Pub Date : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2022.2137657
A. Thorpe
Abstract This article engages with multivalent ways in which Sudanese-American poet Safia Elhillo employs water in her poetry. I argue that studying Elhillo’s use of water imagery and settings in her work offers valuable insights into her intertextual and metatextual poetic method, as well as her thematic concerns with identity, “race,” gender and migration. Her poems with oceanic settings resurface historical traumas associated with slavery, while other poems explore more recent oppressions, such as the flooding of Nubian people’s lands during the building of the Aswan Dam. Water is also used as a metaphor for the loss of language or blurring of identity entailed by migration. Furthermore, Elhillo’s participation in multimodality through creative YouTube videos contributes additional layers to the meanings of water in her work. Comparisons are made throughout the article with poets such as Warsan Shire and Koleka Putuma, underscoring Elhillo’s participation in a wider milieu of contemporary African women poets.
{"title":"Making use of water: Safia Elhillo’s diasporic hydropoetics","authors":"A. Thorpe","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2022.2137657","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2022.2137657","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article engages with multivalent ways in which Sudanese-American poet Safia Elhillo employs water in her poetry. I argue that studying Elhillo’s use of water imagery and settings in her work offers valuable insights into her intertextual and metatextual poetic method, as well as her thematic concerns with identity, “race,” gender and migration. Her poems with oceanic settings resurface historical traumas associated with slavery, while other poems explore more recent oppressions, such as the flooding of Nubian people’s lands during the building of the Aswan Dam. Water is also used as a metaphor for the loss of language or blurring of identity entailed by migration. Furthermore, Elhillo’s participation in multimodality through creative YouTube videos contributes additional layers to the meanings of water in her work. Comparisons are made throughout the article with poets such as Warsan Shire and Koleka Putuma, underscoring Elhillo’s participation in a wider milieu of contemporary African women poets.","PeriodicalId":116895,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122447931","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}
Pub Date : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2022.2134295
Eloïse Brière
Abstract I argue for a re-evaluation of Bakary Diallo’s pre-Négritude Force-Bonté by reconstructing the steps that led to its publication and the ensuing debate surrounding its authorship among scholars of early African literature texts in French. Building on recent research, this article is based on archival research relating to the origins and development of Diallo’s autobiography. I also examine disputes about its authenticity that emerged during the period which saw the growth of Francophone African Literature into a distinct field of inquiry. My examination of archival records and correspondence sheds light on the nature of the assistance that Lucie Cousturier, the book’s presumed ghost-writer, and others offered Diallo. I aim to show that the document-based research offers justification for an alternative understanding of the role played by both Bakary Diallo and Lucie Cousturier in the publication of the autobiography.
{"title":"Reconstructing Force-Bonté’s path to publication: an “assisted” foundational text reassessed","authors":"Eloïse Brière","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2022.2134295","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2022.2134295","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract I argue for a re-evaluation of Bakary Diallo’s pre-Négritude Force-Bonté by reconstructing the steps that led to its publication and the ensuing debate surrounding its authorship among scholars of early African literature texts in French. Building on recent research, this article is based on archival research relating to the origins and development of Diallo’s autobiography. I also examine disputes about its authenticity that emerged during the period which saw the growth of Francophone African Literature into a distinct field of inquiry. My examination of archival records and correspondence sheds light on the nature of the assistance that Lucie Cousturier, the book’s presumed ghost-writer, and others offered Diallo. I aim to show that the document-based research offers justification for an alternative understanding of the role played by both Bakary Diallo and Lucie Cousturier in the publication of the autobiography.","PeriodicalId":116895,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128214692","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}
Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2022.2111071
Bernie Lombardi
{"title":"Queer African cinemas","authors":"Bernie Lombardi","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2022.2111071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2022.2111071","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":116895,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131658639","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}
Pub Date : 2022-08-26DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2022.2111778
V. O. Eze
Abstract This article interrogates those analytical approaches to Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People, which evaluate the worth of the texts based on assumptions, on one hand, and on the structures, on the other. The study posits that these kinds of analyses are insular and reductionist because they hinder the discovery of the potential hidden in the depths of the works. Using Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics depth semantics theory with its systematic and rigorous methodology of explanation and interpretation of poetic metaphor in the text, the texts’ structures and references are explained and the existential issues they raise exposed.
