Cultural theory and cultural dialogue in the 21st century (original) (raw)

Points on African Literary Aesthetics

ABSTRACT This article aims to discuss some points on literary aesthetics and interpretation with a focus on African literature and within the framework of the theory of stylistic criticism. The aesthetic dimension distinguishes African literature as a specific artistic creation in the comity of global culture. Literature like any work of art is prone to different interpretations and reactions as the phenomenologist Roman Ingarden has pointed out. But the criticism and interpretation of African literature must be carried out within the context of Africa’s peculiar tradition and values. In the attempt to discover the artistic status of a work, the interpretations must decipher the extraordinary in the formal aesthetic features of the work. The way a writer has made an ordinary story to look special beyond what is familiar gives the work its aesthetic value. Artful African work of fiction seeks to present the meaning of African social and cultural issues in a malleable poetic and narrative language, richly symbolic, that is imaginatively persuasive with a power to capture attention and emotionally sanctify the reader. Key words: African literature, aesthetics, criticism, judgment, appreciation. ABSTRAIT Cet article a l'intention de discuter un certain nombre de points sur l'esthétique et l’interprétation littéraires en se concentrant sur la littérature africaine dans le cadre de la théorie de la critique stylistique. La dimension esthétique distingue la littérature africaine comme une création artistique spécifique dans le comité de culture globale. La littérature comme n'importe quelle œuvre d'art est encline à de différentes interprétations et aux réactions, comme Roman Ingarden, le phénoménologiste a montré. Mais la critique et l'interprétation de la littérature africaine doivent être réalisées dans le contexte de la tradition particulière de l'Afrique et de ses valeurs. Dans la tentative de découvrir le statut artistique d'un travail, les interprétations doivent déchiffrer l'extraordinaire dans les traits esthétiques formels du travail. La façon dans laquelle un auteur a transformé une histoire banale en un texte particulier au-delà de ce qui est familier donne au travail sa valeur esthétique. La création artistique d’une œuvre de fiction africaine cherche à présenter le sens des problèmes sociaux et culturels africains dans un langage poétique et narratif malléable, richement symbolique, qui est imaginativement persuasif, capable de capturer l'attention et sanctifier le lecteur avec émotion.

'Is There such Thing as African Culture in the 21 st Century? A Philosophical Appraisal

This paper attempts to demonstrate that currently, there is nothing like African culture in the real sense of the word. If culture is understood as the sum total of a way of life of a particular set of people, it is unfortunate but obvious that modern Africa cannot pretend to have one. It is the opinion of this paper that colonialism and imperialism destroyed what was originally African. Talking of a genuine African culture in this twenty first century is a sham. It is shocking to realize that till date, most Africans still rely on the 'Other' [that is, the Western world] to name, qualify, define, and even classify them. This paper then concludes that Africans must regain themselves, that is; they must remain authentic through the revival and imposition of their genuine and unique personality if they really want to contribute to world history.

Discourses and Disciplines: African Literary Criticism, North Africa and the Politics of Exclusion

While it goes without saying that creative literature inscribes human experience through the manipulations of verbal and rhetorical resources, it also stands to reason that literary deployments are epistemic and discursive, thus necessarily biased. To locate realism as a signifier of an irrefutable truth, as suggested by certain schools of thought, becomes highly problematic in literature since it is a linguistic system whose possibilities of meaning are 'always in a process' and therefore 'never concluded'. This paper examines the claims of realism in literature, exploring its history and metamorphosis in time and space, and advancing that its foregrounding by a number of ideo-aesthetic interests as constituting the core of their discourses is, at best, an exercise in 'idealism.' This argument subtly branches into a recognition of how postcolonial literatures have inscribed their difference from the Western Master Text within the realistic discourse. It proffers a poststructuralist resolution of identifying a multiplicity of identities in any project exploring the realistic in imaginative literature.

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.

The Criticism of African Literature

The criticism of African literature awakened and grew by means of controversy during the 1970s and 1980s, with some of the critics taking the view that African literature can only competently be addressed by African critics, as if being an African provided one a special key to these literary artefacts. The prejudice in this is that what one studies is not literature, but Africanness, or what some call ‘the African experience’; and it has led to constructing instrument of analysis which are incapable of uncovering the literary qualities of the works. This has a negative effect on the literary tradition itself since it encourages the production of works displaying the features the critics have called African. This paper argues that the entire tradition – the literature, the criticism, and the literary theory – needs to connect to and stay engaged with other literary traditions of the world in dialogue, highlighting the fact that they are all things of the same kind.

Modern African Literature and Cultural Identity

African Studies Review, 1992

Modern African literature has gained recognition worldwide with such classics as Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Ngugi wa Thiongo's Weep Not Child, and Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman. This recognition was reinforced by Soyinka's winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. Modern African literature is written in indigenous African languages and in European languages used in Africa. Written African literature is very new compared to the indigenous oral tradition of literature which has been there and is still very much alive. While there are literary works in Yoruba, Hausa, Zulu and Sotho, among others, this literature in African indigenous languages is hardly known outside its specific linguistic frontiers. Writers such as Mazisi Kunene, Ngugi wa Thiongo and the late Okot p'Bitek first wrote some of their works in African languages before translating them into English. Most African writers, however, write in English, French, and Portuguese. There is the Eurocentric temptation to see modern African literature written in these European languages as an extension of European literature. However, after modern imperialism, language alone cannot be the sole definer of a people's literature. Defining African literature, Abiola Irele writes: The term 'Africa' appears to correspond to a geographical notion but we know that, in practical terms, it also takes in those areas of collective awareness that have been determined by ethnic, historical and sociological factors, all these factors, as they affect and express themselves in our literature, marking off for it a broad area of reference. Within this area of reference then, and related to certain aspects that are intrinsic to the literature, the problem of definition involves as well a consideration of aesthetic modes in their intimate correlation to the cultural and social structures which determine and define the expressive schemes of African peoples and societies (1981,10). This definition of literature takes note of place with its people and society having "aesthetic modes" and "cultural and social structures." Language is not the prime focus in this definition of literature, whose "essential force" is "its reference to the historical and experiential"

In search for a philosophy of African art

This article examines the obstacles and possibilities of a philosophy of African art. It addresses the problem that the words 'philosophy' and 'art' have a Greco-Roman origin. For a long time philosophy was understood as rational argumentation and art as an aesthetic object. This was a determining factor for the rise of a Eurocentric orientation of Western philosophy and art history. If we want to reflect on (traditional) African philosophy and art we might have to look for a broader concept of philosophy and make a distinction between art as an aesthetic object and art as a cult object. From this point of view I will reflect on the question if-and in what sense-we can find in the Ifá divination of the Yoruba in Nigeria a philosophy that can help us to understand the traditional artworks of the Yoruba.