Pub Date : 2021-12-09DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.06
S. Adebayo
ABSTRACT:This paper examines Chimamanda Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun as a work of postmemory. It argues that the novel disrupts the state repression, institutionalized amnesia, and traumatic silence that surround the Nigeria-Biafra War. It also argues that Adichie wrote the novel as a way of bearing posthumous fidelity to her ancestors. The novel, I argue, serves as Adichie's way of working through her inheritance of loss. Since she did not personally experience the war, I argue that Yellow Sun as a work of postmemory is built on earlier narratives; it is a literary afterlife of earlier stories. The abounding intertextual references in the novel provide a literary archaeology of loss incurred from the war. I also argue that the novel gives a postmodern touch to the narrativization of history through the adoption of metatexts that, in the long run, serves to blur the line between fact and fiction. With intertextual and extratextual readings, I argue that Adichie's postmemorial journey confirms how generational hauntings can facilitate conversations about justice. That is, Adichie's postmemorial endeavor comes with a sense of wanting to remedy the injustices of the past and create possibilities of a just future.
{"title":"Writing About the Dead in the Present Tense: Half of a Yellow Sun as a Work of Postmemory","authors":"S. Adebayo","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.06","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This paper examines Chimamanda Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun as a work of postmemory. It argues that the novel disrupts the state repression, institutionalized amnesia, and traumatic silence that surround the Nigeria-Biafra War. It also argues that Adichie wrote the novel as a way of bearing posthumous fidelity to her ancestors. The novel, I argue, serves as Adichie's way of working through her inheritance of loss. Since she did not personally experience the war, I argue that Yellow Sun as a work of postmemory is built on earlier narratives; it is a literary afterlife of earlier stories. The abounding intertextual references in the novel provide a literary archaeology of loss incurred from the war. I also argue that the novel gives a postmodern touch to the narrativization of history through the adoption of metatexts that, in the long run, serves to blur the line between fact and fiction. With intertextual and extratextual readings, I argue that Adichie's postmemorial journey confirms how generational hauntings can facilitate conversations about justice. That is, Adichie's postmemorial endeavor comes with a sense of wanting to remedy the injustices of the past and create possibilities of a just future.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"52 1","pages":"107 - 84"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45850523","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.52.1.12
Loren Kruger
{"title":"So over the Rainbow—Inheritance, Innovation, and Intervention in South African Live Arts","authors":"Loren Kruger","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.12","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"52 1","pages":"187 - 197"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46874952","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.52.1.10
C. Rono
ABSTRACT:This article explores the repressed autobiographical narrative that runs through Margaret Ogola's Place of Destiny (2005). Based on Ogola's experience, the novel takes the form of a fictional autobiography as it documents the story of Amor A. Lore, a business executive woman in her late forties, from the moment she was diagnosed with liver cancer and ends with her eventual demise. In this article, I critically reflect on Margaret Ogola's personal experience of writing about cancer and how she focuses on the complex dynamics of self-representation, challenges, and opportunities related to fictional autobiography. While emphasizing the victims' experience of cancer in this fictional life story, I argue that Margaret Ogola rewrites the cancer narrative by fictionalizing her personal experience as a means of stationing the authority of the artistic enterprise in the desires of a diseased body to overcome the trauma of disintegration. This essay draws on the ideas of Ann Jurecic and Leigh Gilmore to conceptualize the dialectical interplay between facts and fiction in an attempt to understand possibilities of thinking about and experiencing disease without submitting the text to an effusive paranoid reading.
