Pub Date : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.52.4.11
C. Rono
It would be a gain to our fields of scholarship if many others, located where print archives are stored in private cabinets and on institutional shelves, were to take inspiration from this book’s patient methods and original insights. The research makes evident how a scholar who may imagine themselves to be underresourced (because of location, or in terms of digital resources or access to large grants to do research) but who has access to a print archive of a magazine or a pamphlet might make an important contribution to scholarship. It would be exciting to read the many such articles that could develop from this path-breaking monograph. In this way it is not only Batra’s own contribution that revitalizes our field, but the generative nature of her approach.
{"title":"Postcolonial Disaster: Narrating Catastrophe in the Twenty-First Century by Pallavi Rastogi (review)","authors":"C. Rono","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.52.4.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.52.4.11","url":null,"abstract":"It would be a gain to our fields of scholarship if many others, located where print archives are stored in private cabinets and on institutional shelves, were to take inspiration from this book’s patient methods and original insights. The research makes evident how a scholar who may imagine themselves to be underresourced (because of location, or in terms of digital resources or access to large grants to do research) but who has access to a print archive of a magazine or a pamphlet might make an important contribution to scholarship. It would be exciting to read the many such articles that could develop from this path-breaking monograph. In this way it is not only Batra’s own contribution that revitalizes our field, but the generative nature of her approach.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"52 1","pages":"152 - 153"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43938853","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.52.4.10
C. Coetzee
{"title":"Worlding Postcolonial Sexualities: Publics, Counterpublics, Human Rights by Kanika Batra (review)","authors":"C. Coetzee","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.52.4.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.52.4.10","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"52 1","pages":"150 - 152"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42555284","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.52.4.02
F. Ndaka
ABSTRACT:This article focuses on Dinaw Mengestu's representation of African migrant masculinities within the American space in The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. By paying attention to the gendered nature of the American space, histories, and political and economic cultures, I argue that American foundational mythologies and metanarratives act as repertoires that shape marginal African masculinities' imagination and the embodied experience of the American space. In reading African migrant masculinities' navigation of commercial and corporate America, this article takes heed of the materiality, corporeality, and the governmentality of space and examines how space produces and shapes sociality. Ultimately, the examination of African masculinities' use and access to the American space enables an interrogation of gendered experiences of migration, African masculinities within global modernity, and the reimagining of ethical and egalitarian horizons of racial and political relations.
{"title":"Spatial Encounters: African Migrant Masculinities and Gendered Geographies of Power in Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears","authors":"F. Ndaka","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.52.4.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.52.4.02","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article focuses on Dinaw Mengestu's representation of African migrant masculinities within the American space in The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. By paying attention to the gendered nature of the American space, histories, and political and economic cultures, I argue that American foundational mythologies and metanarratives act as repertoires that shape marginal African masculinities' imagination and the embodied experience of the American space. In reading African migrant masculinities' navigation of commercial and corporate America, this article takes heed of the materiality, corporeality, and the governmentality of space and examines how space produces and shapes sociality. Ultimately, the examination of African masculinities' use and access to the American space enables an interrogation of gendered experiences of migration, African masculinities within global modernity, and the reimagining of ethical and egalitarian horizons of racial and political relations.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"52 1","pages":"12 - 25"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47050285","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.52.4.08
Midia Mohammadi, Ali Salami
ABSTRACT:After being a British protectorate for nearly sixty years, in 1960, Nigeria gained independence the same year A Dance of the Forests was published. The play, which expresses ambivalence toward radical changes with premonitions between its lines, has been regarded as one of the most challenging to understand. With an eye on the work's historical context, it is treated as a symptom of history that reveals its "political unconscious" based on Fredrick Jameson's ideas. Furthermore, Pierre Macherey's Theory of Gaps highlights "the ideological project" of the literary work by focusing on the "unsaid" in the text, which shapes its "speech." In conclusion, regarding the synthesis of Jameson and Macherey's ideas, which reveals and studies the correlation between ideology and narrative, the article sets out to find the central topic of the work and describe the imaginary/symbolic system put into the service of the ideological project concerning its context.
{"title":"A Loud Dance of Silence: The Unsaid of Wole Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests","authors":"Midia Mohammadi, Ali Salami","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.52.4.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.52.4.08","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:After being a British protectorate for nearly sixty years, in 1960, Nigeria gained independence the same year A Dance of the Forests was published. The play, which expresses ambivalence toward radical changes with premonitions between its lines, has been regarded as one of the most challenging to understand. With an eye on the work's historical context, it is treated as a symptom of history that reveals its \"political unconscious\" based on Fredrick Jameson's ideas. Furthermore, Pierre Macherey's Theory of Gaps highlights \"the ideological project\" of the literary work by focusing on the \"unsaid\" in the text, which shapes its \"speech.\" In conclusion, regarding the synthesis of Jameson and Macherey's ideas, which reveals and studies the correlation between ideology and narrative, the article sets out to find the central topic of the work and describe the imaginary/symbolic system put into the service of the ideological project concerning its context.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"52 1","pages":"116 - 132"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49281365","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.52.4.05
Femi Eromosele
ABSTRACT:In the last few decades, madness has become entangled with discourses of rights and pride, which also reject the medicalized definition of the phenomenon as "mental illness." Having its origins in several intellectual and activist traditions contesting the construction of normativity, this body of work seeks to reclaim madness as a positive identity. In this article, I read Aminatta Forna's The Memory of Love against this background. I argue that the novel, as an example of African writing that engages psychiatry and allied disciplines, offers some reflections on the possibility of a discourse of social justice on madness. The narrative emphasizes collective tragedy and injustice over a political discourse that focuses on the mad in particular. This is achieved through several strategies, including the conflation of the mad body and the national body, the portrayal of madness as endemic debility, and, especially, the valorization of the health professional.
