Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2023.2187950
P. Taoua, G. Musila
Abstract This introduction to a special issue on freedom presents a set of original essays that reflect critically on the idea of freedom in relation to specific literary texts from Africa and the African diaspora. Read together, the essays presented in this introduction make up a rich tapestry, offering a set of reflections that map out the complex geo-histories of freedoms in Africa and an array of creative representations of this generative idea across the continent and in the diaspora. This diversity of texts and contexts allows for a wide-ranging critical exploration of a variety of genres, languages, cultures and historical periods. Areas of common ground across the ten essays include literature as a form of protest, creative ways of resisting repression, sidestepping to get around constraints, efforts to build networks of solidarity within and across communities and exploring what it means to be human within these reclaimed spaces.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2023.2178718
P. Taoua
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.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2023.2179180
Meg Arenberg
Abstract This article explores the themes of freedom and enslavement in the poetry of Zanzibari poet-journalist-activist Mohammed Khelef Ghassani. Starting from the layered meanings of the Kiswahili adage “Mwacha asili ni mtumwa” [he who abandons his origins is a slave], adaptations of which figure prominently in Ghassani’s most famous poetry collection, N’na Kwetu: Sauti ya Mgeni Ugenini [I Have a Home: Voice of a Stranger in a Strange Land], the article elaborates a balance Ghassani seeks to maintain between different and overlapping notions of freedom developed against histories of slavery in Pemba, the threat of assimilation in Germany, and ongoing suppression of political speech in Zanzibar. The poems include reflections on violations of foundational rights and state-sponsored violence against which the poet’s genealogical, literary-linguistic, and affective claims to both community belonging and individual free speech stand as firm counter-resistance, declarations of freedom against another kind of slavery.
本文探讨了桑给巴尔诗人、记者、活动家Mohammed Khelef Ghassani诗歌中的自由和奴役主题。从斯瓦希里语谚语“Mwacha asili ni mtumwa”(抛弃自己出身的人是奴隶)的多层含义开始，这句谚语在加萨尼最著名的诗集《我有一个家》中有显著的改编。《异乡异客之声》]，这篇文章阐述了Ghassani试图维持的平衡，即不同且重叠的自由概念与彭巴的奴隶制历史、德国的同化威胁，以及桑给巴尔对政治言论的持续压制之间的平衡。这些诗歌包括对侵犯基本权利和国家支持的暴力的反思，诗人的宗谱，文学语言和情感主张，对社区归属和个人言论自由的主张，作为坚定的反抵抗，是对另一种奴隶制的自由宣言。
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2023.2178719
Eleni Coundouriotis
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.
欧内斯特·科尔(Ernest Cole)开创性的摄影散文《束缚之家》(House of Bondage, 1966)将自由置于纪录片的创造性努力之中，旨在展现受压迫下非洲人的完整生活。这篇文章探讨了科尔在流亡中失去创作自由的经历与他在南非的经历之间的矛盾。受伤的归属感激发了他对空间和环境的看法，以及他对以非洲为中心的伦理观点的阐述。为了传达生活的丰富性，科尔利用了照片散文形式中文字和图像之间的紧张关系，建立了他的图像，使它们超越了纪录片的传统功能。其结果是一部小说作品，用Georg Lukács的话来说，其目的是“揭示和构建被隐藏的生活整体”。科尔的主题阅读图像传达了他们对自由的渴望，通过描绘他们在一种思想状态下，表明想象力与世界的接触超越了他们的限制。此外，阅读的人物形象属于一种图像惯例，这与19世纪小说作为一种流行文学形式的确立密切相关，当时小说同样将内心空间作为自由来传达。
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2023.2171219
Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2023.2180178
G. Musila
Abstract Across Dinaw Mengestu’s three novels, which can be read as a loosely interconnected trilogy of Ethiopian immigrants’ experiences of the United States, he repeatedly disrupts the conventional frame of the migrant narrative through his protagonists, who refuse to pursue the American dream and the freedoms it proposes. Instead, they choose to adopt a largely indifferent attitude toward the seductions of neoliberal subjectivities and the aspirational templates of what a successful life looks like. This paper is interested in how Mengestu stages these refusals across his three novels—The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, How to Read the Air, and All Our Names—and the forms of alternative freedoms these refusals afford his protagonists. Further, the paper tracks the price these protagonists pay for these refusals, in the shape of a repeated sense of paralysis and lethargy, that simultaneously allows them rich metafictional insights into the cracks of neoliberal capital’s promises and its impossibilities.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2023.2180177
I. Mhlambi
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.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2023.2178720
Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra
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.