{"title":"Subverting Autobiography: Illness, Narrative, and Negotiating Dis-ease in Margaret Ogola's Place of Destiny","authors":"C. Rono","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.10","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article explores the repressed autobiographical narrative that runs through Margaret Ogola's Place of Destiny (2005). Based on Ogola's experience, the novel takes the form of a fictional autobiography as it documents the story of Amor A. Lore, a business executive woman in her late forties, from the moment she was diagnosed with liver cancer and ends with her eventual demise. In this article, I critically reflect on Margaret Ogola's personal experience of writing about cancer and how she focuses on the complex dynamics of self-representation, challenges, and opportunities related to fictional autobiography. While emphasizing the victims' experience of cancer in this fictional life story, I argue that Margaret Ogola rewrites the cancer narrative by fictionalizing her personal experience as a means of stationing the authority of the artistic enterprise in the desires of a diseased body to overcome the trauma of disintegration. This essay draws on the ideas of Ann Jurecic and Leigh Gilmore to conceptualize the dialectical interplay between facts and fiction in an attempt to understand possibilities of thinking about and experiencing disease without submitting the text to an effusive paranoid reading.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"52 1","pages":"156 - 169"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42796229","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.52.1.07
Marina Vlahaki
ABSTRACT:Americanah (2013) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie brought to the forefront the natural hair movement as a form of resistance to Western aesthetics. However, this conversation overlooks the labor that goes into creating Africentric hairstyles. In this essay, I examine what hair signifies for immigrant hairstylists in order to articulate a cosmopolitan experience from the perspective of the racialized, gendered, and undocumented migrant worker. To understand how these migrants find belonging in the world, I argue against the abstraction of space, a predominant tendency in invocations of cosmopolitanism and its related strand, Afropolitanism. With that in mind, I look at the hair salon, a highly gendered and stratified space that reveals not only how the female workers are placed in a restrictive position, but also how they shape the space that they occupy through their service of braiding hair. I juxtapose this service and cultural act alongside Achille Mbembe's concept of interweaving worlds to show that the female migrant workers interweave divergent perspectives despite the disharmonious encounters produced by the invisible racial, ethnic, and class boundaries of the hair salon.
{"title":"Braiding Worlds: Disharmonious Encounters in Mariama's African Hair Salon in Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie","authors":"Marina Vlahaki","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.07","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Americanah (2013) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie brought to the forefront the natural hair movement as a form of resistance to Western aesthetics. However, this conversation overlooks the labor that goes into creating Africentric hairstyles. In this essay, I examine what hair signifies for immigrant hairstylists in order to articulate a cosmopolitan experience from the perspective of the racialized, gendered, and undocumented migrant worker. To understand how these migrants find belonging in the world, I argue against the abstraction of space, a predominant tendency in invocations of cosmopolitanism and its related strand, Afropolitanism. With that in mind, I look at the hair salon, a highly gendered and stratified space that reveals not only how the female workers are placed in a restrictive position, but also how they shape the space that they occupy through their service of braiding hair. I juxtapose this service and cultural act alongside Achille Mbembe's concept of interweaving worlds to show that the female migrant workers interweave divergent perspectives despite the disharmonious encounters produced by the invisible racial, ethnic, and class boundaries of the hair salon.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"52 1","pages":"108 - 126"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44789554","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.52.1.11
C. Dunton
is long overdue. Now, for the first time, the wider world out there will get drawn into the throbbing heart of the unofficial civil war that wrecked South Africa from the mid-1980s right up to the day of the first democratic elec-tions of 1994. By turns tender and furious, this novel will change the way the world sees South Africa.
{"title":"Africa Pulse","authors":"C. Dunton","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.11","url":null,"abstract":"is long overdue. Now, for the first time, the wider world out there will get drawn into the throbbing heart of the unofficial civil war that wrecked South Africa from the mid-1980s right up to the day of the first democratic elec-tions of 1994. By turns tender and furious, this novel will change the way the world sees South Africa.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"52 1","pages":"170 - 186"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49387178","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.52.1.03
T. D. Javangwe
ABSTRACT:Political life narratives have emerged in Zimbabwe and elsewhere to contest, rebut, or corroborate versions of official history on nationalist trajectories from the liberation struggles and thereafter. This development has excited new critical attention on such narratives that before were despised by historians who did not accept autobiography in general as a serious field of study that could contribute to knowledge. This discussion focuses on selected political life narratives of Zimbabwean nationalists, arguing that the life narrative is a useful entry point in understanding not only individual identities, but the history, culture, and politics of Zimbabwe. It argues that the existence of the life narrative genre in a particular culture is an important signifier of the dynamic processes of both individual and group identity conception in that society, and therefore it must be read alongside other disciplines such as history.
