Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.53.2.14
Sky Herington
In the context of an ever-expanding humanitarian sector, particularly active in Africa, scholarship interrogating the ethics and effects of arts-based therapeutic models in humanitarian interventions has increasingly turned to performance as both a fruitful object and an important tool of study. In Performing Trauma in Central Africa, Laura Edmondson develops this approach, drawing on performance theory in a compelling analysis of a variety of cultural responses to mass violence and trauma in the Great Lakes region over the last two decades. Borrowing from Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, Edmondson uses an “empire of trauma” (5) as a lens that reveals the limiting master-narratives of suffering and healing that are regularly perpetuated by Western-sponsored arts interventions. Scrutinizing neoliberal solutions to managing the aftermath of conflict, she investigates how Central African trauma is packaged to “obscure rather than to illuminate empire’s complicity in a world order that sustains mass death and systemic violence” (9) and is made to soothe and satiate empire’s appetites. If local artistic expression is prone to manipulation and co-option by both INGOs and African states, however, empire’s trauma market is not a straightforward vampirization of African suffering by the imperial consumer. Performance is a site through which local actors might legitimate such narratives but also, simultaneously, reappropriate them for their own ends: in contexts of scarcity, trauma narratives can serve as vital resources. The historical overview of the region in the first chapter immediately reveals the advantages of Edmondson’s geographical focus, which allows room for a detailed presentation of the specificities of each country’s history while also establishing, through a transnational approach, the interconnectedness of conflicts across the region. Mapping the “roots and routes” (38) of mass violence and genocide, Edmondson analyzes the concept of “competitive memory” (59) and considers how a single mass trauma might overshadow others in the public imagination, creating a hierarchy of suffering. The following four chapters offer a wide range of case studies of the cultural production that has emerged from these intersecting histories of violence in Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Fieldwork in 2004 at a US-sponsored rehabilitation center for former child soldiers in northern Uganda, for example, informs Edmondson’s reflections on the constructed linear narratives of these children’s experiences, performed as spectacle for the benefit of foreign visitors. The exploration of the Western consumption of spectacle is then expanded in an examination of the performative strategies of the post-genocide Rwandan state, while in the Congolese context interventions by American humanitarian organizations are seen to shrink spaces of suffering and eclipse the trauma of those excluded from victim groups recognized on the world stage. Finall
在人道主义领域不断扩大的背景下，尤其是在非洲，学术界对人道主义干预中基于艺术的治疗模式的伦理和影响的质疑越来越多地转向表演，作为一种富有成效的对象和重要的研究工具。在《中非的创伤表演》一书中，劳拉·埃德蒙森发展了这一方法，利用表演理论对过去二十年来大湖地区对大规模暴力和创伤的各种文化反应进行了令人信服的分析。借鉴Didier Fassin和Richard Rechtman的观点，Edmondson用“创伤帝国”(empire of trauma)作为镜头，揭示了西方赞助的艺术干预经常延续的关于痛苦和治愈的有限大师叙事。她仔细审视了处理冲突后果的新自由主义解决方案，调查了中非的创伤是如何被包装成“模糊而不是阐明帝国在维持大规模死亡和系统性暴力的世界秩序中的共谋”(9)，并被用来安抚和满足帝国的胃口。然而，如果当地的艺术表现容易受到国际非政府组织和非洲国家的操纵和选择，那么帝国的创伤市场就不是帝国消费者对非洲苦难的直接吸血。表演是一个场所，通过这个场所，当地演员可以使这些叙事合法化，但同时也可以将它们重新用于自己的目的:在稀缺的背景下，创伤叙事可以作为重要的资源。第一章对该地区的历史概述立即揭示了埃德蒙森以地理为中心的优势，这为详细介绍每个国家历史的特殊性提供了空间，同时也通过跨国方法建立了整个地区冲突的相互联系。埃德蒙森绘制了大规模暴力和种族灭绝的“根源和路线”(38)，分析了“竞争性记忆”的概念(59)，并考虑了单一的大规模创伤如何在公众想象中掩盖了其他创伤，创造了痛苦的等级。接下来的四章提供了从乌干达、卢旺达和刚果民主共和国这些相互交织的暴力历史中产生的文化产物的广泛案例研究。例如，2004年在乌干达北部一个美国资助的前儿童兵康复中心的实地考察，让埃德蒙森对这些儿童经历的线性叙事进行了反思，这些叙事作为一种奇观，为外国游客带来了好处。然后，在对卢旺达种族灭绝后国家的表演策略的考察中，对西方奇观消费的探索得到了扩展，而在刚果的背景下，美国人道主义组织的干预被视为缩小了痛苦的空间，掩盖了那些被排除在世界舞台上公认的受害者群体之外的人的创伤。最后，埃德蒙森回到了2010年冲突后的乌干达北部，并反思了非政府组织和美国名人在创伤品牌的复杂动态中所扮演的角色。然而，许多人回避了这类品牌推广项目
