Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry最新文献

{"title":"Naminata Diabate, Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa. Duke University Press, 2020, 259 pp.","authors":"Oladoyin Abiona","doi":"10.1017/pli.2022.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2022.4","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"32 3","pages":"284-286"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138512838","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":"PLI volume 9 issue 2 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/pli.2022.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2022.9","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":" ","pages":"f1 - f4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47956436","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":"Resistance Movements: The Tempest, Resurgence, and Indigenous Performance on Turtle Island","authors":"Glenn Clark","doi":"10.1017/pli.2022.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2022.2","url":null,"abstract":"Inspired by the reinvigorating theory of Wai-Chee Dimok and Rita Felski, I argue that The Tempest resonates with current theory and performance of Indigenous resurgence in North America. With reference to the work of Indigenous performance theorist Floyd Favel, political thinkers Leanne Simpson and Glen Sean Coulthard, and to plays and performances by Yvette Nolan, Monique Mojica, Kevin Loring, and Spiderwoman Theatre, I describe resurgence as culturally recuperative practices of movement on the land that make it feel more comfortable, establish an Indigenous sense of sovereignty, and diminish shame. I emphasize the ways in which the physical and imaginative mobilities of Shakespeare’s Boatswain and Gonzalo anticipate the comforting—and insurgent—land-oriented movements of Caliban. I argue that Caliban’s sense of natural sovereignty is understood better in terms of free and secure mobility than in terms of rule or possession.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"9 1","pages":"198 - 215"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46890576","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":"Communal Intellection and Individualism in the African Novel","authors":"A. Harris","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.48","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.48","url":null,"abstract":"The advancement of individual integrity as an alternative to the dissolution that concludes so many African novels is a compelling (and, in Jackson’s sophisticated analysis, convincing) idea. But I am nevertheless left wondering why so many African novels of ideas do end in states of dissociation and disassociation “in which intellection signals not just social illegibility but literal death”?2 I wager that if we approach novelistic form as deeply entangled in aesthetic, cultural, contextual, historical, and philosophical codes, we can trace a historical arch of the genre’s formal limitations for intellection in African contexts that explains this tendency. To illustrate this claim, I wish briefly to discuss S. E. K. Mqhayi’s Ityala lamawele (Lawsuit of the Twins), first published in 1914 with the missionary Lovedale Press and widely considered to be the first isiXhosa novel. To call Ityala lamawele a novel is to stretch the description of that genre a little far. The original 1914 text comprised a mere nine chapters and was no longer","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"9 1","pages":"256 - 262"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44820268","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":"(In)Sights from Àwòrán: Yorùbá Epistemologies and the Limits of Cartesian Vision in Teju Cole’s Open City","authors":"U. Inyang","doi":"10.1017/pli.2022.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2022.7","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Teju Cole’s Open City is often read as the quintessential Western cosmopolitan novel. But despite the protagonist’s fixation with European aestheticism, the presence of African antecedents looms almost as an unacknowledged shadow in the acclaimed cosmopolitan novel. This article traces how Yorùbá visual registers about perception, subjectivity, and representation provide interpretative cues for understanding the meta-text of Cole’s novel in ways that illuminate the conflicted, contradictory itineraries of the postcolonial African transnational figure. I argue that Yorùbá conceptual registers relating to visuality, especially the concept of Àwòrán and its insistence on intersubjective relations and the visual call of images, highlight a visual hermeneutics that inflect the construction of personhood in Open City. By tracing the centrality of Yorùbá optic codes to Cole’s project, the article concludes that the novel’s philosophically dense conversation with aspects of Yorùbá culture demonstrates how conceptual registers from African cultures might contour Afro-diasporic texts.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"9 1","pages":"216 - 236"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44778890","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":"“Undoing the Laws of the Universe”: Reading Jeanne-Marie Jackson’s The African Novel of Ideas after #FeesMustFall","authors":"Simon van Schalkwyk","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.50","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.50","url":null,"abstract":"On October 12, 2016, #FeesMustFall student leaders at the University of Cape Town gathered to discuss the decolonization of science. A video-recording of this event offers an illuminating perspective of the high-stakes involved in the decolonial debate: “If I personally were committed to enforcing decolonization,” declares the primary speaker, “science as a whole is a product of Western modernity and the whole thing should be scratched off.”1 Despite the ensuing laughter, the speaker continues, insisting that “we have to restart science from... an African perspective, from our perspective of how we’ve experienced science.”2 She then proceeds to develop this idea with reference to a place in Kwazulu-Natal where people believe that it is possible, through black magic or witchcraft, “to send lightning to strike someone,” before clinching her pointwith the challenging question: “Can you explain that scientifically?”3 Amid the concatenation of voices raised either in affirmation or protest in response to the speaker’s claim, a member of the audience can be heard saying, “It’s not true.”4 At this point, the chair calls the audience to order and addresses the voice of dissent directly. “When we started this,” she begins, “we agreed on","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"9 1","pages":"263 - 272"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47506439","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 African Novel at the Vanguard","authors":"Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.49","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.49","url":null,"abstract":"The final chapter of Jeanne-Marie Jackson’s The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing (2021) openswith a characterization of the novel as the genre par excellence of disruption, failure, and, via reference to György Lukács, the loss of totality. This is, Jackson continues, one of two stories commonly told about the novel. The other treats the novel as a liberal and bourgeois institution, where narratives of individual development