{"title":"Between No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People: problematizing the analytical methods","authors":"V. O. Eze","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2022.2111778","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2022.2111778","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article interrogates those analytical approaches to Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease and A Man of the People, which evaluate the worth of the texts based on assumptions, on one hand, and on the structures, on the other. The study posits that these kinds of analyses are insular and reductionist because they hinder the discovery of the potential hidden in the depths of the works. Using Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics depth semantics theory with its systematic and rigorous methodology of explanation and interpretation of poetic metaphor in the text, the texts’ structures and references are explained and the existential issues they raise exposed.","PeriodicalId":116895,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"88 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123311294","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}
Pub Date : 2022-08-24DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2022.2111920
Cajetan Iheka, Matthew Omelsky
{"title":"African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics","authors":"Cajetan Iheka, Matthew Omelsky","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2022.2111920","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2022.2111920","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":116895,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"54 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130443972","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}
Pub Date : 2022-07-25DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2022.2098602
O. Ibironke
Abstract Bernth Lindfors recently sent me a manuscript on Don Herdeck, which signals an active post-retirement research career. Herdeck famously published and promoted African literature for almost three decades in the United States. The biography of authors and figures such as Herdeck that constitute Lindfors’s forte is the more exciting aspect of the cold hard facts he spent his entire career investigating. Of what relevance is the material history of writing to the study of literature? This is precisely the question for Lindfors, an ardent researcher who argues that a literary scholarship has no claim to knowledge or a disciplinary field without biography and archival research. Is it accurate to assume that empirical data offer the best explanation and indubitable expression of knowledge? How should archives function in literary scholarship? How do empirical data and reliance on archival research condition our understanding of texts or define and delimit literary research?
{"title":"Bernth Lindfors’s archive fever","authors":"O. Ibironke","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2022.2098602","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2022.2098602","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Bernth Lindfors recently sent me a manuscript on Don Herdeck, which signals an active post-retirement research career. Herdeck famously published and promoted African literature for almost three decades in the United States. The biography of authors and figures such as Herdeck that constitute Lindfors’s forte is the more exciting aspect of the cold hard facts he spent his entire career investigating. Of what relevance is the material history of writing to the study of literature? This is precisely the question for Lindfors, an ardent researcher who argues that a literary scholarship has no claim to knowledge or a disciplinary field without biography and archival research. Is it accurate to assume that empirical data offer the best explanation and indubitable expression of knowledge? How should archives function in literary scholarship? How do empirical data and reliance on archival research condition our understanding of texts or define and delimit literary research?","PeriodicalId":116895,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114885732","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}
Pub Date : 2022-07-19DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2022.2098604
Supriya M. Nair
Abstract The article discusses Bernth Lindfors’s unique contributions to the field of Anglophone African literary studies, contextualizes his methodology, and discusses the controversies that arose over a few of his interventions to preserve and canonize early African literature. His commitment to the field is unequivocal and the journal he founded, Research in African Literatures, continues to exhibit the brilliance and promise of African literature and literary studies.
{"title":"Ben Lindfors and his palavers with African literature","authors":"Supriya M. Nair","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2022.2098604","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2022.2098604","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The article discusses Bernth Lindfors’s unique contributions to the field of Anglophone African literary studies, contextualizes his methodology, and discusses the controversies that arose over a few of his interventions to preserve and canonize early African literature. His commitment to the field is unequivocal and the journal he founded, Research in African Literatures, continues to exhibit the brilliance and promise of African literature and literary studies.","PeriodicalId":116895,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125579987","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}
Pub Date : 2022-07-08DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2022.2092272
Patoimbasba Nikiema
Abstract La littérature antillaise se caractérise par la centralité de la question de l’identité particulière de l’archipel. Cette question identitaire tient non seulement de l’action de l’histoire dans la région, mais aussi de la multiculturalité et des influences raciales dans l’espace. Avec l’émergence de la négritude, l’identité spécifique antillaise s’est vite noyée dans la cause de l’homme africain dans le monde, et s’est ainsi focalisée dans sa filiation avec le continent africain. Pour Edouard Glissant, Raphaël Confiant, Jean Bernabé et autres écrivains, pour qui l’identité antillaise ne doit pas être intrinsèquement continentale, c’est-à-dire, tournée vers l’extérieur, il y a nécessité de resituer cette identité dans une relation archipélique qui se focalise sur les différentes interactions et constructions internes. Avec Traversée de la Mangrove, Maryse Condé s’insère dans cette filialité qui est marquée par la réunion du divers dans l’espace. Cependant Condé ne se contente pas de narrativiser le rapprochement des identités multiples. A travers la mort du protagoniste, Francis Sancher, elle créolise l’identité antillaise, indiquant par cette fusion du divers, la nécessité de la mort des identités racines et continentales et l’effondrement des frontières raciales et culturelles qui les symbolisent. Ce travail se propose d’analyser la mort de Sancher comme une métaphore de la mort des identités multiples. Se basant sur les travaux de Glissant, de Confiant, de Michel Agier et de Serge Domi, je soutiens que la créolité n’est possible que dans l’expression empirique de la diversalité.
