Journal of the African Literature Association最新文献_第5页

Of freedom and literature in Africa and the diaspora 自由和文学在非洲和散居海外

Journal of the African Literature Association Pub Date : 2023-01-02 DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2023.2187950

P. Taoua, G. Musila

引用次数: 0

Of writing and freedom in Sony Labou Tansi’s novel Life and a Half 论《一生半》中的写作与自由

Journal of the African Literature Association Pub Date : 2023-01-02 DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2023.2178718

P. Taoua

{"title":"Of writing and freedom in Sony Labou Tansi’s novel Life and a Half","authors":"P. Taoua","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2023.2178718","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2023.2178718","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay offers a critical re-reading of Sony Labou Tansi’s début novel Life and a Half that was both formally innovative and conceptually challenging. As a point of departure, I consider Tansi’s statements about his vocation as a writer and the interpretive questions they raise. One such question is why the novel’s critical reception has tended to focus on its representation of dictatorship, while not engaging as productively with its existential dimensions. To get at these issues, this essay explores the integral relationship between writing and freedom. I structure the argument around an interpretation of three aliases for the writer, Martial, Chaïdana, and Layisho, who are fictional projections of the author in the novel. My critical approach to the text is informed by the published archive of Tansi’s extra-literary writing, my own fieldwork in Congo-Brazzaville, and interdisciplinary scholarship on the Kongo people and their culture from art history to political anthropology. My re-reading of this classic novel argues that the archive and Kongo culture are valuable resources for understanding the writer’s creative repertoire, which allows us to expand our interpretive framework for explicating aesthetic choices and their meanings in the text. Freedom as a concept broadens our critical parameters and brings a range of interrelated experiences into focus in the same interpretive frame, helping us to elucidate distinctions between them. By showing how Sony Labou Tansi elevates writing as a weapon of resistance with a spiritual dimension drawing on Kongo ritual and culture, we are better able to appreciate the extent of his capacious longing for freedom at home.","PeriodicalId":116895,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"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":"127394664","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}

引用次数: 0

Mohammed Khelef Ghassani’s “Kwetu”: poetry, place, and liberation Mohammed Khelef Ghassani的《Kwetu》:诗歌、地方和解放

Journal of the African Literature Association Pub Date : 2023-01-02 DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2023.2179180

Meg Arenberg

引用次数: 0

Belonging and freedom in Ernest Cole’s The House of Bondage 欧内斯特·科尔《奴役之家》中的归属与自由

Journal of the African Literature Association Pub Date : 2023-01-02 DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2023.2178719

Eleni Coundouriotis

{"title":"Belonging and freedom in Ernest Cole’s The House of Bondage","authors":"Eleni Coundouriotis","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2023.2178719","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2023.2178719","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Ernest Cole’s seminal photo essay, House of Bondage (1966), locates freedom in the documentarian’s creative effort, which aims to bring forth the fullness of African lives under oppression. This essay explores the paradox of Cole’s experience of a loss of creative freedom in exile compared to his experience in South Africa. A wounded belonging inspires his perspective on space and context and his articulation of an African-centered ethical perspective. To convey the fullness of life, Cole exploits the tensions between text and image that characterize the photo essay form, setting up his images so that they exceed the conventional function of documentary. The result is a novelistic work that aims, in Georg Lukács’s terms “to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life.” Cole’s images of subjects reading convey their yearning for freedom by depicting them in a state of thought that indicates imaginative engagement with the world beyond their confinement. Images of persons reading, furthermore, belong to a pictorial convention strongly associated with the establishment of the novel as a popular literary form in the nineteenth century, when the novels similarly conveyed the space of interiority as freedom.","PeriodicalId":116895,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"534 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":"123578451","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}

引用次数: 0

Singing the Law: Oral Jurisprudence and the Crisis of Colonial Modernity in East African Literature 歌唱法律:东非文学中的口头法理学与殖民现代性危机

Journal of the African Literature Association Pub Date : 2023-01-02 DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2023.2171219

Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire

引用次数: 2

Refusal and the American dream in Dinaw Mengestu’s oeuvre 狄纳·孟格斯图作品中的拒绝与美国梦

Journal of the African Literature Association Pub Date : 2023-01-02 DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2023.2180178

G. Musila

引用次数: 0

Black liberation politics and quagmires in trans-Atlantic black operas 跨大西洋黑人歌剧中的黑人解放政治与泥潭

Journal of the African Literature Association Pub Date : 2023-01-02 DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2023.2180177

