ORATURE, ORALITY AND IDENTITY IN THE PROBLEM OF PERCEPTION AND INTERPRETATION OF MODERN AFRICAN LITERATURE (original) (raw)
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African oral cultures as well as their oral literatures are vigorous. True, in some cases, elements of such literatures are at risk of disappearing when styles and texts are linked to specific languages and rituals that are no longer performed as they were in the past; in other cases, the very limited number of speakers has drawn local and global attention to endangered languages and the need for their revitalization. Still, such a “sense of an ending” needs to be balanced by the observation that the large majority of the verbal arts and the cultural groups that produce them have, by and large, integrated oral and new ways of expression—from hip hop to various forms of theatre, world fusion music and digital orality. Changing oral genres and “technauriture” in African literatures are at the heart of the analyses and discussions presented in this number of Tydskrif vir Letterkunde. Pdf : http://www.letterkunde.up.ac.za/argief/51\_1/00%20Prelims%20WEB%2003.pdf
The role of orature in African socio-cultural space
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The spoken words are more natural and perhaps better understood than the written letters, which are invented to capture and to re-enact human mind, intention, emotion, opinion, view, experience and prediction among other things. Oral narratives, all over the world, set the pace for the written literature. It is an integral part of every human culture. However, the sophistication of the modern world, particularly the globalisation, has directly or indirectly affected the potency of oral narratives in Africa. Having discovered the neglect of orature in Africa as a whole and in the Yoruba land in particular, this article seeks to explain the essentials of this aspect of life which is at a dangerous point of extinction. The study sets its search light on certain elements of African oral literature such as folklores, myths, legends, proverbs and oral poetry which emanate from the Yoruba community. Using the theme study method/approach, the article aims at reversing the dying fortune of t...
Nature and Functions of Oral Literature in Africa
EN-QUETE: Revue scientifique de lettres, arts et Sciences humaines, 2021
ABSTRACT African literature cannot be fully apprehended if the concept of “oral literature” or orature is underestimated. In fact, contemporary literature in Africa is the child of orature because this form of artistic expression, in more ways than one, bears many imprints on literature. Writers have shown their African identity in literature by means of oral literature. Here, the question is what is oral literature? How does it deploy itself in the fabric of African expressive creativity? What are the characteristic features of such a literature? Answering these questions is the point of the current study. Keywords : Africa, Orality, Epic, Poetry, Tale, Myth, Language, Writing, Art, Colonialism.
With the coinage of the term “ethnopoetics” by Jerome Rothenberg in 1968, a new vista was opened for the study of performance contexts and the intricacies of linguistic manipulations particularly in so called primitive societies and predominantly oral environments. Also, with the term “ethnopoetics,” communication scholars like Jerome Rothenberg, Dell Hymes, Dennis Tedlock, Barre Toelkin and others focused attention not only on the poetics of language use but also on methods of translation and transcription that will portray the artful qualities of oral performances in traditional societies that, through neglect, have almost become extinct or are endangered. It is obvious that oral based African societies face this danger as they are not prone to stabilization or fixity through writing. The “Ongian” concept of primary and secondary orality, therefore, draws attention to the re-emergence and primacy of oral communication particularly with the development of internet media technology. These developments, therefore, call for a reassessment and reinforcement of efforts on the dialectic of ethnopoetics particularly as it relates to the African context as a means of not only bridging the gap between orality and writing and bringing out the centrality of verbal art as a dynamic force in shaping linguistic structure and linguistic study but also to help dispel what Bauman and Briggs have described as the anthropological and linguistic belief that “aesthetic uses of language are merely parasitic upon core areas of linguistics and phonology.” Ethnopoetics affords us a new emphasis on the subtlety of performance and performance contexts in the traditional African environment in the bid to develop an African personality and oral literary aesthetics. This Research is meant to be a two part study. Part one focuses on the concerns of ethnopoetics and its relevance to contextual performance studies while part two will be an adoption of the Ethnopoetics approach to the study of a Bakor oral narrative with the aim of authenticating the assertion that Ethnopoetics thrives on a concerted effort to lend credence to, concretize and revitalize the personality profiles of otherwise disappearing Languages because of lack of sustained usage. It is, therefore, an ethnographic and Linguistic appraisal of so called minority languages, (of which the Bakor language group is one) and their cultural potentialities evident in the creative or poetic uses of language. Keywords: Orality, performance contexts, primitive societies, endangered languages, linguistic study.
Sumerianz, Journal of Education, Linguistics and Literature., 2019
(1) Introduction. (2) The Problem of perception of African Traditional Drama. (3) Ritual and the Making of African Traditional Drama. (4) Orality and the Performance Context in the Making of African Traditional Drama. (5) The Dynamics of the Oral Performance Context.(6) Conclusion. Followed by References. The concept of African Traditional drama has elicited diverse and sometimes derogatory connotations in the past from alien and sometimes, surprisingly, indigenous African critics. The contention has always been that Africans lack a dramatic tradition comparable to the Western concept of dramaturgy. This paper, therefore, focuses on an analysis of what constitutes African traditional drama and posits that while the dramatic impulse is inherent in all human societies, the methods for the realization of that dramatic impulse may differ according to environmental needs and the societal concept of the aesthetics of literary composition and presentation.
The African Literary Artist and the Question of Function
Critics have argued that the African literary artist [traditional or modern] carries out some kind of function. This includes teaching his audience through his work, having qualified as the keeper of his society’s mores. Yet no critic has closely interrogated this stance and the constitution of the space of representation and teaching; what he really teaches; the shades of opinion that make him seem a recorder of his society’s mores; and other sundry lacunae. This article proceeds by problematising such terms as artist, society, mores and teaching, on one hand, and by invoking such theoretical concepts of literature enunciated by critics, from Aristotle to Akwanya, on the other, in order to dismantle the argument that the artist teaches. It also argues that the notion of function, either teaching or recording of mores, privileges unity of message. The sense of unity is later exploded via exploring the chaotic meaning in Nigerian literature from traditional to modern works. In addition, this work demonstrates that the artist is a victim of the fleeting space of in-betweenness in which his craft is formed and to which he owes allegiance. Rather than record the mores of a society, at most, society merely affords him a place through its language for the purpose of mediating ‘reality’ at a second remove. From the explorations of the above varied concerns, this work concludes that either the artist is a bad teacher, or is someone from whom the ability to teach or record his society’s mores breaks free.