Journal of the African Literature Association最新文献

{"title":"Nature as a symbiotic edge of humanity: eco-critical reading of Armah’s The Healers","authors":"Samuel Nkansah","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2023.2223826","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2023.2223826","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In his historical novel, The Healers, Ayi Kwei Armah correlates elements of the fictional settings of Esuano and the Eastern Forest, with different phases of social communication. The binary settings and their elements mirror the symbiotic character of the relationship that ought to exist between humans and nature. Armah employs symbolic, temporal and cultural codes reflective of African tradition and indigenous values through natural representation in the text as communicative properties. Eco-critical theory guides this study to explore the relationship that exists between humans and the natural world. Principles from eco-criticism are explored with a focus on Armah’s creation of groups in the Eastern Forest and rivers as emblems of the divine with particular powers, in contrast to what Esuano represents to these groups. In this novel, Esuano is associated with manipulation, while the Eastern Forest is the site for inspiration and healing.","PeriodicalId":116895,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"69 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133871354","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Unmaking agency: intersectionality and narrative silencing in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body","authors":"P. Uwakweh","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2023.2204575","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2023.2204575","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In This Mournable Body, the voice of Dangarembga’s Tambu is strikingly missing. What happened to the protagonist whose voice pervades the narrative landscape of the earlier novels? This paper attempts to account for the authorial shift in narrative perspective. It engages the ‘unmaking’ of Tambu’s agency by deliberating on the causal factors through the framework of Intersectionality. By tracing Tambu’s subjectivity in the post colony back to her actions in Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not, this paper examines the implications of her co-constructing multiple identities. It argues that Tambu’s misjudgments, pathology, narrative erasure, silencing, disrupt her presence in this last trilogy, and her predicament also parallels the anxieties and travails of her fragile post colony. Further, the paper considers the constituents of agency within the postcolonial African cultural context, affirms that Dangarembga celebrates the power of women in the post colony, and shifts the criteria for agency to a new level of activism against oppressive neocolonial forces. More significantly, the author also aligns her women’s activism with Unhu communal ethics and practices. Overall, the paper establishes that Dangarembga’s political critique in This Mournable Body is evident in her representational choices which reinforce social awareness, individual accountability, and communal responsibility as the redemptive pathway for postcolonial African nations.","PeriodicalId":116895,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114375705","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Feminism and modernity in Anglophone African women’s writing","authors":"A. Mtenje","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2023.2200451","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2023.2200451","url":null,"abstract":"In Africa, when the backlash is placed against the backdrop of political monopoly, economic deprivation, poverty, violence, displacement, adjusting economics and globalization, the crisis multiplies tenfold. It will take a new revamped kind of feminism to resist and defeat this kind of backlash. A feminism with a capital “F”. (Tamale 2006 qtd in Pucherová 1)","PeriodicalId":116895,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129851045","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Our ways among strangers”: tradition and late modernity in Hollist’s So the Path Does Not Die","authors":"Oluseun Adekunmi Tanimomo","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2023.2182020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2023.2182020","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Questions of modernity, globalization, and transnationalism have occupied the thematic focus of African literature in the past three decades. In this paper, I argue that the adverse consequences of modernity, globalization, and transnationalism are at the heart of risk and uncertainty in Pede Hollist’s novel So the Path Does not Die. I pursue Ulrich Beck’s understanding of the consequences of the victories of modernity as risks in the novel. Risks in the novel can be read at macro-levels of normative values and the socio-psychological frame of collective fear, that derive from choosing from multivariate mediating institutions, traditions, and social standards; on the meso-level of family or group disarray; and on the individual level of existential anxiety. In these three stages, the novel deals with the questioning and changing status of tradition in the social order and the transnational problems of risk in a world in which individuals have to share the consequences of dangers and threats that may have been produced elsewhere through policies and social frameworks. This novel interlinks the complexities of postcolonial fictionality with ongoing late-modernity dynamics to depict the risks of late modernity.","PeriodicalId":116895,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129536464","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Re-purposing African elements in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber","authors":"Elisabeth Abena Osei","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2023.2181512","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2023.2181512","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper places Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber, which is steeped in Caribbean traditions, under the umbrella of black speculative fiction. In Midnight Robber, Hopkinson’s tech-sophisticated projected future human settlement, becomes a creative space that subverts colonial legacies and creatively utilizes symbolism in imagined speculative futures to subliminally assert a decolonial agenda. In Midnight Robber, these symbols lie in the placement of certain historical African elements in the viable future. Anthony Kwame Appiah’s Thick Translation provides a hinge for contextual engagement with the text in order to clearly discern the implications of the use of these African elements. I argue that the weaving of these valorized African cultural elements into the speculative future space, imagines a reconnection to pre-colonial Africa thus introducing the Sankofa theory of return. This paper will show that in the treatment of African elements through the reclamation of traditional African storytelling technique, the reification of an ancestor as a supreme being and the use of an indigenous African god as an artificial intelligence body, Midnight Robber does not only present many analogies consistent with the Sankofa principle but also becomes an avenue for previously marginalized communities to move forward into the future with valorized elements sourced from Africa in a productive way.","PeriodicalId":116895,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127461867","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The itineraries of agency and resistance in the petrofiction of the Niger Delta: Okpewho’s Tides and Ojaide’s The Activist","authors":"O. Udumukwu","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2023.2170763","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2023.2170763","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The impact from