I. Mhlambi

{"title":"Black liberation politics and quagmires in trans-Atlantic black operas","authors":"I. Mhlambi","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2023.2180177","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2023.2180177","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Legacies of colonialism, slavery, and neo-liberalism, as well as the afterlives of black liberatory politics, are laying bare shortcomings of the regionalization of black politics and the limits of the freedoms fought for. In their attempts to grapple with these realities, diasporan African communities inadvertently fractured black solidarity espoused in the ethos of transnational black unity and pan-Africanism. I argue that neoliberal capitalism and contradictions of black liberatory discourses have given rise to black identities whose outlook disavo ws values that once bound the black race around common goals of social and economic justice. Drawing from Phyllis Taoua’s notion of “unfreed freedoms,” this article uses three black operas about slavery, migration, and human trafficking to explore contradictions of the afterlives of black liberatory discourses. I show that slavery and human trafficking in Toni Morrison and Richard Danielpour’s Margaret Garner (premiered in the United States in 2005), Shirley Thompson’s The Woman Who Refused to Dance (premiered in the United Kingdom in 2007), and Mandla Langa and Hugh Masekela’s Milestones (premiered in South Africa in 1999) point to renewed ways of theorizing black solidarity by acknowledging the singularities of our black situatedness and the peculiarities of the black condition in different black contexts.","PeriodicalId":116895,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"36 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":"124870205","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}

引用次数: 0

Of freedom and the problem of the future in contemporary diasporic African speculative fiction 当代散居的非洲思辨小说中的自由和未来问题

Journal of the African Literature Association Pub Date : 2023-01-02 DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2023.2178720

Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra

{"title":"Of freedom and the problem of the future in contemporary diasporic African speculative fiction","authors":"Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2023.2178720","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2023.2178720","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Reading Deji Bryce Olukotun’s After the Flare (2017) and Lesley Nneka Arimah’s “What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky” (2017) alongside Emmanuel Dongala’s “Jazz et vin de palme” (“Jazz and Palm Wine,” 1970), this essay begins with the observation that these contemporary works of speculative fiction by writers from the recent African diaspora suggest a sense of crisis about the future. Both Arimah and Olukotun proffer future worlds little different from the present, in which current conditions of exploitation and inequality are magnified. Rather than being the symptom of a creative impasse that cannot imagine a world beyond the domination of capital, however, I argue that these attenuated futures function as counter-futurisms, facilitating critical meditation on the question of freedom in the present in a manner consonant with what Dongala earlier achieved via his more comical approach. For all three writers, freedom is a project that extends beyond the limits of the nation-state and calls for a larger epistemic break along the lines of what Rinaldo Walcott has termed Black freedom—an irruptive force that rejects the linear and entails a fundamental reorganization of what it means to be human.","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":"128543517","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}

引用次数: 0

Queer(ing) freedom: rewriting coming-out narratives in contemporary Maghrebian literary production 同性恋自由:改写当代马格里布文学作品中的出柜叙事

Journal of the African Literature Association Pub Date : 2023-01-02 DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2023.2178722

G. Ncube

引用次数: 0

Blackness blurred: (un)belonging, kinship, and métissage in Marie NDiaye’s Ladivine 在玛丽·恩迪亚耶的《拉蒂涅》中，黑暗模糊了(不)归属、亲属关系和人格

Journal of the African Literature Association Pub Date : 2023-01-02 DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2023.2178723

Polo B. Moji

{"title":"Blackness blurred: (un)belonging, kinship, and métissage in Marie NDiaye’s Ladivine","authors":"Polo B. Moji","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2023.2178723","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2023.2178723","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines elusive freedom and black (un)belonging in France through the work of Marie NDiaye, a prize-winning playwright and author, whose controversial denunciation of the “monstrosity” of President Nicholas Sarkozy’s France in 2009 coincided with her being awarded France’s highest literary award. Reading the author’s fierce attachment to the conception of her blackness as French rather than francophone I analyze the interracial and intraracial dynamics of black French identities in NDiaye’s novel Ladivine (2013) alongside her critically acclaimed play Papa doit manger (2003) and short story “Les sœurs” (2008). The analysis frames (un)belonging as contingent belonging, using Tommie Shelby’s articulations of “thin” and “thick” conceptions of blackness to read NDiaye’s literary representations in conversation with Pap Ndiaye’s sociological study of blackness as a minoritization “condition” in France. I explore the representation of métissage (biracial/mixed-race) identities and the trope of passing (as white) in troubling dominant conceptions of “thin blackness” and being able to read race on the body in Ladivine and “Les sœurs.” This is followed by an examination of the representation of “monstrous” intimacies of kinship and ancestry as articulations of “thick blackness” by reading Ladivine in conversation with Papa doit manger. I propose that through the poetics of the “thins and thicks” of blackness NDiaye productively challenges the conflation of blackness with “other” origins.","PeriodicalId":116895,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"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":"125354667","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}

引用次数: 0