Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.52.2.02
Deepa Jani
ABSTRACT:This essay celebrates the sixtieth anniversary of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart by returning to a cliché that the novel remakes African humanity. While the presumption of Achebe’s humanism has congealed into academic common sense, he does not belong to some of the brands of literary humanism developed since the ascendancy of High Theory. Examining Achebe’s literary humanism in the wake of anti-humanist French theory, which engendered defenses of literary humanism from aesthetic philosophers and postcolonial scholars, I argue that Achebe ascribes neither to propositional nor non-propositional literary humanism, but to the Saidean text-and-language-bound literary humanism by virtue of which he remakes African humanity after Europe in Things Fall Apart. I contend further that as a postcolonial writer his relationship to humanism remains nevertheless ambivalent. Achebe’s humanism in the novel is of aporetic form, “anti-humanistic humanism,” engendering an impassable paradox; qua Said, he is critical of humanism in the name of humanism. Whereas Achebe refashions the precolonial Okonkwo to humanist measure in Things Fall Apart, the figure of Okonkwo is paradoxically molded in the principle of Cartesian individualism of classical realism.
{"title":"Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: Literary Humanism and the Question of Human Dignity","authors":"Deepa Jani","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.52.2.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.52.2.02","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This essay celebrates the sixtieth anniversary of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart by returning to a cliché that the novel remakes African humanity. While the presumption of Achebe’s humanism has congealed into academic common sense, he does not belong to some of the brands of literary humanism developed since the ascendancy of High Theory. Examining Achebe’s literary humanism in the wake of anti-humanist French theory, which engendered defenses of literary humanism from aesthetic philosophers and postcolonial scholars, I argue that Achebe ascribes neither to propositional nor non-propositional literary humanism, but to the Saidean text-and-language-bound literary humanism by virtue of which he remakes African humanity after Europe in Things Fall Apart. I contend further that as a postcolonial writer his relationship to humanism remains nevertheless ambivalent. Achebe’s humanism in the novel is of aporetic form, “anti-humanistic humanism,” engendering an impassable paradox; qua Said, he is critical of humanism in the name of humanism. Whereas Achebe refashions the precolonial Okonkwo to humanist measure in Things Fall Apart, the figure of Okonkwo is paradoxically molded in the principle of Cartesian individualism of classical realism.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"52 1","pages":"29 - 53"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48534070","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 : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.52.2.08
Kristien Potgieter
ABSTRACT:This paper discusses the representation of nonracialism in two white South African children’s novels by Jaco Jacobs, A Good Day for Climbing Trees (2018) and A Good Night for Shooting Zombies (2018). By making use of a critical race lens, I demonstrate how a diminished focus on racial difference in white post-transitional South African children’s literature does not reflect the reality of contemporary South African society, which is still largely racialized, nor does it necessarily indicate a racially progressive or anti-racist outlook. In order to demonstrate how nonracialism fails to address structural racism, white supremacy, and white privilege, three narrative strategies of nonracialism in the chosen texts are identified and analyzed: colorblindness, selective cultural specificity, and apartheid decontextualization. It is suggested that alternatives to nonracialism in post-transitional South African children’s literature, which are more suited to addressing enduring racial inequality, white privilege, and structural racism, need to be found.
