Yacoubou Alou | Ohio University (original) (raw)

Papers by Yacoubou Alou

IOSR journal of humanities and social science, Feb 1, 2017

In "The Danger of a Single Story," Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reveals how people construct other pe... more In "The Danger of a Single Story," Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reveals how people construct other people's image through the story they tell about them. She explains how power plays an important role in defining one group whose story is told over and over from the perspective of those in position of power. The end result, Adichie suggests, is that a single story reduces people to mere misrepresentations, what is even more dangerous about it, is that how people perceive the defined group is determined by the single story teller, that is, the more powerful. This study argues that Adichie herself comes close to misrepresenting Northern Nigerian identity in her fiction. Using postcolonial theory methods, this paper contends that Adichie's portrayal of the binary opposition Hausa/Igbo, Biafra/Nigeria, Islam/Christianity appears as dangerous as the single story that she claims she despises. The researcher, after acknowledging the many efforts so far made in exploring her Half of a Yellow Sun and "A Private Experience," supports that Adichie's characterization not only points at postcolonial identity dilemma but implicitly reflects her proclivity towards telling a single, unbalanced, story in her identity narrative and her underground Biafran activism.

Human Rights Abuse and Leadership Irresponsibility as Obstacles to Peace in Chimamanda N. Adichie's Short Stories, 2022

This paper explores Chimamanda N. Adichie's two short stories to show how the writer portrays hum... more This paper explores Chimamanda N. Adichie's two short stories to show how the writer portrays human rights abuse and political irresponsibility as obstacles to peace and raises her fellow Africans' awareness on the conditions to meet to foster conflict mitigation and nation-building efforts. Drawing on postcolonial theory, the study has found that Adichie implicitly interrogates the causes of constant conflicts in Nigeria and suggests that a sound social justice, political accountability, and respect of human rights constitute viable passes to peace in Nigeria and Africa as a whole.

Asian Journal of Literature and Culture Studies, 2023

Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (hereafter refers to as Hope) and Americanah display some strik... more Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (hereafter refers to as Hope) and Americanah display some striking similarities in terms of setting and characterization while they portray some provocative postcolonial preoccupations in terms of human displacement and the question of identity with the characters of both novels struggling to find their way out as they are caught in the complexities of immigration. Drawing upon the theories of postcolonialism and transnationalism, the paper examines the two novels to demonstrate the two writers' perspectives on African diasporic thought concerning postcolonial discourse. In a comparative maneuver and the light of structural and thematic approaches, the study stresses common narrative features and schemes in the two texts. The research reveals that palpable similarities between the two prose narratives appear when we consider how the novelists use specificity rather than generalization as far as setting and characterization are concerned to voice their trepidations concerning the host cultures. However, critical diverging points might be found between the two novels, but that is beyond the scope of the research.

Revue Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée, de Littérature et d’Education, 2022

ABSTRACT Some feminist scholars qualified women’s implication in domestic violence against men as... more ABSTRACT
Some feminist scholars qualified women’s implication in domestic violence against men as self-defence or retaliation. This paper examines the context and interaction that may lead women to abuse men in The Housemaid and Mema (2003) through womanist and radical feminist approaches. As findings, women’s domestic violence on men has appeared as a product of radical feminism because radical feminist
ideology is contrary to that of womanists. Through the study of the female characters such as Sekyiwa and her husband’s ex-wife in Darko’s novel and a female character, Mema, in Mengara’s novel, the motives paving the way for women’s violence on men/husbands can be traced in the followings: female masculinity, women’s deliberate will to maintain
control over men due to their economic advantage, age difference, revenge and violation of African values related to marriage. Women’s violence on men may lead to the increase of men’s violence on women. Violent African women may lose the support or defence of their societies and social institutions designed to maintain gender equality/equity. So, it is advisable for African women not to make justice themselves but recourse to nonviolent approaches and to competent law enforcement institutions whether modern or traditional in order to defend themselves.
Keywords: Domestic violence; women, men; African society, African Literature, feminism

Migration and mobility stories have received scholarly attention in contemporary African literary... more Migration and mobility stories have received scholarly attention in contemporary African literary criticism lately. Scholarship on African migration to the developed world has mainly focused on migrants' experience in the West with regards to race and identity and a continual propensity towards criticizing Western border closing policies. This paper, in a close reading and critical discourse analysis maneuver, explores two new generation Nigerian writers namely Teju Cole and Noo Saro-Wiwa within postcolonial theoretical framework. It purports to examine new immigration narratives in which migrants return 'home' to write about their place of origin as they have become transnationals calling attention on mayhem that this place experiences as opposed to nationalist or Pan-Africanist ideologies, of bygone era, expressed primarily in Negritude writings. Both considered narratives show that Cole and Saro-Wiwa use magical realism and travelogue form to depict the starkly mundane life condition in Nigeria with failed transportation system, socio-political corruption, and overwhelming fatalism due to not only the ruled but the ruler's failure to change their living conditions. Rather, they tend to surrender and participate in 'mutual zombification.' These writers' thematic inclination displays their pessimism and skepticism regarding Nigeria's improvement to become a place with acceptable living standards as they leave their readers to hopelessly contemplate the mess that the narratives aesthetically depict.