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Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.53.2.06
Emmanuel Ufuoma Tonukari, A. Abba
ABSTRACT:In his religious and philosophical persuasion, Amechi Akwanya seeks to reconceptualize the concept of human suffering, an idea that is validated in the representation of cosmic warfare in the first sequence of his poetry collection, Pilgrim Foot: A Collection of Poems. Interestingly, this sequence of Akwanya's poetry shares common philosophical ideation with Leopardi's "Dialogue between Nature and an Icelander" in their interrogation of the history of human experience, an observation not yet captured by critical scholarship. Thus in its attempt to cover up this critical space, this article seeks to juxtapose Akwanya's poetry and Leopardi's dialogue to illuminate how art subjects Nature to cross-examination for her alleged hostility toward man. Working within the framework of the Hegelian concept of cosmic contradiction, of the end having already been determined at "the beginning," and Nietzsche's Heraclitean theory, the paper offers a critical examination of not only Nature's burden of guilt in human plight but also how art serves as an outlet for transcending cosmic warfare.
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Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.53.2.02
Daniel Chukwuemeka
ABSTRACT:This article identifies the figure of the e-fraud hustler as a contemporary iteration of an African discourse of masculinity. Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani's I Do Not Come to You by Chance and Chuma Nwokolo's Diaries of a Dead African represent men's engagement in the e-fraud hustle as a neoliberal gamble to monetize their masculinity. As men's pecuniary agency is threatened and limited by the vagaries of neoliberal capitalism, it is equally mediated by yet another paradigm of neoliberal capitalist ideology, namely, (the criminal redefinition of) entrepreneurship. To be a man thus necessitates an ever-shifting performance of terminal and complicit masculinity, a paradoxical development in which men take risks to circumvent economic exclusion by imitating the expediencies of neoliberal capitalism. The novels register this money-governed sense of masculinity through gender discourses and narrative strategies that resist fixed constructions of African masculinity in favor of an ever-vigilant logic of its contingency and plurality.
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Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.53.2.13
Christopher R. Hebert
“place-making” (116) but, in light of the economic and domestic obligations of the local women, could not resolve the asymmetry between them and the full-time artists, even if the latter included black women such as Chuma Sopotela who spoke Xhosa alongside English. In contrast, MTP’s work with the Langeberg Youth Arts Project (LYAP), led most recently by multilingual director-therapist Makgathi Mokwena, took account of the ethics of intervention as well as the aesthetic dimension of “curating care” (180). Her success in training and inspiring disconnected rural youth to express themselves with confidence and to find and keep remunerative and dignified employment beyond farm labor was confirmed by participants who credit their achievement to the skills that they learned (113). LYAP members share thoughts in their own words on the website at https://www.mothertongue .co.za/, but the editors could have highlighted this resource by adding the URL to the introduction and the cover of the book. The editors acknowledge the difficulties affecting the work of art and social action by dedicating their book to a LYAP member who died in his twenties. The conversations in the book provide ample testimony of the social and artistic force of participatory dramaturgy for sustaining democratic action in South Africa and should also speak to readers interested in the art and the application of curating care at other locations in the Global—and glocal—South.