{"title":"A Good Day for Seeing Color: Nonracialism in Two White South African Children’s Novels","authors":"Kristien Potgieter","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.52.2.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.52.2.08","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This paper discusses the representation of nonracialism in two white South African children’s novels by Jaco Jacobs, A Good Day for Climbing Trees (2018) and A Good Night for Shooting Zombies (2018). By making use of a critical race lens, I demonstrate how a diminished focus on racial difference in white post-transitional South African children’s literature does not reflect the reality of contemporary South African society, which is still largely racialized, nor does it necessarily indicate a racially progressive or anti-racist outlook. In order to demonstrate how nonracialism fails to address structural racism, white supremacy, and white privilege, three narrative strategies of nonracialism in the chosen texts are identified and analyzed: colorblindness, selective cultural specificity, and apartheid decontextualization. It is suggested that alternatives to nonracialism in post-transitional South African children’s literature, which are more suited to addressing enduring racial inequality, white privilege, and structural racism, need to be found.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"52 1","pages":"136 - 152"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49373354","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 : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.52.2.01
Doyle Calhoun
ABSTRACT:Nearly all analyses of Ousmane Sembène’s novella La Noire de… (Voltaïque, 1962) and its eponymous film adaptation (1966) mention the fact that Sembène found inspiration for his text and film in a French newspaper report of a real suicide. However, scholars have not tracked down a copy of the original report or excavated the history of Diouana Gomis, the real woman whose suicide in 1958—on the heels of the 1958 Referendum and on the eve of Senegalese independence (1960)—served as the inspiration for one of the most iconic of African films. Indeed, the figure of Diouana has become synonymous with Sembène’s literary and cinematic character, in particular her “screen memory” as Senegalese actress’s Mbissine Thérèse Diop’s powerful performance in the film. Until now, traces of the “real” Diouana have remained buried in French police archives, her story receding from view. My essay makes a significant contribution to the study of Sembène’s art and to the memory of Diouana Gomis by reconstructing the backstory of her suicide through unstudied archival documents. Diouana Gomis (1927–58), a thirty-one-year-old, unmarried woman from Boutoupa in the Ziguinchor region of Senegal arrived in Antibes during the second week of April in 1958 and died by suicide less than three months later. The faint archival traces sewn in the wake of her suicide make it possible, and necessary, to reconstruct some of the details of her life and death so that the ghostly signature of this real woman might shadow the “Diouana” whom we see and hear on screen.
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Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.52.2.07
Chike Mgbeadichie
ABSTRACT:Economic principles about Africa have ignored the contributions of African literature. For scholars in the social sciences, African literature has no business in economic theorizing. The role of African writers, many think, is simply to tell African stories, discuss African cultures, and address social issues within the continent. African literature goes beyond these; it contains fascinating economic projections that can support the development of a better economic model for Africa. This paper argues that African literature is a philosophical text that transcends beyond stories on African cultural heritage. Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah will serve as my primary text for analysis. In order to understand how African writers function as economic thinkers, I situate Ifemelu’s blogging and Obinze’s enterprising formation within the economic theory of entrepreneurship. In Mariama’s hair braiding salon, I foreground Adichie’s projection for vocation, and with the narrative on Edusco, I conceptualize the idea of the Igbo apprenticeship model, Igba-Odibo.
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Pub Date : 2021-12-09DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.01
Dorothée Boulanger
ABSTRACT:Through the study of Rioseco (1999), a little-known novel written by the Angolan author Manuel Rui, this article proposes to examine how, during some of the country's darkest hours, Angolan postcolonial literature remained an important site of creative resistance and utopia. Using Boaventura de Sousa Santos's works on the need to widen our understanding of social reality by taking into account the subaltern experiences and cosmologies traditionally discarded as irrelevant and anachronistic by Western rationality, this article examines how fiction literature in Angola participates in the decolonization of knowledge by forming an alternative archive, shedding light on subaltern populations in the country. Focusing more specifically on the subversion of gender stereotypes and the connection between material culture, community, and spirituality in postcolonial Angola, I highlight how the celebration of African cosmologies participates in the reimagining of modes of conviviality and reconciliation in a country plagued by violence and poverty.
摘要:本文通过对安哥拉作家曼努埃尔·鲁伊(Manuel Rui)的小说《里奥塞科》(Rioseco, 1999)的研究，探讨在安哥拉最黑暗的时期，安哥拉后殖民文学是如何成为创造性抵抗和乌托邦的重要场所的。本文以Boaventura de Sousa Santos的作品为例，探讨有必要扩大我们对社会现实的理解，将传统上被西方理性视为不相关和不合时宜的次等经验和宇宙观纳入考量，检视安哥拉的虚构文学如何透过形成另类档案，参与知识的非殖民化，揭示该国次等人口。我特别关注后殖民时期安哥拉对性别刻板印象的颠覆，以及物质文化、社区和灵性之间的联系，强调非洲宇宙观如何在一个饱受暴力和贫困困扰的国家参与重新构想欢乐与和解模式。
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Pub Date : 2021-12-09DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.02
Reshmi Mukherjee
ABSTRACT:This article is a study of the transformation of harems and hammams from marginalized, gender-secluded locations to sites for and of resistance in Assia Djebar's Ombre Sultane [A Sister to Scheherazade] and Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement [Women of Algiers in Their Apartment]. It argues that domestic and private spaces like the harem and hammam denotes both "a space and a category of people" and contends that the female dwellers of Assia Djebar's stories, whose identities are integral to the places they inhabit, actively change these places, break the stereotypical image of the Arab women as docile, and represent themselves as independent female subjects of postcolonial Algeria (Schick, "Harem" 69).
