Research in African Literatures最新文献

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Kindred Spirits: Chinua Achebe and Toni Morrison by Christopher N. Okonkwo (review) 《志趣相照:奇努亚·阿契贝和托妮·莫里森》克里斯托弗·n·奥孔科沃著(书评)
3区 文学
Research in African Literatures Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.53.4.15
Adewuyi Aremu Ayodeji
{"title":"Kindred Spirits: Chinua Achebe and Toni Morrison by Christopher N. Okonkwo (review)","authors":"Adewuyi Aremu Ayodeji","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.53.4.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.53.4.15","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Kindred Spirits: Chinua Achebe and Toni Morrison by Christopher N. Okonkwo Adewuyi Aremu Ayodeji Kindred Spirits: Chinua Achebe and Toni Morrison BY CHRISTOPHER N. OKONKWO U of Virginia P, 2022. xii + 297 pp. ISBN 9780813947112 e-book. Projecting the seemingly unforeseeable yet shared village-centric tropes in three novels each by Chinua Achebe and Toni Morrison, Kindred Spirits yields a reimagining of both literary greats as kindred spirits. For Christopher N. Okonkwo, “[t]hose profound parallels in their personal and professional histories, artistic visions, and works warrant imagining them as kindred spirits” (6). Though separated by spatial and temporal barriers, both Achebe and Morrison are said to (re)connect culturally and intellectually via the mutual history of blackness. The four-chapter book “critically reconnects and celebrates” the duo of the Nigerian novelist and Man Booker Prize–winner Chinua Achebe and the African American writer and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison (3–4). Okonkwo, who contrives the book as “merely the beginning of a rigorous and sustained Achebe-Morrison comparative scholarship,” anchors it on an overarching twofold goal: first, “to direct attention to certain disciplinarily significant relations between both authors”; second, “to synthesize a theoretical model with which . . . to elucidate the compelling inter-textualities of their fiction” (3). Unarguably, part of the book’s aim is recognizing and celebrating Morrison’s undeniable but unsung intellectual investment in, and indebtedness to, modern African literature and writers like Wole Soyinka, Ama Ata Aidoo, Cyprian Ekwens, and, particularly, Chinua Achebe. [End Page 180] Okonkwo demonstrates a thoroughness of Achebe-Morrison scholarship by drawing on scholars such as Edward Said, V. Y. Mudimbe, M. M. Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, Toyin Falola, Isidore Okpewho, Nkiru Nzegwu, Michel Foucault, etc., for historical, theoretical, and critical coverage of the study. He carefully sets the theoretical basis of the book in chapter one where he purposefully articulates the tenets of villagism by first repurposing Toni Morrison’s 1984 groundbreaking essay “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation.” Morrison, in the essay, has proposed the presence of the ancestor or an ancestral figure. This proposition effloresces into villagism, which entails the idea that the village is not just a cultural context but also a theoretical model fit to tease out the similarities in the six trilogies of Achebe and Morrison. Characterization and aesthetics are the two ways, Okonkwo discerns, through which village tropes like “the ancestor,” “the past,” “generations,” generational “change,” and “the tragic” (41) manifest in the trilogies. As well as building on the contributions of West African scholars such as Ernest Emenyonu, George Nyamndi, Wendy Griswold, and Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi on the emergence of the village novel tradition in West Africa, Okonkwo heavily alludes to Achebe’s an","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"159 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":"136208914","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}
引用次数: 0
An Onomastic Analysis of Character Names in Bessie Head’s Maru and When Rain Clouds Gather 贝西·海德的《马鲁》和《当雨云聚集》中人物名字的象形分析
3区 文学
Research in African Literatures Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI: 10.2979/ral.2023.a905364
Goabilwe Nnanishie Ramaeba, Wazha Lopang
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引用次数: 0
South-South Triangulations: Fabric, Marriage, and Decolonization in Latifa al-Zayyat’s The Open Door and Leila Aboulela’s Lyrics Alley 南南三角:拉蒂法·扎亚特的《敞开的门》和莱拉·阿布莱拉的《歌词小巷》中的结构、婚姻和非殖民化
3区 文学
Research in African Literatures Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI: 10.2979/ral.2023.a905359
Nada Ayad
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引用次数: 0
Dictatorship, Trauma, and Scriptotherapy in Remi Raji’s A Harvest of Laughters 雷米·拉吉的《笑声的收获》中的独裁、创伤和脚本疗法
3区 文学
Research in African Literatures Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI: 10.2979/ral.2023.a905362
Kazeem Adebiyi-Adelabu
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引用次数: 0
Relocating the Sacred: African Divinities and Brazilian Cultural Hybridities by Niyi Afolabi (review) 《重新安置神圣:非洲神灵与巴西文化杂交》作者:Niyi Afolabi
3区 文学
Research in African Literatures Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI: 10.2979/ral.2023.a905370
Cajetan Iheka
{"title":"Relocating the Sacred: African Divinities and Brazilian Cultural Hybridities by Niyi Afolabi (review)","authors":"Cajetan Iheka","doi":"10.2979/ral.2023.a905370","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/ral.2023.a905370","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":"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":"135495352","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}
引用次数: 0
South-South Triangulations: Fabric, Marriage, and Decolonization in Latifa al-Zayyat’s The Open Door and Leila Aboulela’s Lyrics Alley 南南三角:拉蒂法·扎亚特的《敞开的门》和莱拉·阿布莱拉的《歌词小巷》中的结构、婚姻和非殖民化
3区 文学
Research in African Literatures Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI: 10.2979/ral.2023.a905358
Nada Ayad
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引用次数: 0
Udje, Ecosystem, and Sustainability Udje,生态系统和可持续性
3区 文学