{"title":"African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics by Cajetan Iheka (review)","authors":"Christopher R. Hebert","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.53.2.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.53.2.13","url":null,"abstract":"“place-making” (116) but, in light of the economic and domestic obligations of the local women, could not resolve the asymmetry between them and the full-time artists, even if the latter included black women such as Chuma Sopotela who spoke Xhosa alongside English. In contrast, MTP’s work with the Langeberg Youth Arts Project (LYAP), led most recently by multilingual director-therapist Makgathi Mokwena, took account of the ethics of intervention as well as the aesthetic dimension of “curating care” (180). Her success in training and inspiring disconnected rural youth to express themselves with confidence and to find and keep remunerative and dignified employment beyond farm labor was confirmed by participants who credit their achievement to the skills that they learned (113). LYAP members share thoughts in their own words on the website at https://www.mothertongue .co.za/, but the editors could have highlighted this resource by adding the URL to the introduction and the cover of the book. The editors acknowledge the difficulties affecting the work of art and social action by dedicating their book to a LYAP member who died in his twenties. The conversations in the book provide ample testimony of the social and artistic force of participatory dramaturgy for sustaining democratic action in South Africa and should also speak to readers interested in the art and the application of curating care at other locations in the Global—and glocal—South.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"53 1","pages":"190 - 192"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47958504","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}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.53.2.10
Katwiwa Mule
ABSTRACT:This paper examines Kitula Kinge'i's reworking of a controversial nineteenth-century Swahili classic, Utendi wa Mwana Kupona by Mwana Kupona, into "biographical" children's books. It revisits some of the critical controversies surrounding her poem in order to underscore how King'ei's adaptations participate directly in the debates about the status and importance of Mwana Kupona's text within Swahili popular culture and imagination. The paper also highlights the ways in which, at the formal level, King'ei radically transforms Mwana Kupona's text, as well as the effects such transformations have on the way she is read in a new, global context. Ultimately, I demonstrate that although King'ei's transcreative adaptations of the formal elements of the poem are so extensive as to result in new texts, he is unable to decisively untether himself from its conservative, feudal class values. What would have been a radical project is, in the end, hampered by its didactic impulses and its ideological affinities to Mwana Kupona's poem.
摘要：本文考察了基图拉·金伊（Kitula King'i）将一部备受争议的19世纪斯瓦希里语经典作品——姆瓦纳·库波纳（Mwana Kupona）的《乌滕迪·瓦·姆瓦纳·库波纳》（Utendi wa Mwana Kupona）改编成“传记”儿童读物的过程。它重新审视了围绕她的诗歌的一些批判性争议，以强调金的改编作品如何直接参与关于姆瓦纳·库波纳文本在斯瓦希里流行文化和想象中的地位和重要性的辩论。这篇论文还强调了在形式层面上，金伊从根本上改变姆瓦纳·库波纳文本的方式，以及这种转变对她在新的全球背景下被阅读的方式的影响。最后，我证明，尽管王对诗歌形式元素的转录改编如此广泛，以至于产生了新的文本，但他无法果断地摆脱其保守的封建阶级价值观。本应是一个激进的项目，最终却被其说教冲动和与姆瓦纳·库波纳诗歌的意识形态相似性所阻碍。
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Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.53.2.12
Loren Kruger
{"title":"Collaborative Conversations: Celebrating Twenty-One Years of the Mothertongue Project ed. by Alex Halligey and Sara Matchett (review)","authors":"Loren Kruger","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.53.2.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.53.2.12","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"53 1","pages":"188 - 190"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43673390","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}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.53.2.15
Oliver Coates
northern Ugandans in their use of memorialization and demands on the state for “living memorials” (252) that respond to their material needs. A different approach is taken in the book’s final chapter in which, drawing on her own experience running theater workshops in northern Uganda and Rwanda, Edmondson searches for new models of theater activism detached from its “humanitarian baggage” (287). Since, she argues, “neoliberal pressures are more easily negotiated than opposed” (271), staying at home is not an option. Instead she seeks to offer Western theater activists a guide to avoiding those pitfalls of empire discussed in the preceding chapters and tentatively concludes, borrowing from Emmanuel Lévinas, that a stance of “radical passivity” (276)—involving shared vulnerability, open-ended collaboration, and the acceptation of inaction—might be a useful, if sometimes elusive, point of departure from which to develop a more ethical approach to intercultural performance outside of the influence of empire. This explicit identification of an imagined reader in the closing pages echoes the emphasis on the perspectives of Western agents found throughout the book. While the range of source types studied is impressive, encompassing a broad variety of documents that includes the BBC documentary Rwanda’s Untold Story, the memoirs of genocide survivor Immaculée Ilibagiza, and Lynn Nottage’s play Ruined, the early assertion that “the creative expressions of Central Africans take center stage” (10) is perhaps not fully realized, with the stimulating discussion of artists such as Judith Adong and Faustin Linyekula confined to a brief afterword. Edmondson envisages further study of these artists in a future book, but arguably a more detailed discussion of their strategies for evading the forces of state and empire would have been pertinent to this present work. Nonetheless, Performing Trauma in Central Africa offers a fascinating and highly readable interdisciplinary exploration of the insidious workings of imperial appetite in Central Africa, as seen from the standpoint of empire, which will be of great interest to regional specialists and scholars of applied theater, memory studies, and humanitarianism alike.