{"title":"Madness and Its Experts: Aminatta Forna's The Memory of Love","authors":"Femi Eromosele","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.52.4.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.52.4.05","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:In the last few decades, madness has become entangled with discourses of rights and pride, which also reject the medicalized definition of the phenomenon as \"mental illness.\" Having its origins in several intellectual and activist traditions contesting the construction of normativity, this body of work seeks to reclaim madness as a positive identity. In this article, I read Aminatta Forna's The Memory of Love against this background. I argue that the novel, as an example of African writing that engages psychiatry and allied disciplines, offers some reflections on the possibility of a discourse of social justice on madness. The narrative emphasizes collective tragedy and injustice over a political discourse that focuses on the mad in particular. This is achieved through several strategies, including the conflation of the mad body and the national body, the portrayal of madness as endemic debility, and, especially, the valorization of the health professional.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"52 1","pages":"63 - 79"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44675241","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 : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.52.4.07
S. Zulfiqar
ABSTRACT:In approaching the topic of polygamy and how it is discussed in Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood (1979), this article uses two central concepts: firstly, María Lugones's idea of "world travelling," which emphasizes the need to understand the plurality of women's perspectives, enabling the decentering of feminist debates; and secondly, Marilyn Frye's idea of the "loving eye," closely connected to Lugones's concept, which calls for us to see other worlds and see other women from within their worlds—that is, from within their specific sociocultural contexts. Using these two concepts to analyze Emecheta's novel and its representation of polygamy, I argue that polygamy is as valid as monogamy and posit that no useful discussion of polygamy can take place from within a Eurocentric worldview. I also highlight the role of empire more generally in denigrating unfamiliar customs and traditions in various parts of Africa by framing them as illegitimate. This illegitimacy still affects representations and perceptions of polygamy today, as a form of marriage that (it is implied) has no place in a "civilized" world.
{"title":"\"Sharing a Husband\": The Representation of Polygamy in Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood (1979)","authors":"S. Zulfiqar","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.52.4.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.52.4.07","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:In approaching the topic of polygamy and how it is discussed in Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood (1979), this article uses two central concepts: firstly, María Lugones's idea of \"world travelling,\" which emphasizes the need to understand the plurality of women's perspectives, enabling the decentering of feminist debates; and secondly, Marilyn Frye's idea of the \"loving eye,\" closely connected to Lugones's concept, which calls for us to see other worlds and see other women from within their worlds—that is, from within their specific sociocultural contexts. Using these two concepts to analyze Emecheta's novel and its representation of polygamy, I argue that polygamy is as valid as monogamy and posit that no useful discussion of polygamy can take place from within a Eurocentric worldview. I also highlight the role of empire more generally in denigrating unfamiliar customs and traditions in various parts of Africa by framing them as illegitimate. This illegitimacy still affects representations and perceptions of polygamy today, as a form of marriage that (it is implied) has no place in a \"civilized\" world.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"52 1","pages":"100 - 115"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48323064","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 : 2022-05-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.52.3.04
L. Kruger
ABSTRACT:This paper considers Achebe’s No Longer at Ease in terms of its modest canonical fortunes and its peculiar formal construction. The paper argues that the novel’s urban setting is produced through an emergent and local noir style, that this setting indexes the increasing centrality of the city in late colonial African life, and that it formally responds to the success of Achebe’s rural Things Fall Apart and its problematic status as a paradigmatic African text. The paper suggests that No Longer at Ease’s foreign and local horizons of interpretation, as symptoms of an ongoing imperial world-system, are internalized and symbolically resolved by the novel’s instantiation of Lagos as chronotope. The paper’s methodological intervention offers a hermeneutics of literary setting through which to elaborate the relationships between form, literary institutions, and material conditions in the postcolony.