Research in African Literatures Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI: 10.2979/ral.2023.a905361
Tanure Ojaide
{"title":"Udje, Ecosystem, and Sustainability","authors":"Tanure Ojaide","doi":"10.2979/ral.2023.a905361","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/ral.2023.a905361","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT: Recent scholarly publications on African literature discuss the African environment and the need to “naturalize” it as if the continent’s environment is not or has not been “natural.” By looking at only recent written African literature and not studying African oral literatures, the works on environmentalism have missed important parts of what the African creative mind has done before later postcolonial writers started. It is this gap that this essay on udje, an African oral poetic genre, is used to fill. This essay looks at how African oral poets made use of land that embraces bush/forests and water with its resources to express the congenial relationship between human and nonhuman beings. The physical environment becomes a repository of tropes to express human relationships and existential ideas. Oral literatures such as udje expressed a complementarity that newer literary works lack and so should be studied for a holistic environmental condition and solution.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"301 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":"135495563","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}
引用次数: 0
Udje, Ecosystem, and Sustainability Udje,生态系统和可持续性
3区 文学
Research in African Literatures Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.53.4.05
Tanure Ojaide
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引用次数: 0
Mobility in Contemporary Zimbabwean Literature in English: Crossing Border, Transcending Boundaries by Magdalena Pfalzgraf (review) 当代津巴布韦英语文学的流动性:跨越边界,超越边界作者:马格达莱纳·法兹格拉夫(书评)
3区 文学
Research in African Literatures Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.53.4.13
Nhlanhla Dube
{"title":"Mobility in Contemporary Zimbabwean Literature in English: Crossing Border, Transcending Boundaries by Magdalena Pfalzgraf (review)","authors":"Nhlanhla Dube","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.53.4.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.53.4.13","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Mobility in Contemporary Zimbabwean Literature in English: Crossing Border, Transcending Boundaries by Magdalena Pfalzgraf Nhlanhla Dube Mobility in Contemporary Zimbabwean Literature in English: Crossing Border, Transcending Boundaries BY MAGDALENA PFALZGRAF Routledge, 2022. 260 pp. ISBN 9780367637811 cloth. Zimbabwean literary criticism is effectively in the doldrums. This is not to say that creative writers are not producing exceptional content. Rather, the Zimbabwean academy is failing to diligently appraise and survey relevant and topical fields in the canon. The many nonplussed scholarly attempts that lack critical insight and bonhomie have only made the situation worse. Magdalena Pfalzgraf’s book Mobility in Contemporary Zimbabwean Literature is a breath of fresh air. Pfalzgraf’s monograph makes an astute contribution to literary scholarship focused on Zimbabwean literature. Pfalzgraf expatiates migration as the number one issue that has beleaguered both the nation and its literature since the early 2000s to date. [End Page 175] Pfalzgraf has characterized this period as being a state of “large scale out-migration” (5). The Zimbabwean crisis of the early 2000s led to a spike in migration as people made their way overseas to attempt to find clean running water, consistent electricity, and food. “Labor migration to South Africa was so pervasive that it became an engrained part of Zimbabwean life, and it also formed a collective imaginary which persists in contemporary representations of migration to South Africa” (25). Pfalzgraf explores how these struggles have been explored in creative fiction, and she honestly deliberates on their effects. Pfalzgraf starts off by pointing to the circuitous nature of migration and movement. “In the primary texts analysed here, we will come across numerous instances where being ‘on the move’ does not mean moving on, where movement is not necessarily mobilizing and where city dynamism is not always indicative of development. This contradictory dynamic is a central concern of this study” (2). Movement is thus anfractuous, and it does not result in liberation. The greener pastures sought by itinerants remain a dream deferred. This sometimes eventually results in migrants returning home in what has come to be called “diasporic return.” Zimbabwean literature thus becomes international in dimension. Writers also went abroad along with their compatriots. “The diasporic literary community is large and scattered across the globe: Chikwava and Huchu live in Britain, Bulawayo lives in the US and Lang in Australia, Mlalazi is based in Mexico” (9). Pfalzgraf points to the fact that we are beginning to see an internationalization of Zimbabwean literature. It is no longer enough to think of the canon of Zimbabwean literature as that which is only produced within its national geographical borders. And in turn, Zimbabweans do shape their new homes abroad and this can be seen in the “Hararization of London” (208","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":"136208936","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}
引用次数: 0
And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African Women’s Novels as Feminism by Barbara Boswell (review) 《我还是写了我的故事:作为女权主义的南非黑人女性小说》芭芭拉·博斯韦尔著(书评)
3区 文学
Research in African Literatures Pub Date : 2023-01-01 DOI: 10.2979/ral.2023.a905372
Ellen A. Ahlness
{"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/ral.2023.a905372","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/ral.2023.a905372","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":"110 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":"135495358","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}
引用次数: 0
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