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Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.53.2.01
T. Waller
{"title":"Messianic Failure: Angolan Literature, Magical Realism, and the Form of Critique","authors":"T. Waller","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.53.2.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.53.2.01","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44557247","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}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.53.2.08
S. Novieto
ABSTRACT:Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born has been condemned for its severe criticism of newly independent Ghana, its disdain for its leaders and officials, and for the absence of hope displayed for a future in which the individual and the nation might triumph over societal corruption. This article analyzes Armah's controversial novel through the caustic response of its main character, The Man, to contemporary national ethics and to the possibilities he himself embodies for genuine change and regeneration. The conflict in The Man's alienated consciousness is rooted not only in the expediencies of the newly postcolonial Ghana he fastidiously observes, but also in his loyalty to the traditional Ghanaian values he inherits, remembers, and practices, thus indicating the possibility of hope and change for both character and nation.
{"title":"Postcolonial Disgust or Regenerative Vision?: The Values and Significance of \"The Man\" in Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born","authors":"S. Novieto","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.53.2.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.53.2.08","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born has been condemned for its severe criticism of newly independent Ghana, its disdain for its leaders and officials, and for the absence of hope displayed for a future in which the individual and the nation might triumph over societal corruption. This article analyzes Armah's controversial novel through the caustic response of its main character, The Man, to contemporary national ethics and to the possibilities he himself embodies for genuine change and regeneration. The conflict in The Man's alienated consciousness is rooted not only in the expediencies of the newly postcolonial Ghana he fastidiously observes, but also in his loyalty to the traditional Ghanaian values he inherits, remembers, and practices, thus indicating the possibility of hope and change for both character and nation.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"53 1","pages":"131 - 147"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69366366","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}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.53.2.05
Eve Nabulya
ABSTRACT:Several studies have gestured toward the fact that the environmental consciousness in most African communities is distinct from the common positions elsewhere. Accordingly, it becomes important to explore environ-mentalities that evolve from practical engagements with the still close natural world in twenty-first-century Africa. In this trajectory of thought, this article reads Ngang'a Mbugua's novel Different Colours and considers the representation of an eco-ethos anchored in the community values of mutual care and accountability. I argue that human-nonhuman relations in Different Colours attest to the recognition of both the intrinsic value as well as the instrumental value of nonhuman entities, which destabilizes the symmetrical categorization of environmentalism standpoints as either human-centered or ecosystem-centered. I trace the roots of this alternative African environ-mentality in an African community-based morality. Hence, I propose the term eco-communitarianism. I also demonstrate how, through various narrative strategies, Mbugua's story typifies a balance between interest in instrumental value and respect for the intrinsic value of the nonhuman.
{"title":"\"We Have an Obligation to Act as the Custodians\": Environmental Communitarianism in Mbugua's Different Colours","authors":"Eve Nabulya","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.53.2.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.53.2.05","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Several studies have gestured toward the fact that the environmental consciousness in most African communities is distinct from the common positions elsewhere. Accordingly, it becomes important to explore environ-mentalities that evolve from practical engagements with the still close natural world in twenty-first-century Africa. In this trajectory of thought, this article reads Ngang'a Mbugua's novel Different Colours and considers the representation of an eco-ethos anchored in the community values of mutual care and accountability. I argue that human-nonhuman relations in Different Colours attest to the recognition of both the intrinsic value as well as the instrumental value of nonhuman entities, which destabilizes the symmetrical categorization of environmentalism standpoints as either human-centered or ecosystem-centered. I trace the roots of this alternative African environ-mentality in an African community-based morality. Hence, I propose the term eco-communitarianism. I also demonstrate how, through various narrative strategies, Mbugua's story typifies a balance between interest in instrumental value and respect for the intrinsic value of the nonhuman.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"53 1","pages":"79 - 93"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48765364","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}
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