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Pub Date : 2022-06-24DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2022.2080349
Chima Osakwe
critical histories and genealogies nonetheless map these onto extant engagements and ways of delineating the discipline, even as they attempt to re-orient it. The Routledge Handbook of African Literature, on the other hand, is preoccupied less with a mapping of the field and more with a performance of its possibilities through practice and example. Self-contained pieces show what the discipline of African literary criticism is and can be, even as they sometimes feel more fragmentary or discrete. Neither approach is more or less successful; both offer rich possibilities for understanding the futures and pasts of African literary criticism. Indeed, in their differences, these two volumes illustrate a key point made by Stefan Helgesson in his introduction to Southern African Literatures in the Companion. In this introduction, Helgesson notes the trouble that arises with any attempt to delineate a literary region or sub-classification, particularly those which try to enforce singular and static boundaries to do so. Instead, he offers the concept of “frontline figures” as “a productive point of departure for studying Southern African literatures as Southern African, from within the literary works themselves,” while still remaining attuned to “the building, crossing, closing and transformation of borders, both conceptual and physical” (208). Perhaps ultimately, then, this is what these two volumes enable, when read together. Through two different but complementary approaches to understanding African literary writing and its attendant critical fields, these volumes remind us of the multiple crossings, languages, approaches, and boundaries negotiated within and productive of the literary text as literary text. Moreover, they demand an attentiveness to the different levels of critical visibility which persist as much as literary visibility, foregrounding how intellectual conversations, landscapes, dialogues, and fields are not singular and that it is essential for a robust future to enable their expression from different positions – both literally and intellectually.
{"title":"Experiencing WS: the making of an artist scholar, by Femi Euba. New York: Austin Macauley Publishers, 2021. 275 pages. ISBN-13: 978-1-6437898-2-8: Paperback. $15.95","authors":"Chima Osakwe","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2022.2080349","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2022.2080349","url":null,"abstract":"critical histories and genealogies nonetheless map these onto extant engagements and ways of delineating the discipline, even as they attempt to re-orient it. The Routledge Handbook of African Literature, on the other hand, is preoccupied less with a mapping of the field and more with a performance of its possibilities through practice and example. Self-contained pieces show what the discipline of African literary criticism is and can be, even as they sometimes feel more fragmentary or discrete. Neither approach is more or less successful; both offer rich possibilities for understanding the futures and pasts of African literary criticism. Indeed, in their differences, these two volumes illustrate a key point made by Stefan Helgesson in his introduction to Southern African Literatures in the Companion. In this introduction, Helgesson notes the trouble that arises with any attempt to delineate a literary region or sub-classification, particularly those which try to enforce singular and static boundaries to do so. Instead, he offers the concept of “frontline figures” as “a productive point of departure for studying Southern African literatures as Southern African, from within the literary works themselves,” while still remaining attuned to “the building, crossing, closing and transformation of borders, both conceptual and physical” (208). Perhaps ultimately, then, this is what these two volumes enable, when read together. Through two different but complementary approaches to understanding African literary writing and its attendant critical fields, these volumes remind us of the multiple crossings, languages, approaches, and boundaries negotiated within and productive of the literary text as literary text. Moreover, they demand an attentiveness to the different levels of critical visibility which persist as much as literary visibility, foregrounding how intellectual conversations, landscapes, dialogues, and fields are not singular and that it is essential for a robust future to enable their expression from different positions – both literally and intellectually.","PeriodicalId":116895,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129804288","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}
Pub Date : 2022-06-22DOI: 10.1080/21674736.2022.2067740
Charisse Burden-Stelly
Abstract This article examines the shared radical Black female subjectivity and practice of mutual comradeship that bind Carole Boyce Davies and Claudia Jones. It argues that their interrelation provides Boyce Davies with unique insight into Jones’s manifold intellectual, theoretical, and political contributions and has allowed Jones to animate and shape Boyce Davies’s approach to preserving and interpreting her legacy. The conclusion considers the ways that Jones and Boyce Davies offer an alternative epistemology that is instructive for scholars who seek to learn from and continue their ethical and political approach to scholar-activism.
{"title":"Carole Boyce Davies and Claudia Jones: radical Black female subjectivity, mutual comradeship, and alternative epistemology","authors":"Charisse Burden-Stelly","doi":"10.1080/21674736.2022.2067740","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2022.2067740","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines the shared radical Black female subjectivity and practice of mutual comradeship that bind Carole Boyce Davies and Claudia Jones. It argues that their interrelation provides Boyce Davies with unique insight into Jones’s manifold intellectual, theoretical, and political contributions and has allowed Jones to animate and shape Boyce Davies’s approach to preserving and interpreting her legacy. The conclusion considers the ways that Jones and Boyce Davies offer an alternative epistemology that is instructive for scholars who seek to learn from and continue their ethical and political approach to scholar-activism.","PeriodicalId":116895,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the African Literature Association","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120964465","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}
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