摘要：本文研究了阿西娅·杰巴尔（Assia Djebar）的《谢赫拉扎德的姐妹》（Ombre Sultane）和《阿尔及尔的女人在她们的公寓里》（Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement）中的后宫和吊床从边缘化、性别隐蔽的地方转变为反抗场所。它认为，像后宫和哈姆这样的家庭和私人空间意味着“一个空间和一类人”，并认为阿西亚·杰巴尔故事中的女性居民，她们的身份与她们居住的地方是不可分割的，积极改变这些地方，打破了阿拉伯妇女温顺的刻板印象，并将自己描绘成后殖民时代阿尔及利亚的独立女性主体（Schick，“Harem”69）。
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Pub Date : 2021-12-09DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.04
Mads Larsen
ABSTRACT:Christopher Miller recently supported Adele King's exposure of L'enfant noir (1953) as likely having been ghostwritten, thus ingraining the stain of French anti-independence conspiracy on the founding novel of Francophone African literature. A new perspective on decolonialization from Frederick Cooper and Gary Wilder suggests that it is misunderstood to read Camara Laye's biography as political betrayal. The novel embodies a vision for global cooperation that transcends the nation-state, a position that archival research reveals to have been hegemonic in French West African postwar discourse. Pluralistic sovereignty was meant to ensure both cultural integrity and fair, effective governance in an interdependent world. This vision was lost with the balkanization of Africa, but it parallels what Jürgen Habermas, Yuval Harari, and other scholars view as crucial in order to solve twenty-first-century challenges. The structural dilemma that colonies faced in the 1950s now threatens the entire global community.
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Pub Date : 2021-12-09DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.05
Maha Mohamed Samy Ibrahim Elhalawany
ABSTRACT:In the aftermath of colonization with its psychologically devastating impact on the colonized, narratives of trauma face the difficulty of describing the painful experience of the victimized due to the failure of the human language to depict the sweeping, unutterable feeling of pain experienced. Given this rhetorical incompetence, silence has become a legitimate response to trauma. In the postcolonial context, silence is mainly conceptualized from an ideological perspective as a deliberate tactic by the victim to subvert the techniques of hegemonic discourse. The paper presents a context of colonial violence by Andre Brink's On the Other Side of Silence, reconceptualizing silence as an instrument of empowerment, assertion, and recognition. However, the paper departs from presenting silence as a rhetorical device that can only be studied on semiotic premises. The study rather exploits silence as a mode of representation and a performative tool. The paper foregrounds the performative, nonverbal quality of silence as a more powerful strategy of lending voice to the powerless.
摘要：在殖民化及其对被殖民者的心理破坏性影响之后，由于人类语言未能描绘出所经历的难以言说的痛苦，创伤叙事很难描述受害者的痛苦经历。鉴于这种修辞上的无能，沉默已经成为对创伤的合理回应。在后殖民语境中，沉默主要从意识形态的角度被概念化为受害者蓄意颠覆霸权话语技巧的策略。本文通过安德烈·布林克（Andre Brink）的《沉默的另一面》（On The Other Side of Silence）介绍了殖民暴力的背景，将沉默重新定义为一种赋权、断言和认可的工具。然而，本文并没有将沉默作为一种修辞手段，只能在符号学的前提下进行研究。这项研究将沉默作为一种表现方式和一种表演工具。这篇论文将沉默的表演性、非语言性作为一种更有力的策略，为无权者发声。
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Pub Date : 2021-12-09DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.08
C. Okoye
ABSTRACT:The "igidi," a culturally relevant tool in literary criticism, is important in Nnabuenyi Ugonna's study of the dramatic aspects of the Igbo ancestral mask in Mmonwu: A Dramatic Tradition of the Igbo. The "igidi," as an equivalent to a prosodic foot, is Ugonna's solution to the problem of suitability in the analyses of Igbo mask chants. The "igidi" in this instance is such a culturally relevant tool. Similarly, Ezenwa-Ohaeto, in his text Contemporary Nigerian Poetry and the Poetics of Orality, advocates for a unique poetics for the criticism of contemporary oral texts. He postulates and applies this framework to critiques of poems featured in the text. In this article, a combination of "igidi," the poetics of orality, and context-based pragmatic analyses, which was developed into "universalist relativism," the author's construct is applied to select lines of The Voice of the Night Masquerade. This paper effectively negotiates the literary legacy of orality, its applications, and contemporaneity through a coherent poetics and argues for their application in wider scopes and texts.
