The African-Jamaican Aesthetic : Cultural Retention and Transformation Across Borders (original) (raw)

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 Verbal Genre as Literature and Performance

Journal of Critical Studies in language and literature, 2020

This research paper is my attempt, through a blow-by-blow analysis of a fictional work of a rising star in postcolonial writing, to grapple with the manifold discontents that attend the event of migration. Migration is an astoundingly painful experience to go through, whose multifaceted toll on the subject may be beyond repair. Using NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New names as a stepping-stone, I argue that migration, albeit a time-honoured phenomenon has picked up speed in the twentieth-century and continued into the twenty-first century with a most heavy human toll. The paper emphasizes that even though the act of migration is underpinned by a hope for betterment, it may turn out to be a damp squid. No end of landmines and hiccups dot the migratory journey. The long-suffering postcolonial subject, hallmarked by the stifling strictures of marginality owing to a long history of race-based oppression that stretches back to the gruesome eras of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and coloniza...

AFRICAN LITERATURE IN THE MAKING: FROM PRE-COLONIALISM TO POST-COLONIALISM

This paper attempts to trace the various vicissitudes of the evolution and development of African Literature: from oral literature, through pre-colonial literature, colonial literature, to post-colonial literature. African literature is defined as ‘literature of and from Africa’. However, though cursory reference is made to non-English African literatures as well, the focus of this paper is literature of English ‘black Africa’. A special page is devoted to African-American literature because of its unique historical position in the development of African literature. The foundations of modern African literature as an intellectual ‘school’ are traced back to the middle of the 18th century. Modern African literature emerged as a resistance platform, an instrument of struggle against oppression and exploitation. Unfortunately, more than a couple of centuries on, African literature is still faced with formidable challenges, including lack of freedom of expression imposed by political authoritarianism and socio-cultural reactionarism. Even though a great deal of achievement has been recorded since its inception in the 18th century, African literature still has a long way to go in the struggle to fulfill its mission to foster socio-political justice and true liberty for the common people of Africa.

REWRITING ORAL TRADITION IN POSTCOLONIAL AFRO-CARIBBEAN FRANCOPHONE NOVELS

Although rooted in the tradition of every society and its culture, folk literature has undergone transformation over time. It continuously adapts to the contemporary context to highlight the human experience, feeling, attitude, and knowledge. And it is observed in postcolonial Francophone literature that Afro-Caribbean writers rely heavily on a large number of elements of oral tradition (such as the use of myths, riddles, proverbs, folktales, songs, “polyphonies”, and symbolic images corresponding with Nature) and languages (such as the Creole language) not only to reformulate the cultural policy of the Afro-Caribbean postcolonial world, but also to create an epistemic condition in the construction of identity and history denied to these people by the colonizers. This Paper attempts to shed some light on the issue of orality and its treatment as a narrative element, from a postcolonial standpoint, in the novels by Afro-Caribbean writers, particularly in reference to Simone Schwartz-Bart (Guadeloupe), V.Y. Mudimbe (Congo), Ahmadou Kourouma (Ivory Coast), and Werewere Liking (Camaroon). It is this very relationship between the ‘old’ (African) oral tradition and the ‘new’ (African) writings in the French language that I wish to examine in order to see how these authors attempt to reassert and restore African reality, self-autonomy and identity; that, beyond the problems of marginalization of the African in the story, their novels attempt, above all, a fictional reconstruction of “the social, political and ideological history and experience” of the African society as a whole.

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"

Thematic changes in postcolonial African literature: From colonialism to neocolonialism

Postcolonial African literature emerged as a reaction to colonialism as theory and practice. It comes under the banner of postcolonialism-a theory of oppositionality that encapsulates the totality of practices which characterize the third world nations, especially in Africa, from the inception of colonialism to the present day. The main thrust of the paper is to examine the thematic changes associated with the development of African literature. To do this, the definitional problem with postcolonialism is resolved to have an operational definition. Foundational issues in postcolonialism are considered. These issues-history, universalism and difference, and language-recur in every phase of postcolonial African literature. It is ascertained that history has been a site for racial tension. The European ethnocentric concept insists that Africans have no history or culture, while Africans are subverting the European centralist notion of history and re-inscribing African history. European universalism suggests that European culture is the standard culture, while postcolonial writers insist on pluralism of culture, emphasizing the beauty and virility of African culture. Apart from the use of African languages in writing, postcolonial writers are domesticating the European languages to express African experience. The paper analyses the thematic changes in postcolonial African literature which are found to be dictated by the prevailing circumstances during each phase. The paper concludes with suggestions on how to make postcolonial African literature more effective and responsive for the good of Africans and Africa.