natural resource extraction finds expression in the petrofiction of the Niger Delta through the nature and role of characters that function in agency. A study of the major characters in Isidore Okpewho’s Tides and Tanure Ojaide’s The Activist reveals itineraries of human agency in their responses to the effect of oil extraction. While a group of characters shows that environmental action can become a counterpane for self-seeking and self-motivated intellectuals at the detriment of solidarity with all including human, nonhuman and the general economy, this study also reveals that there is still a set of intellectuals that remain consistent to the genuine need for a safe and clean environment. Our overall goal in this contribution is achieved through a renegotiation of the value of agency in both the work of Cajetan Iheka as well as that of Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin. Iheka privileges agency that is attuned to a shift from an emphasis on the human to the nonhuman. Huggan and Tiffin accommodate agency that underpins both human and animals. While acknowledging the importance of both positions, this article calls for a return to a focus on human agency especially in relation to the factor of accountability which remains an unfinished business. The call for general action against resource extraction and its impact will remain elusive as long as there are divergences in human agency.","PeriodicalId":116895,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"60 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132299291","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Desiring women in contemporary Senegal: Nafissatou Dia Diouf and Kalista Sy’s inclusive afrotopos","authors":"Molly Krueger Enz","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2022.2159654","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2022.2159654","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In Afrotopia, Senegalese scholar and writer Felwine Sarr argues that it is time for Africa to undertake “the efforts of critical reflection in regard to oneself, one’s own realities and situation in the world: to think oneself, to represent oneself, to project oneself” in order to “contribute to the positive transformation of African societies.” Contemporary Senegalese writers Nafissatou Dia Diouf and Kalista Sy are committed to transformative visions of Africa in their work which focuses on the perspectives and desires of Senegalese women. Through the genres of literature and television screenplays, Diouf and Sy tackle important, sometimes sensitive, issues that are not often portrayed on the page or the screen and that push back against patriarchal views of women. By elevating women’s voices and experiences, these two important cultural producers stimulate critical reflection on perceptions of gender, sexuality, desire, pleasure, and empowerment to promote a more inclusive society and afrotopos.","PeriodicalId":116895,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117312724","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Postsecular Poetics: Negotiating the Sacred and Secular in Contemporary African Fiction","authors":"R. Topper","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2023.2178197","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2023.2178197","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":116895,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115998484","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Deconstructing the figure of the dictator in Ramón Esono Ebalé’s La pesadilla de Obi","authors":"J. Boampong","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2023.2178721","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2023.2178721","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract As a country which, since gaining independence from Spain in 1968, has only known two autocratic regimes and is currently headed by Africa’s longest-serving dictator, the question of freedom weighs heavily on the literature of Equatorial Guinea. Although the Hispanophone tradition is little explored within African literary criticism, writers from the Hispanophone literary tradition of Equatorial Guinea, much like their Anglophone and Francophone counterparts, address the question of dictatorship and its repercussions in varied ways. Joaquim Mbomio Bacheng’s description of Hispanophone literature as “a song of freedom in its eternal quest for a new world” is very telling of Equatoguinean writers’ response to the stranglehold that dictatorship has over the country. One contemporary Hispanophone author whose life and works exemplify Bacheng’s observation, and arguably confront the subject of dictatorship most forcefully, is Ramón Esono Ebalé, renowned for his activism and visually arresting texts. This paper undertakes a close reading of Ebalé’s graphic novel La pesadilla de Obi [Obi’s nightmare], which employs the power of both visual and written texts to fashion a new status for Obi, its dictator-turned-ordinary-citizen protagonist. I argue that the deconstruction of the image of the dictator serves as a solid basis for compelling its target audience to formulate a counter-discourse to destabilize established notions about Obiang.","PeriodicalId":116895,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"31 3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117024562","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"(Digital) anthologies and genre: Writing sexual pleasure and poetic freedom","authors":"Naminata Diabate","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2023.2181520","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2023.2181520","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract “Our reticence [to discuss sex in public] is therefore understandable, but not acceptable when it seeps into our literature” (v) declares Sibbyl Akwaugo Whyte in her introduction to the 2018 electronic collection Erotic Africa: The Sex Anthology. Back in 2014-2015, Léonora Miano rejected the muzzling effects of racialization that until recently has led Francophone sub-Saharan and Afrodiasporic writers to suppress their sexuality. Miano’s rebellion against that repressed form of self-alienation and her striving toward poetic sexual freedom resulted in her commissioning and editing two anthologies, Première nuit: une anthologie du désir (2014) by male writers and Volcaniques: une anthologie du plaisir (2015) by female writers. Investment in correcting the silence around sex(ual) pleasure is echoed and amplified in a growing number of anthologies, mostly digital. What is the conceptual repertoire the editors, curators, and writers deploy in expressing their vision of sexual pleasure and poetic freedom? Are there discernible forms of freedom in their articulations? What kind of freedom is possible in writing and publishing erotic and/or pornographic texts in a digital space? Drawing on the collections’ editorial notes, secondary materials on the founders of the collectives and hubs, Phyllis Taoua’s reflections on freedom, and a close reading of Tuelo Gabonewe’s short story “The Oink in Doinker,” I argue that this genre and its current success is all about freedom in its instrumental and substantive guises. Specifically, I show how in combating sexual moralists through the distribution of their literary output via the Internet, these writers engage online platforms as instrumental freedoms. Using those instrumental freedoms, they practice and aspire to substantive freedoms by presenting a radical vision of sexual permissiveness, and thus remedying a stale literary scene through experimentation with content and style, which equally affords their readers a certain degree of substantive freedom. In their practices and aspiration exists the insuppressible creative resolve toward sexual self-determination that however reveals the tenuous relationship between the two kinds of freedom.","PeriodicalId":116895,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116280752","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}