Journal of the African Literature Association最新文献

{"title":"The rogue in African literature: trickster or pícaro?","authors":"R. Cancel","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2024.2371716","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2024.2371716","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":496971,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"39 18","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141655178","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":"Gendered Violence and Human Rights in Black World Literature and Film\u0000 \u0000 Gendered Violence and Human Rights in Black World Literature and Film\u0000 \u0000 , edited by Naomi Nkealah and Obioma Nnaemeka. London: Routledge, 2021. 259 pp. ISBN: 978-0-367-74806-7: Paperback. £36.99","authors":"Megan E. Fourqurean","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2024.2304477","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2024.2304477","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":496971,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"52 46","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139594525","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":"Indirect Subjects: Nollywood’s Local Address\u0000 Indirect Subjects: Nollywood’s Local Address\u0000 , byMatthew H. Brown.Durham: Duke University Press, 2021, 328 pages. ISBN 978-1-4780-1419-5: Paper.US$ 28.95; ISBN 978-1-4780-1328-0: Cloth","authors":"Lindsey B. Green-Simms","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2023.2295748","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2023.2295748","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":496971,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":" 14","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139626036","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":"Black Consciousness affiliations in Soweto women’s life writing","authors":"Kanika Batra","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2023.2277550","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2023.2277550","url":null,"abstract":"Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1 Feminist criticism engaging with South African women’s life writing including early essays by Carole Boyce Davies and Desiree Lewis, and more recent work by Gabeba Baderoon and Pumla Gqola set the terms for future work in the area. Barbara Harlow’s assessment of women’s prison narratives remains a benchmark for the field.2 Elleke Boehmer et al. explain in a recent essay, “while BC raised awareness of unequal power relations, it was unambiguously sexist in its terms of reference, and did not consider women, in particular Black women, as having equal agency to Black men” (788). Despite this, they consider the philosophy to be relevant to a new generation of young men and women, black women in particular, “take BC ideology forwards by purposefully and deliberately gendering it to raise and bring into prominence their concerns” (799).3 Cartobiography is not a new concept. Existing literary analyses deploying this term to describe Euro-American histories of map-making and map makers. More recently, the term has been used in connection with personal narratives and video in Story Maps of non-Western writing.4 See for instance an excellent essay by Mbulelo Vizikhungo Mzamane, which focuses on fiction and drama, to mention that the “novel since Soweto” depicts youth activism in the form of guerilla and revolutionary acts (192).5 IDAF’s research program began by compiling press clippings and later went on to publicize the situation of political prisoners and torture tactics used by the authorities. It published Prisoners of Apartheid, a comprehensive list of all known political prisoners in South Africa, with brief biographies of each person in custody. Under Hugh Lewin, a former political prisoner himself, the work picked up with secret trips to South Africa to photograph life under repression. Albie Sachs, Mary Benson, and Ruth First were famous political detainees who contributed their writings to the volume.6 This essay is part of a larger project on student-led black freedom movements in the US and South Africa.Additional informationNotes on contributorsKanika BatraKanika Batra is Professor of English at Texas Tech University, where she teaches and researches postcolonial and comparative literature, transnational feminist and queer studies, and globalization studies. This essay is part of ongoing research on student-led anti-apartheid and civil rights movements in South Africa and the United States.","PeriodicalId":496971,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"56 40","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134902113","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":"“‘Everything in this new world, a wound’: hospitality and violence in Jamila Osman’s poetry.”","authors":"Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2023.2271751","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2023.2271751","url":null,"abstract":"AbstractThere is a new generation of Somali poets in the United States and Europe, mainly women, writing about home, war, migration, and diaspora. This paper examines the Somali American poet Jamila Osman’s critiques of hospitality and sexual violence against women. The aim of this article is twofold: I first examine Osman’s poetic representation of hospitality, dramatized by an encounter between a Canadian border official and a female African refugee at the airport. In exploring the intersections of home, migration, and borders in Osman’s poetry, I draw insights from Jacques Derrida’s and Mireille Rosello’s discussions of hospitality and the immigrant. I then analyze Osman’s portrayal of sexual violence against female refugees: violence at the border, violence in the nation, and violence at home. Although Osman demonstrates that sexual violence silences women and undermines their selfhood in their new countries, underlining the transborder character of violence, she highlights women’s capacity to reclaim their voices and reassert their sovereignty within the domestic and communal spaces.Keywords: SomaliaJamila Osmanrefugeeshospitalitysexual violence AcknowledgmentsThe author would like to thank Lahoucine Ouzgane, Chielozona Eze, and the anonymous reviewers of JALA for their comments and suggestions.