Research in African Literatures最新文献

{"title":"An Onomastic Analysis of Character Names in Bessie Head’s Maru and When Rain Clouds Gather","authors":"Goabilwe Nnanishie Ramaeba, Wazha Lopang","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.53.4.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.53.4.08","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT: This literary onomastics paper explores character naming in two of Bessie Head’s novels, namely, When Rain Clouds Gather and Maru , both set in villages of Botswana. The purpose is to illustrate how the author uses character names to advance her themes and storylines. The paper relies heavily on the lexical transparency of the names from a structural linguistics perspective and on the sociocultural contexts of the names from a sociolinguistics perspective. The analysis reveals that Head’s choice of character names is intentional and deliberate, meant to achieve a specific purpose, and this is reflective of the process of names and naming in real life scenarios, particularly in the African context. The names mirror the sociocultural contexts of the characters and in the process reveal their personalities, physical attributes, and the types of relationships they have with other characters. The paper concludes that Head employs a lot of symbolism and irony in naming her characters, powerful features that help to effectively communicate her themes.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136208912","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Finding My Way: Reflections on South African Literature by Duncan Brown (review)","authors":"Werner Labuschagne","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.53.4.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.53.4.12","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Finding My Way: Reflections on South African Literature by Duncan Brown Werner Labuschagne Finding My Way: Reflections on South African Literature BY DUNCAN BROWN U of KwaZulu-Natal P, 2020. x + 202 pp. ISBN 9781869144494. Duncan Brown’s Finding My Way surveys and comments on the state and history of South African literary criticism from the vantage point of 2020. It aims to provide more productive in-roads to approaching emerging and established South African literature. This is especially salient regarding one of the book’s main arguments, that whereas South African literature itself has been flourishing, the contemporary criticism thereof has been lagging behind. As the title suggests, Brown employs his own personal experience as a career academic to add credence to his perspective of where he believes the discipline could be more fruitful. This more flexible and individualized tone works as a counterpoint to the rigidness of contemporary criticism. In the book, Brown attempts to untangle some of the limiting aspects of the conventional, institutionalized approach. In the opening chapters, Brown explains that a central issue in studying South African literature is whether a South African literature exists in the first place. Early on, Brown outlines the shortcomings of most major studies and expansiveness of South African literature, especially highlighting their failure to definitively categorize and unify a concise South African literary canon. In terms of post-apartheid criticism, the problem of a unified criticism seems even more apparent. Brown references Leon de Kock to make the point that, during apart-heid, “writers [and critics, I would add] could take on a sense of grave importance by virtue of writing in and about one of the great crisis points in the world” (50). Literary criticism in the country has, arguably, not found another stable unifying point since. While, in contrast, the literature and readership itself has flourished. Regarding the state of current criticism, Brown posits that there is too much focus on utilizing theory, rather than reading into the literariness of the texts themselves. Brown presents a thesis that argues for a literary scholarship that “deploys theory as it is useful, rather than . . . using ‘theory’ to discipline ‘literature’ . . . a scholarship that is less monumental and institutionally proclaimed . . . that is less sure about its own grounds of working and its aims” (46). Brown argues that critics attempt to fit their predetermined frameworks onto texts, rather than reading “with” the text. In the chapters succeeding these establishing points, Brown visits various South African texts that fall somewhat outside of the traditional literary scope [End Page 173] (especially considering the usual emphasis on novels), in readings that emphasize their literariness. That is to say, reading “with” the text, rather than establishing a framework to fit onto the text. For example, Brown analyzes th","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136208930","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Eating Bodies: Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones","authors":"Njeri Githire","doi":"10.2979/ral.2023.a905366","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/ral.2023.a905366","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT: This essay exposes the imagery of cannibalism as a critique of unfettered consumption and greed at the root of the exploitative structures in The Farming of Bones (1998). The essay contends that the symbolic tapestry of Edwidge Danticat’s second novel is woven around metaphors of consumption and excretion. In a bid to unpack the inner workings of a plantation system that reduced human beings to commodities, I tease out the novel’s layered reflection on these metaphors and their meaning. I demonstrate that the purported menace posed by Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic is but a deflection of the violence exerted on working bodies on a constant basis. A scheme that serves to mask the assault and plunder that are commonplace, the ascription of malevolent intent onto the immigrants strips them of their humanity and justifies their expulsion from the national territory. I further expose the strategies used by the exploited to counter the consuming carnage and restore dignity.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495344","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Relocating the Sacred: African Divinities and Brazilian Cultural Hybridities by Niyi Afolabi (review)","authors":"Cajetan Iheka","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.53.4.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.53.4.14","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Relocating the Sacred: African Divinities and Brazilian Cultural Hybridities by Niyi Afolabi Cajetan Iheka Relocating the Sacred: African Divinities and Brazilian Cultural Hybridities BY NIYI AFOLABI SUNY Press, 2022. 