{"title":"A Practical Poetics for Orality: Nnabuenyi Ugonna's \"Igidi\" and Ezenwa-Ohaeto's Poetics and The Voice of the Night Masquerade","authors":"C. Okoye","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.08","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:The \"igidi,\" a culturally relevant tool in literary criticism, is important in Nnabuenyi Ugonna's study of the dramatic aspects of the Igbo ancestral mask in Mmonwu: A Dramatic Tradition of the Igbo. The \"igidi,\" as an equivalent to a prosodic foot, is Ugonna's solution to the problem of suitability in the analyses of Igbo mask chants. The \"igidi\" in this instance is such a culturally relevant tool. Similarly, Ezenwa-Ohaeto, in his text Contemporary Nigerian Poetry and the Poetics of Orality, advocates for a unique poetics for the criticism of contemporary oral texts. He postulates and applies this framework to critiques of poems featured in the text. In this article, a combination of \"igidi,\" the poetics of orality, and context-based pragmatic analyses, which was developed into \"universalist relativism,\" the author's construct is applied to select lines of The Voice of the Night Masquerade. This paper effectively negotiates the literary legacy of orality, its applications, and contemporaneity through a coherent poetics and argues for their application in wider scopes and texts.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"52 1","pages":"127 - 138"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45958334","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 : 2021-12-09DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.09
Olanike Lawore
ABSTRACT:This study contextualizes and theorizes Nigeriopolitanism as a tool wielded by many Nigerian authors for the purpose not only of countering essentialized constructions of Nigerian identity in 19th- and early 20th-century British texts but also of contributing to negotiating Nigerian identities in a global space. Drawing on the concept of Afropolitanism, this study, through the agency of Nigeriopolitanism, redresses the central critique leveled against Afropolitanism, namely that the concept does not apply to those living in the African continent but only to its diasporas. Reading across a range of Nigerian authors from first-generation writers to 21st-century writers such as Chinua Achebe, Chukwuemeka Ike, Buchi Emecheta, and Chimamanda Adichie, this study examines the expressions of Nigeriopolitanism. The understanding of Nigeriopolitanism is crucial to understanding the multiple, complex, and ambiguous Nigerian identities and the modern-day realities of globalization and their impacts. This project will provide a model for other countries that have similar demographics to Nigeria.
{"title":"A Critique of Afropolitanism: Toward the Formation of a New Reading Model—Nigeriopolitanism","authors":"Olanike Lawore","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.09","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This study contextualizes and theorizes Nigeriopolitanism as a tool wielded by many Nigerian authors for the purpose not only of countering essentialized constructions of Nigerian identity in 19th- and early 20th-century British texts but also of contributing to negotiating Nigerian identities in a global space. Drawing on the concept of Afropolitanism, this study, through the agency of Nigeriopolitanism, redresses the central critique leveled against Afropolitanism, namely that the concept does not apply to those living in the African continent but only to its diasporas. Reading across a range of Nigerian authors from first-generation writers to 21st-century writers such as Chinua Achebe, Chukwuemeka Ike, Buchi Emecheta, and Chimamanda Adichie, this study examines the expressions of Nigeriopolitanism. The understanding of Nigeriopolitanism is crucial to understanding the multiple, complex, and ambiguous Nigerian identities and the modern-day realities of globalization and their impacts. This project will provide a model for other countries that have similar demographics to Nigeria.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"52 1","pages":"139 - 155"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43684874","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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