serve to sustain social and, increasingly, geopolitical inequalities. Although the latter has had greater traction in African literary studies, neither story is properly satisfactory for Jackson. There follows from this an analysis of works in which “it is the idea of ideas that provides some relief from a grotesquely disjointed and disorienting web of global systems.”1 The qualification “some relief” is key: the exploration of philosophical questions in fiction is not for Jackson a recuperating alternative. It is one among several modalities engaged in the works she analyzes, but one that has tended to be overlooked—even dismissed—by the predominant paradigms of African literary studies as it currently stands. Enter the novel of ideas, alternately referred to here as the philosophical novel. In Jackson’s thinking, the “novel of ideas” is less a taxonomizing literarycritical designation (a set of features that a work must or must not have) than a tool for breaching a set of critical impasses. At no point does Jackson undertake a systematic excavation of the form comparable to what one finds in Sianne Ngai’s recent Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (2020), nor","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"9 1","pages":"243 - 250"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43139134","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":"final year undergraduate class, which focuses on romantic influences in African literature. On the contrary, though, the book’s depth in theory does not detract from the quality of its central argument, which is clearly well","authors":"Marian Ofori-Amoafo","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.20","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.20","url":null,"abstract":"African literature. On the contrary, though, the book’s depth in theory does not detract from the quality of its central argument, which is clearly well researched andwell written. It will, therefore, be an excellent resource text for many graduate-level courses on postcolonial literature. Besides, as I stressed earlier, this is a book that will get you to reread and reexamine most texts within the postcolonial literary canon, and also provide a template for creating a decolonized curriculum within postcolonial literary discourse and scholarship.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"9 1","pages":"289 - 291"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49045781","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":"A Voice in the Crowd: The African Novel of Ideas Book Forum Response","authors":"J. Jackson","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.51","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.51","url":null,"abstract":"Early 2021 was an uncomfortable time to publish a book that has nothing ostensibly to do with living through a pandemic. And so the thanks that almost always begin roundtable responses like this one are especially heartfelt in this long, weary stretch: I am grateful that Cajetan Iheka, Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra, Bruce Janz, Ashleigh Harris, and Simon Van Schalkwyk took time they almost certainly did not have to craft such thoughtful replies to The African Novel of Ideas. It is a pleasure, too, to be able to steal glimpses of new projects that are fully of their own making. I am happy to have these colleagues and to work in this field. The African Novel of Ideas is my recovery and building out of something that probably cannot exist and yet meaningfully wants to: a mind that coheres through dedication to querying external truths. Time and again, in my work thus far, I have found in African novels an intellect striving to break free of the social and historical vicissitudes by which it nonetheless knows itself to be formed. Equally as often, I have been frustrated by the lack of a developed critical vocabulary to describe this give and take between social attunement and individual reasoning in African contexts often marked by terms of “crisis,” “urgency,” “resistance,” and the like. This does not mean that the aggregate protagonist of The African Novel of Ideas is timely; on the contrary, the trajectory of my book connects philosophical types who begin as mere loners, in preindependence contexts, and become outright pariahs in postcolonial ones. But neither does untimely mean ahistorical. The opening vignette of Simon Van Schalkwyk’s contribution to this forum, set at a University of Cape Town #FeesMustFall gathering in 2016, offers a glimpse of a real-life figure who could well be enfolded intomy book. “Amid the concatenation of voices raised either in affirmation or protest” over whether the decolonization of science should take seriously the idea that one person can send lightning to strike another, Van Schalkwyk writes, a lone audience member “can be heard saying, ‘It’s not true.’” The particular content of this showdown over science and (Zulu) belief","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"9 1","pages":"273 - 277"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45645457","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":"Individual Epistemes in The African Novel of Ideas","authors":"Cajetan Iheka","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.47","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.47","url":null,"abstract":"ChinuaAchebe’s gifts to African andworld literatures aremany, but anunheralded aspect is his textualization (and therefore popularization) of the Igbo proverb: “Egbe belu, ugo belu; nke si ibe ya e belu, ka nku kwa ya.” In English, that is: “Let the kite perch and let the eagle perch too, if one saysno to the other, let itswingbreak.” This proverb finds its corollary in the Yoruba saying: “Ojú oṛun tó eỵe ̣e ̣ ́ fò láì f’ara kan ra” (“The sky is wide enough for all to fly without colliding”). I offer these examples from Igbo andYoruba—the twoAfrican languages I ammost comfortable in—to register the accommodationist, tolerant orientation ofAfricanways of being in the world. These proverbs, with correlations across African cultures and languages, index the rejection of absolutisms by making room for alternative possibilities and epistemologies. Enunciated in these vernacular expressions is a denunciation of the single story of a monochromatic Africa. It is important to foreground the multiplicitous affordance of African epistemologies and praxis here because African literary studies, which stresses its social referentiality, often ignores its inheritance of complexity in the simplification of the field’s commonsense. The dominant expression of this commonsense is in the emphasis on community or social collective in the determination of African literature’s political stakes. Again, the interpretation of Achebe’s work is significant in this regard for stressing the writer’s commitment to decolonization within a communitarian ethos. As Simon Gikandi observes, “Achebe’s novels were intended to both represent colonial history as it was—brutal, degrading, and destructive—while celebrating communities that had survived the detritus of this history.”1 African literary criticism has foregrounded the dissolution and celebration of communities in fiction and has pondered the imaginative possibilities in that literature for constituting counter-publics.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"9 1","pages":"251 - 255"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43291979","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}