366 pp. ISBN 9781438490717 cloth. Niyi Afolabi opens his fascinating study Relocating the Sacred: African Divinities and Brazilian Cultural Identities with the story of his first trip to Brazil and the shock at the Africanist presence and religious consciousness in Bahia. Afolabi recalls his befuddlement at the common use of Yoruba language and consecration of Yoruba deities as spiritual anchors in Bahia. Afolabi’s confusion results from the denigration of the same cultural practices—indigenous language and spiritual practices—in Nigeria in the face of colonial modernity, a development that continues today. In Brazil, however, these African divinities are vibrant cultural [End Page 177] expressions mobilized for survival in a New World context steeped in violence for African descendants since slavery. Relocating the Sacred is a captivating study of traveling theory and praxis, of how Afro-Brazilians relocated religious and cultural practices to cope with the dehumanizing impacts of slavery and ongoing marginalization within a Brazil wracked by continuous legacies of slavery, colonialism, and globalization. Afolabi’s emphasis on “relocating” is a particular strength of his book as the term locates intentional agency in the hands of the Africans whose cultural heritage was not tabula rasa, as the colonizers would love to claim. The relocative thrust of the book reclaims a culturally rich society that the Afro-Brazilians were displaced from even as it emphasizes the work of syncretism that attended the migration of sacred practices to the Brazilian space. In Brazil, these sacred practices not only allowed for grappling with the traumas of forced displacement; they also offered a technology for dealing with the hauntings of the slavery past in the Brazilian state’s treatment of its Black citizens. As he has done in previous studies, Afolabi takes Brazil’s myth of racial democracy to task for excluding Afro-Brazilians in an equitable conceptualization of the nation and citizenry. As Afolabi asks in Relocating the Sacred, “why do these African cultural practices persist amidst the onslaught of globalization? Within a context of ongoing racial discrimination and demonization of Blackness, what roles exist for identifiable religious-cum-sacred rituals?” (3). Afolabi’s study argues “that the tension between the theory of racial democracy and the practice of white supremacy in Brazil opens the space for syncretism of cultures, including African sacred practices” (3). Afolabi locates three specific locations of culture for this syncretism, namely ritual altar, literature, and carnival culture. Each of the three sections of the book investigates each site of cultural production, showing how the “syncretism of African sacred practic","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136208911","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Curse of Manhood: Reflections on Male-Bashing in Radical Separatist Feminist African Literature","authors":"Kelvin Acheampong","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.53.4.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.53.4.04","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT: Feminism represents the battle for equal access to opportunities in society for males and females and, therefore, a necessary struggle for social justice. It is sometimes the case, however, that feminism degenerates into a battle against men, a tendency Mawuli Adzei refers to as “radical separatist feminism” (47). In African literature, this standpoint is reflected in the abject degradation of male characters, who are usually presented as the oppressors of women, enemies of women, barriers to women’s progress, and only without whom women would be able to achieve their highest potentials in society (Adzei 47). Against this backdrop, and using El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero as a primary text, this paper, while acknowledging the validity and necessity of the crusade for gender equity in African societies, contests the logic fueling male-bashing by foregrounding certain often-ignored variables in this debate: first, the faulty homogenization/essentialization of men and women (and by extension, the neglection of intersectionality) and, second, the constraints certain cultural expectations pose to men. I conclude by highlighting Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s point that—because feminism is potentially liberating for both women and men—we can all be feminists.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136208927","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African Women’s Novels as Feminism by Barbara Boswell (review)","authors":"Ellen A. Ahlness","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.53.4.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.53.4.16","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African Women’s Novels as Feminism by Barbara Boswell Ellen A. Ahlness And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African Women’s Novels as Feminism BY BARBARA BOSWELL Wits UP, 2020. xix + 229 pp. ISBN 9781776146185 paper. In Gcina Mhlophe’s short story, “The Toilet,” a young woman living under the dehumanizing and brutal conditions of apartheid struggles to pursue her drive for writing poetry. She discovers a toilet in a park that is for whites only and goes on to turn this segregated space into a sanctuary for her to work on her poetry. While she temporarily finds safety and privacy in her new haven, the victory does not last long; she later returns to her newfound space to find the toilet locked, her access barred. From this short story, Barbara Boswell takes her own text’s title: upon losing access, the protagonist of the short story defiantly heads to a bench and writes her story anyway. The determination captured within this line well-articulates the underlying drive that Boswell seems compelled to capture in her analysis of ten black women fiction writers. Throughout the book, Boswell seems driven to challenge the reduction of women, minority, and intersectional authors to genre writers—those whose powerful stories are nonetheless reduced to context-informed products—to develop in readers a greater appreciation for the worlds created within and across their published works. Depending on readers’ familiarity with South African writers, the discussed authors—Miriam Tlali, Lauretta Ngcobo, Farida Karodia, Agnes Sam, Zoë Wicomb, Sindiwe Magona, Bessie Head, Gcina Mhlophe, Yvette Christiansë, Rayda Jacobs, Kagiso Lesego Molope, and Zukiswa Wanner—may or may not be of high familiarity. Regardless of readers’ own familiarity, Boswell defends her position in discussing this varied selection of women: each represents some kind of “first” in literary history in the South African context and consequently has a unique influence on their political, social, and national landscapes. Yet even coming from the South African context, their impact is not bound by borders; their influence, Boswell positions, is also