阅读Deji Bryce Olukotun的《耀斑之后》(2017)和Lesley Nneka Arimah的《当一个人从天空坠落意味着什么》(2017)以及Emmanuel Dongala的《Jazz et vin de palme》(《爵士和棕榈酒》，1970)，本文首先观察到，这些当代的投机小说作品是由最近散居的非洲作家创作的，暗示了一种对未来的危危感。Arimah和Olukotun提供的未来世界与现在没有什么不同，目前的剥削和不平等状况被放大了。然而，我认为，这些弱化的未来并不是一种无法想象一个超越资本统治的世界的创造性僵局的症状，而是作为反未来主义的功能，促进了对当前自由问题的批判性思考，其方式与唐加拉早些时候通过更滑稽的方法所取得的成就是一致的。对于这三位作家来说，自由是一项超越民族国家界限的工程，它要求沿着里纳尔多·沃尔科特(Rinaldo Walcott)所称的黑人自由的路线进行更大的认知突破——一种拒绝线性的破坏性力量，需要对人类的意义进行根本性的重组。
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2023.2178722
G. Ncube
Abstract This article analyses how contemporary writers of Maghrebian descent make use of autofiction to make visible queer desires and sexualities which exist in a perpetual state of marginalization. Using autofiction, a genre of literary expression which has been popular in the Francophone world in the past two decades, writers like Abdellah Taïa, Rachid O., and Nina Bouraoui complicate the idea of coming out. Although it might appear as though they are reproducing Western ideals of coming out as sine qua non to a fortification of a queer identity, they offer a different nuancing of what disclosing one’s sexual identity in the Maghreb means and entails. In their coming-out literary narratives, these writers articulate a practice of freedom which liberates the queer body from both Western modes of considering queerness and Maghrebian logics that marginalize and render invisible queer lived experiences.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2023.2178723
Polo B. Moji
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.
本文通过获奖剧作家兼作家玛丽·恩迪亚耶的作品审视了法国难以捉摸的自由和黑人(un)归属。2009年，她被授予法国最高文学奖，同时对尼古拉斯·萨科齐总统统治下的法国的“怪物”进行了有争议的谴责。读到作者对她是法国人而不是说法语的黑人这一概念的强烈依恋，我分析了在NDiaye的小说《Ladivine》(2013)以及她广受好评的戏剧《Papa doit manger》(2003)和短篇小说《Les sœurs》(2008)中，法国黑人身份的种族间和种族内动态。分析将(非)归属框架为偶然归属，使用Tommie Shelby对黑人“薄”和“厚”概念的阐述，阅读NDiaye的文学表现，并与Pap NDiaye对黑人作为法国少数民族“条件”的社会学研究进行对话。我在Ladivine和《Les sœurs》中探讨了混血(混血儿/混血儿)身份的表现，以及在令人不安的主流概念中通过(作为白人的)“瘦黑人”的比喻，以及能够从身体上读出种族的比喻。接下来，我们通过阅读拉狄恩与马槽爸爸的对话，来考察“可怕的”亲属关系和祖先的亲密关系作为“厚黑”的表达。我认为，通过黑人“细密”的诗学，NDiaye富有成效地挑战了黑人与“其他”起源的混淆。
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