexual affair. This study privileges a generic divergence whereby analysis is hinged on the literary appreciation of salaciousness. Abubakar Adam Ibrahim's Season of Crimson Blossoms departs from prostitution plot to a pornographic depiction of sexual obscenity: the venereal affair between Binta Zubairu, a 55 year old widow and grandmother, and Hassan Reza, a 25 year old street gang leader. The study investigates the existential tragedy of sexual freedom by examining the extent to which sexual relationship that is considered a taboo in a given social milieu is a recipe for self-realisation. Using a feminist view of existentialism, I demonstrate how the individual will to rise above the conventional, by escaping from being a sexually deprived human to becoming one who responds to the body's need for unbridled sexual pleasure, constitutes George Lukács and Arthur Miller's ideas of modern tragedy.

The International Journal Of Humanities & Social Studies, vol. 6, issue 2 (2018), 17 - 23

Abstract: This study examines tragic vision in Patience Swift’s The Last Good Man with the aim of... more Abstract:
This study examines tragic vision in Patience Swift’s The Last Good Man with the aim of establishing the claim that,
following the postulations on tragedy by G.W.F Hegel, the tragedy in the novel is both inevitable and paradoxical—
inevitable, since the protagonist’s world is tragically circumscribed, with no escaping the tragic entrapment, which does
not have to be determined by his being good or bad; and paradoxical because he is great and as well flawed, with his
greatness being his flaw. The approach to tragedy developed by the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel is the interpretive
strategy adopted, a reading strategy which was structured in such a manner as to take into account the catastrophic
conclusion, the sense of inevitability, human limitation, suffering and disproportion, and the learning process and
acceptance of moral responsibility in the novel. Critics may be tempted to only look at the human limitations of the
protagonist, which is a fundamental element of a tragic hero—hubris—without taking into consideration the sense of
inevitability and the intricacies of the hero’s situation. Because Sam acts both for and against the good, his individuality
is as paradoxical as the situation in which he finds himself; hence he is both great and flawed—indeed, his very greatness
is his flaw, since greatness in Hegel comes at the price of excluding what the situation demands. Perhaps this is the first
study of the novel as tragedy that will take into account the above strategy of reading.
Keywords: Tragedy, struggle, inevitability, nature, paradoxical

Chinua Achebe and the Convolutions of Immortality: Reassessing the Writer in Relation to New Realities, edited by Emeka Nwabueze (2018)

Following the principles of phenomenological criticism, this paper aims to point out the erroneou... more Following the principles of phenomenological criticism, this paper aims to point out the erroneousness of any attempt to conceive the mode of being of a literary work in terms of the experience of reality, and as a modification of it. Should Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness be analysed in relation to phenomena different from themselves, the result would be an invalidation of truth in the one by the other, and vice versa. Phenomenological reduction deals with a return to aesthetic experience, which does not think in terms of this relationship, but, rather, regards what it experiences as genuine truth. Achebe and Conrad’s works are immortal masterpieces—despite their varied representations of truth of African situation—because their interest, first, was art, aesthetic appearance. Comparing Achebe’s mode of representation with that of Conrad’s in this paper is an attempt to look at the sustainability of the validity claim of truth in the representation of African situation—vis-à-vis the stereotypes—in two literary works which otherwise are of opposed standpoints, and thus unveiling the striking similarity in their validity claims of literary truth.

Books by Daniel Chukwuemeka

Urban Walking: The Flâneur as an Icon of Metropolitan Culture in Literature and Film. Pp. 133-152. Edited by Oliver Bock and Isabel Vila-Cabanes, 2020

Often emphasis is made on the things we see each time memory is discussed. This study, however, I... more Often emphasis is made on the things we see each time memory is discussed. This study, however, Investigates the extent to which memories are associated with urban noise, and how an individual can negotiate or address memory—so-recalled—through embodying the figure of a flâneur navigating an urban space. By drawing our attention to—not merely the noises but—sounds he hears or misses, Julius, as a flâneur in Teju Cole's masterpiece, Open Cry, is seen negotiating memory in the novel through writing and walking. Each step invites him to pay attention to the inviolability in memorial silence that often competes amid the resounding noise of the metropolitan hassles of the New York urban atmosphere. New York is represented as a city open to the propagation of Jullus's collective memories, and thus becomes tangible and palpable through Julius's walks. As an Afropolitan flâneur, Julius is not just a detached urban spectator or passive walker: he is actively engaged with the city lifestyle but experiences the city through the memory of immigration. With the fundamental framewark of the flâneur that is traditionally hinged on Charles Baudelaire’s idea of it and Walter Benjamin’s historical interpretation of same, tweaked by Achille Mbembe's critical take on Afropolitanism, this chapter is based on the interference theory of human memory, a theory credited to John A. Bergström, a German psychologist. Interference theory refers to the idea that the learning of something new causes forgetting of older material on the basis of competition between the two. The interfering items are said to originate from an over-stimulating environment. In this chapter, we find how Julius embodies the immigrant when the silent (suppressed) memories in his life are evoked by the chaotic sound of city life as he traverses the nooks and crannies of New York with its urban noise.

Book Reviews by Daniel Chukwuemeka

The Popular Culture Studies Journal vol. 8, no. 1, 2020

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (hereafter The Wind) is an inspiring true account of youthful reso... more The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (hereafter The Wind) is an inspiring true account of youthful resourcefulness and creative resilience. It follows the story of a Malawian youngster, William Kamkwamba (Maxwell Simba), who constructs a windmill to provide electricity for his community and save them from the scourge of drought and starvation. A distinctive critical feature of the movie is its connection of popular culture and informal postcolonial economy.