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Warsan Shire is the most popular Somali poet. In October 2013, she became the first young Poet Laureate of London. In 2016, she was featured in Beyonce’s Lemonade album. Her poem “Home” has been extensively referenced in conversations on refugees and migration and widely examined. See Bridget Grogan, “Refining Contrapuntal Pedagogy” (2020), Kevin Potter, “Centrifugal Force and the Mouth of a Shark” (2019), Jennifer Leetsch, “Ocean Imaginaries in Warsan Shire’s Afro-Diasporic Poetry” (2019), among others2 Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani are the editors of the African Poetry Book Series, managed by the African Poetry Book Fund (APBF) of which they are also board directors. The APBF was founded in 2012. This series, one of the several Pan-African projects of the APBF, which aims mainly to platform emerging African poets who still need to publish a full-length collection, produces the New-Generation African Poets chapbook box sets and has published at least eight box sets or more. 3 See entries on Jane Freedman’s extensive scholarship on gender-based violence against African and racialized female migrants and refugees in Europe (2022; 2016; 2012). See also Elsa Tyszler’s research on African female migrants and refugees along the Morocco-Spain border.4 In her talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie critiques reductive narratives that homogenize people as a stereotype, effacing their complexities and histories. https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story/cin5 In “The Emergence of a Somali State: Building Peace fro","PeriodicalId":496971,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"210 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135475965","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":"Aesthetic transgression, writing pain, and the construction of female subjectivities: Joyce Ash’s <i>Beautiful Fire</i>","authors":"Ernest Dominic Cole","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2023.2268204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2023.2268204","url":null,"abstract":"AbstractJoyce Ash’s Beautiful Fire focuses on womanhood and its thematization in multiple contexts. In this collection of poems, she presents a historical trajectory of the struggles of the woman for self-definition. Her exploration of the plight of womanhood sheds light on cultural stereotypes associated with such figuration as she seeks to contest and reconfigure female identity in new cultural and geo-political spaces. In this paper, I explore the meaning of the woman as writer as she ventures into forbidden masculine spaces and claims those spaces for herself. This sense of intrusion is indicative of female resistance and reinvention. I draw from the spirit of Ellen Kuzwayo’s biography Call Me Woman, incidentally the title of the first section of Ash’s collection, to establish a framework for analysis of the poems. I make the claim that the woman writer’s use of the pen to create new genres, the biography in verse, is a mechanism of resistance, self-definition and empowerment.Keywords: African Diasporawriting painfemale empowerment Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationNotes on contributorsErnest Dominic ColeErnest Dominic Cole, PhD is the John Dirk Werkman Endowed Professor and Chair of English at Hope College, Holland, Michigan, where he teaches Postcolonial literatures of Sub-Saharan Anglophone Africa, India, and the Caribbean. Previously he taught African literature at Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone, The Gambia College, and the University of The Gambia. He has published two monographs—Theorizing the Disfigured Body (2014) and Space and Trauma in the Writing of Aminatta Forna (2017) and two collected volumes—Emerging Perspectives on Syl Cheney Coker (2014), with Eustace Palmer, and Ousmane Sembene, Writer, Filmmaker, & Revolutionary Artist (2016), with Oumar Cherif Diop. His current research is on return migration of the African diaspora and his monograph is tentatively titled Black Bodies in White Spaces: The Politics of Migration, Diaspora, and Return.","PeriodicalId":496971,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"97 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135616137","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 pathogenicity of violence and mental disequilibrium in E. E. Sule’s <i>Sterile Sky</i>","authors":"Kazeem Adebiyi-Adelabu","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2023.2256067","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2023.2256067","url":null,"abstract":"AbstractSterile Sky by E. E. Sule is a partaker in the creative reflections on the phenomenon of violence, which has attracted scant attention in Nigerian literary scholarship. Relying on insights from orthodox