{"title":"The In-Between-Ness of the Life Narrative—Negotiating Disciplinary Boundaries in Selected Zimbabwean Political Life Narratives","authors":"T. D. Javangwe","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.03","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Political life narratives have emerged in Zimbabwe and elsewhere to contest, rebut, or corroborate versions of official history on nationalist trajectories from the liberation struggles and thereafter. This development has excited new critical attention on such narratives that before were despised by historians who did not accept autobiography in general as a serious field of study that could contribute to knowledge. This discussion focuses on selected political life narratives of Zimbabwean nationalists, arguing that the life narrative is a useful entry point in understanding not only individual identities, but the history, culture, and politics of Zimbabwe. It argues that the existence of the life narrative genre in a particular culture is an important signifier of the dynamic processes of both individual and group identity conception in that society, and therefore it must be read alongside other disciplines such as history.","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"52 1","pages":"36 - 51"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44527453","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 : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.14
Dominic Thomas
{"title":"Your Feet Will Lead You Where Your Heart Is / Le crépuscule des âmes sœurs ed. by Dzekashu Macviban and Nfor E. Njinyoh (review)","authors":"Dominic Thomas","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.14","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"52 1","pages":"200 - 202"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46530883","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 : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.16
C. Onah
{"title":"Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa by Naminata Diabate (review)","authors":"C. Onah","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.16","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"52 1","pages":"205 - 206"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47615441","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 : 2021-11-01DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.13
Mahruba T. Mowtushi
{"title":"Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature by Ato Quayson (review)","authors":"Mahruba T. Mowtushi","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.52.1.13","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"52 1","pages":"198 - 200"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45696920","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 : 2021-07-19DOI: 10.2979/reseafrilite.51.4.08
Alexandra Reza
ABSTRACT:In this paper, I take the time-space of post-independence Conakry as an important site in the history of articulations and rearticulations of culture and politics that have rightly sustained critical interest in the conjuncture of decolonization. Such a maneuver might lead us to challenge the centripetal tendencies of postcolonial studies. In this article, though, I ask only this: how does taking Conakry at this time seriously as a site of cultural production modulate understandings of cultural production in the conjuncture of decolonization? My answer to that question centers on dissidence, through a discussion of the work of Maryse Condé and Condetto Nénékhaly-Camara. The conjuncture of post-independence Conakry can help us configure the place of literary and artistic non-conformism in the context of authoritarianism. It supposes moving from an aesthetics of independence to an aesthetics of dissent.I remember being in Conakry in 1968. … Those were, in their way, golden days. (Johnson 3)S. T. spoke at maximum volume for over an hour, his speech punctuated by cheers. The woman next to me got a bit bored and began to tuck into a huge bag of nuts. (Nkrumah and Milne 220)
{"title":"Stepping out of Line in Independent Conakry","authors":"Alexandra Reza","doi":"10.2979/reseafrilite.51.4.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.51.4.08","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:In this paper, I take the time-space of post-independence Conakry as an important site in the history of articulations and rearticulations of culture and politics that have rightly sustained critical interest in the conjuncture of decolonization. Such a maneuver might lead us to challenge the centripetal tendencies of postcolonial studies. In this article, though, I ask only this: how does taking Conakry at this time seriously as a site of cultural production modulate understandings of cultural production in the conjuncture of decolonization? My answer to that question centers on dissidence, through a discussion of the work of Maryse Condé and Condetto Nénékhaly-Camara. The conjuncture of post-independence Conakry can help us configure the place of literary and artistic non-conformism in the context of authoritarianism. It supposes moving from an aesthetics of independence to an aesthetics of dissent.I remember being in Conakry in 1968. … Those were, in their way, golden days. (Johnson 3)S. T. spoke at maximum volume for over an hour, his speech punctuated by cheers. The woman next to me got a bit bored and began to tuck into a huge bag of nuts. (Nkrumah and Milne 220)","PeriodicalId":21021,"journal":{"name":"Research in African Literatures","volume":"51 1","pages":"137 - 155"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49609532","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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