felt globally as seminal works developed from 1975 to 2012. [End Page 182] And Wrote My Story Anyway evolved out of Boswell’s PhD thesis, driven by a personal and intellectual curiosity: why did she, even as a literary scholar, see and know so few works of fiction by black women writers? This inquiry led to a deeper investigation of the structural conditions that cumulate to work against black women who would be published. The driving question that informs the book’s structure is a query into what can be learned: what can we—as readers, researchers, and scholars—learn from black women, who represent some of those most negatively impacted by apartheid and the legacy of colonialism? Boswell considers literary work as a theoretical body that suggests a direction for developing the foundations and premise","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136208935","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Poetic Metaphor and Multi-Signification: A Rereading of Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease","authors":"Virginia Obioma Eze","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.53.4.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.53.4.07","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT: This article explores the poetic metaphors and multi-signification in Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease . The novel itself has been the focus of several readings, many of which pursue the humanistic and sociological orientations of the text as merely an instrument of communication about the post-independence sociopolitical and cultural realities of Achebe’s society. This manner of reading may be attributed to the birth of African literature and Afrocentrism, which many of the earlier writers, including Achebe, believe was a reaction to the poor Euro-American portrayal of Africa and Africans. But it forecloses the possibility of a grounded analytical methodology capable of opening up multiple possibilities of meanings in the text through the linguistic elements of literature. Relying on Paul Ricoeur’s depth semantic theory, this article explores the poetic metaphors of the text to unveil the multilayered meanings.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136208937","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Tuning into the Polyphony: The Emergence of LGBTQ+ Writing in Africa","authors":"Chris Dunton","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.53.4.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.53.4.01","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT: This paper takes as its starting-point observations made by Lindsey Green-Simms in her paper “The Emergent Queer.” Following an exploration of the term “emergent,” the paper addresses the fact that, as homophobic legislation has become entrenched in the majority of African countries, more and more LGBTQ+-themed writing is emerging from or on the continent. There follows some documentation on the experience of LGBTQ+ writers such as Jude Dibia and Logan February and on the advantages to these writers of expatriation. Turning to the literature itself, coverage of the creative corpus is not comprehensive. The author has not, for example, had a chance to consider the 2013 volume Queer Africa: New and Collected Fiction , edited by Karen Martin and Makhosozana Xaba. But the central task of the paper is not to account for the relevant creative writing, but to focus on the body of critical work that addresses this and on texts that explore the historical and sociological context in which the creative corpus has been produced.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136208907","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Heteronormative Plots and African Feminine Powers in Buchi Emecheta’s The Rape of Shavi","authors":"Nikita Anand, Kumar Parag, Aditya Prakash","doi":"10.2979/ral.2023.a905365","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/ral.2023.a905365","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT: Buchi Emecheta’s The Rape of Shavi (1985) is representative of African women’s subordination in “motherhood,” “body movements” (used for communication in the absence of any bridge language), and “marriage” after the arrival of a group of uninvited exclusively white people (albinos) from England in the land of Shavi, a land that was abundantly blessed with a robust matriarchal spirit and self-sustaining powers of African women. This article examines how African women novelists shaped heteronormative plots as a compulsory gendered perspective for articulating the politicized disappearance of African femininity left for organizing African manhood and the masculine principle of the social, political, and heterosexual in a community like Shavi. Extending old Shavian men’s vision, Queen Mother attempts to reawaken European visitors’, such as Flip, Mendoza, Ronje, Andria, and Ista, struggle for a heterosexual role and desire limited to their race so as to save Shavian women from the men’s sexual advances and to assist Shavian women in the preservation of African virtues such as hospitality, cooperation, equality, and love besides protection against Western and young Shavian men’s critical and oppressive attitudes. This article thus contributes to persistent discussions on heterosexuality, the masculinity-femininity division, and heterosexual imaginary.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135495558","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"South-South Triangulations: Fabric, Marriage, and Decolonization in Latifa al-Zayyat’s The Open Door and Leila Aboulela’s Lyrics Alley","authors":"Nada Ayad","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.53.4.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.53.4.02","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT: Heeding Arabic literary scholar Waïl Hassan’s call for literary comparatist work that does not center the United States or Europe, in this article, I investigate two novels of the Global South set in the same political moment of decolonization. Examining the Egyptian writer Latifa al-Zayyat’s The Open Door (1960) and the Sudanese writer Leila Aboulela’s novel Lyrics Alley (2010), I study the significance of women’s sartorial choices, what these sartorial choices symbolize within the central marriage plots, and what both reveal about the charged political fabric in the country in which each text is set—the early years of the 1950s in which Egypt gained independence from British colonial rule but before Sudan’s independence from Anglo-Egyptian co-rule. I contend that Al-Zayyat’s work invites a dynamism to women’s writing history and reveals an indigenous epistemology, while Aboulela’s novel centers the quotidian only to uphold colonial supremacy.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136208906","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}