Anchored on textual analysis and theoretical insights from (interactional) sociolinguistics, (pos... more Anchored on textual analysis and theoretical insights from (interactional) sociolinguistics, (positive) psychology and neuroscience, the current paper aims at analyzing the various strategies that the street children, named or nameless, etc. in Amma Darko’s Faceless (2003) draw on to ensure their survival on the streets. The study further demonstrates how this novel, beyond its representation of the social issue of street children, depicts the outstanding resourcefulness of many African children who have to cater and fend for themselves on the streets. The findings reveal that these children have used such survival strategies as imitating or behaving in an adult-like manner, bonding, learning and using a code, hustling, accepting and adapting to one’s reality and floating-out-of-one’s body to cope with life on the streets.

European Journal of Language and Culture Studies, 2022

This paper explores Chimamanda N. Adichie’s two short stories to show how the writer portrays hum... more This paper explores Chimamanda N. Adichie’s two short stories to show how the writer portrays human rights abuse and political irresponsibility as obstacles to peace and raises her fellow Africans’ awareness on the conditions to meet to foster conflict mitigation and nation-building efforts. Drawing on postcolonial theory, the study has found that Adichie implicitly interrogates the causes of constant conflicts in Nigeria and suggests that a sound social justice, political accountability, and respect of human rights constitute viable passes to peace in Nigeria and Africa as a whole.

Journal La Sociale

This paper examines the tropes of (sexually) objectified or/and oppressed men in selected contemp... more This paper examines the tropes of (sexually) objectified or/and oppressed men in selected contemporary African prose works. Drawing on Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth, FCDA) for theoretical underpinnings, Systemic Functional Linguistics (henceforth, SFL) for grammatical tools and the qualitative research method, this study seeks to analyze how contemporary feminist writers like Amma Darko, Daniel Mengara, and Lola Shoneyin employ language in their fictional texts The Housemaid (1998), Mema (2003) and The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives (2015) respectively to represent the phenomenon of (sexually) objectified or/and oppressed male characters. This article cogently argues that the tropes of (sexually) objectified or/and oppressed men, as enacted in the aforementioned prose works, encode a form of gendered experience which irrefutably has a given recondite function or meaning which only a critical linguistic analysis of the writers’ language can uncover. The findings...

Many theorists, feminist scholars, and critics have been divided on the question of if it is pos... more Many theorists, feminist scholars, and critics have been divided on the question of if it is
possible for both men and women to adequately write about women. This article examines how
some contemporary men and women have redefined and represented African women in their
fiction, discharging them of conventional roles in patriarchal settings. To prove this, we examine
instances of reversal of women’s conventional roles through womanist and radical feminist trends
in four selected contemporary African novels written by both men and women: Mema (2003), A
Beautiful Daughter (2012), The Housemaid (1998), and The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives
(2010). The first two novels are respectively written by men, Daniel Mengara and Asare Adei,
whereas the last two were written by women, Amma Darko and Lola Shoneyin. There are
similarities in the ways contemporary African authors write about women in their fictional texts.
For instance, they sometimes switch from a patriarchal ideology to a matriarchal one. The authors
have revealed these ideologies via the reversal of women’s roles, by empowering them through
decision-making on matters concerning their children, their children’s rights, motherhood, giving
the hand of their daughter in marriage, and arranging and financing wedding festivities of their
children in their novels. But the writers each adopt different concepts when advocating or
addressing problems facing women. Their use of womanist or radical feminist ideology varies
from one another irrespective of their gender. By reversing women’s conventional roles, the
authors seem to have confirmed that a society cannot, therefore, be either "strictly matriarchal" or
"strictly patriarchal"; rather, a society can have matriarchal and patriarchal subsystems, and these
usually complement each other (Chinweizu, 1990, p.112).
Keywords: Women, Conventional roles, Womanism, Radical feminism, Reversal

Many theorists, feminist scholars, and critics have been divided on the question of if it is poss... more Many theorists, feminist scholars, and critics have been divided on the question of if it is possible for both men and women to adequately write about women. This article examines how some contemporary men and women have redefined and represented African women in their fiction, discharging them of conventional roles in patriarchal settings. To prove this, we examine instances of reversal of women’s conventional roles through womanist and radical feminist trends in four selected contemporary African novels written by both men and women: Mema (2003), A Beautiful Daughter (2012), The Housemaid (1998), and The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives (2010). The first two novels are respectively written by men, Daniel Mengara and Asare Adei, whereas the last two were written by women, Amma Darko and Lola Shoneyin. There are similarities in the ways contemporary African authors write about women in their fictional texts. For instance, they sometimes switch from a patriarchal ideology to a matri...

International Journal of Social Science Studies, 2017

The South societies, under the influence of their Northern counterparts, have undergone profound ... more The South societies, under the influence of their Northern counterparts, have undergone profound familial changes; these transformations are translated in a reduction of the number of marriages and in making wedlock unions fragile along with the consequences that this entails on children. Drawing on the data from four Demographic and Health surveys (DHS) (1992, 1998, 2006, and 2012) which Niger has so far conducted, this study aims at verifying whether the influence of social transformations on the family in Niger can be captured through an examination of the increase in median age at the first marriage, in the proportion of single women (and definitive celibacy), in polygamous marriages, in couples living in consensual union (not in wedlock), in the proportion of children living with their single mother, and in that of the divorced/separated women. Our results show that though urbanization and education influence marriage, women’s “dismarriage” is yet to be a topical issue. Thus, w...

IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 2017