{"title":"Literary Setting and the Postcolonial City in No Longer at Ease","authors":"L. Kruger","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.52.3.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.52.3.04","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This paper considers Achebe’s No Longer at Ease in terms of its modest canonical fortunes and its peculiar formal construction. The paper argues that the novel’s urban setting is produced through an emergent and local noir style, that this setting indexes the increasing centrality of the city in late colonial African life, and that it formally responds to the success of Achebe’s rural Things Fall Apart and its problematic status as a paradigmatic African text. The paper suggests that No Longer at Ease’s foreign and local horizons of interpretation, as symptoms of an ongoing imperial world-system, are internalized and symbolically resolved by the novel’s instantiation of Lagos as chronotope. The paper’s methodological intervention offers a hermeneutics of literary setting through which to elaborate the relationships between form, literary institutions, and material conditions in the postcolony.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"52 1","pages":"62 - 86"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42731268","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 : 2022-05-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.52.3.09
Lauren Horst
ABSTRACT:While Botswana today is remembered as a nation rich in mineral resources, this essay identifies another key to the country’s remarkable economic transformation after independence: national economic plans. Noting that it was Botswana’s ability to efficiently produce national economic plans that helped the country attract and sustain the interest of foreign lenders and development institutions, this essay makes the case for thinking about Bessie Head’s early work, much of which was marketed to foreign readers, in similar terms. As a means of thinking across the literary and the economic, this essay introduces the concept of the planning imagination, a mode of thinking reliant on techniques such as abstraction, miniaturization, and modeling. This essay argues that while Head’s first novel, When Rain Clouds Gather, replicates such techniques, implicitly encouraging its readers to think of themselves as development planners, Head’s later works—here, A Question of Power and Serowe: Village of the Rain-Wind—critique and resist this mode.
{"title":"Bessie Head, National Economic Development, and the Planning Imagination","authors":"Lauren Horst","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.52.3.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.52.3.09","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:While Botswana today is remembered as a nation rich in mineral resources, this essay identifies another key to the country’s remarkable economic transformation after independence: national economic plans. Noting that it was Botswana’s ability to efficiently produce national economic plans that helped the country attract and sustain the interest of foreign lenders and development institutions, this essay makes the case for thinking about Bessie Head’s early work, much of which was marketed to foreign readers, in similar terms. As a means of thinking across the literary and the economic, this essay introduces the concept of the planning imagination, a mode of thinking reliant on techniques such as abstraction, miniaturization, and modeling. This essay argues that while Head’s first novel, When Rain Clouds Gather, replicates such techniques, implicitly encouraging its readers to think of themselves as development planners, Head’s later works—here, A Question of Power and Serowe: Village of the Rain-Wind—critique and resist this mode.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"52 1","pages":"167 - 186"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41856094","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 : 2022-05-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.52.3.03
K. Manzo
ABSTRACT:This paper argues that genealogical ties exist between the “national-masculine” literary tradition that characterized the sexual politics of the Ibadan modernist arts journal Black Orpheus and the homosocial environments of the colonial boarding schools and university system of Nigeria. Within this flagship journal, a certain form of short story thematized social issues and forms of violence commonly associated with Western second-wave feminism and frequently siloed under the category of “women’s issues.” These included general sexual violence, abortion, and rape. The symbolic handling of these forms of violence within Black Orpheus is notable because it marks a sharp departure from similarly gendered issues within contemporaneous market literature and stands in contrast to social concerns raised by African women writers who were the male authors’ peers. Like the authors of market literatures, these texts do not engage women as rounded subjects capable of speaking their own minds. Yet unlike market literatures, these texts flatten womanhood in order to engage in performative acts of solidarity, allyship, and/or sympathy with figures of womanhood, especially—and ironically—related to issues surrounding women’s bodily autonomy. In short, these works allowed male authors to construct fictionalized women and fictionalized male voices to speak for and of them.
{"title":"Sublimations and Shadows: Sexual Politics of Ibadan Modernism in Black Orpheus","authors":"K. Manzo","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.52.3.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.52.3.03","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This paper argues that genealogical ties exist between the “national-masculine” literary tradition that characterized the sexual politics of the Ibadan modernist arts journal Black Orpheus and the homosocial environments of the colonial boarding schools and university system of Nigeria. Within this flagship journal, a certain form of short story thematized social issues and forms of violence commonly associated with Western second-wave feminism and frequently siloed under the category of “women’s issues.” These included general sexual violence, abortion, and rape. The symbolic handling of these forms of violence within Black Orpheus is notable because it marks a sharp departure from similarly gendered issues within contemporaneous market literature and stands in contrast to social concerns raised by African women writers who were the male authors’ peers. Like the authors of market literatures, these texts do not engage women as rounded subjects capable of speaking their own minds. Yet unlike market literatures, these texts flatten womanhood in order to engage in performative acts of solidarity, allyship, and/or sympathy with figures of womanhood, especially—and ironically—related to issues surrounding women’s bodily autonomy. In short, these works allowed male authors to construct fictionalized women and fictionalized male voices to speak for and of them.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"52 1","pages":"41 - 61"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49393189","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 : 2022-05-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.52.3.11
Cameron Cook
{"title":"The Quebec Connection: A Poetics of Solidarity in Global Francophone Literatures by Julie-Françoise Tolliver (review)","authors":"Cameron Cook","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.52.3.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.52.3.11","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"52 1","pages":"223 - 224"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48375814","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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