medicine, specifically in its conception of violence, this article brings an interdisciplinary perspective to interrogate the literary representation of violence in the novel in terms of its relation to mental health challenges. Against the backdrop of the common belief that violence is associated with some mental health challenges, I demonstrate the paradox of violence as not only a symptom or consequence of mental instability or pathology, but also its cause. I also show how physical violence to persons or group of persons inflicts psychological violence on others. I go further to show how such psychological violence in turn leads to mental health challenges; and, finally but briefly, how some mental health challenges originally incited by violence beget new violence.Keywords: Mental health challengereligious riotphysical violencepsychological violenceSterile Sky Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 SAP refers to Structural Adjustment Program, an economic program of the government that further pauperized poor Nigerians in the 1980s and 1990s.Additional informationNotes on contributorsKazeem Adebiyi-AdelabuKazeem Adebiyi-Adelabu is a senior lecturer at the Department of English, University of Ibadan, NIgeria, where he teaches African literature. His research interests include poetry studies, post-apartheid literature, and the intersection of literature and medicine.","PeriodicalId":496971,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"334 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136061156","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":"Masculinities and the “colonial unconscious” in Shimmer Chinodya’s <i>Dew in the Morning</i>","authors":"Anias Mutekwa","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2023.2251735","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2023.2251735","url":null,"abstract":"AbstractThis article examines the gendered dynamics surrounding masculinity and the “colonial unconscious” in Shimmer Chinodya’s novel, Dew in the Morning, in the context of its narrated and narrative times. These are situated in, and emanate from, the encounter between colonized black African subjects, namely migrants and indigenes, set apart by different degrees of assimilation of colonial modernity in an unnamed area in Northern Zimbabwe. The article argues that narration in the novel is mediated by a colonial unconscious that results in the discursive construction of binary dichotomies and masculinized hierarchies between these subjects. The empowerment of the migrant subjects mainly involves the appropriation of colonial modernity, and the “big man” model of African Masculinity, to inform their more profitable agrarian activities. The resultant differential economic empowerment between the migrant acculturated subjects and the local conservatives in a colonial setting creates hierarchies of masculinity between the former and the latter. The process of masculinization helps to reinforce patriarchal domination and/or exploitation of women, less powerful men, and the natural environment in this localized context. The narrative thus casts aspersions on the masculinities of both the migrants and the indigenes and their suitability to mediate the post-colonial realities of the novel’s narrative time.Keywords: Colonial unconscious“big man”masculinitiesmodernityZimbabwe Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Customary law was an adulteration of African tradition meant to regulate the lives of colonized black subjects. It reinforced black African patriarchy, and disempowered African women by reducing them to the level of minors. So in official matters concerning their lives, they needed adult males such as their husbands to stand on their behalf.Additional informationNotes on contributorsAnias MutekwaAnias Mutekwa (PhD) is a senior lecturer in the Department of Languages, Literature and Cultural Studies at Midlands State University, Zimbabwe. His main interests are in Zimbabwean literature, African literature, literature and gender, as well as ecocriticism. He has published articles in these areas.","PeriodicalId":496971,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136308925","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 Zimbabwean Maverick: dambudzo Marechera and Utopian Thinking <i>The Zimbabwean Maverick: Dambudzo Marechera and Utopian Thinking</i> , by Shun Man Emily Chow-Quesada. New York and London: Routledge, 2023. 222 pages. ISBN-13: 9781032260006: Hardback. $170.00; E-Book: $52.95","authors":"J.R. Osborn","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2023.2256559","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2023.2256559","url":null,"abstract":"\"The Zimbabwean Maverick: dambudzo Marechera and Utopian Thinking.\" Journal of the African Literature Association, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2","PeriodicalId":496971,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135148657","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":"Continuous Pasts: Frictions of Memory in Postcolonial Africa","authors":"Chijioke K. Onah","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2023.2256558","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2023.2256558","url":null,"abstract":"\"Continuous Pasts: Frictions of Memory in Postcolonial Africa.\" Journal of the African Literature Association, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2","PeriodicalId":496971,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"61 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134912268","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}