Pub Date : 2022-10-19DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2023.2128514
E. Kowalská
Abstract Despite geo-political distances, the Beat Generation writers, and individuals or groups within Polish and South African literature of the period 1948–1968, shared similar artistic outlooks, literary concerns, and thematic as well as formal experimentation in response to their socio-political situations and mainstream national literatures. In addition, there is evidence to suggest that they sought out each other’s work, despite language barriers and censorship, and that several points of confluence can be identified. This article focuses on five significant encounters or movements and considers how these might be illustrative of broader issues within transnational studies of these groups and writers.
{"title":"Literary Encounters: The Beat Generation, Poland and South Africa, 1948–1968","authors":"E. Kowalská","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2023.2128514","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2023.2128514","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Despite geo-political distances, the Beat Generation writers, and individuals or groups within Polish and South African literature of the period 1948–1968, shared similar artistic outlooks, literary concerns, and thematic as well as formal experimentation in response to their socio-political situations and mainstream national literatures. In addition, there is evidence to suggest that they sought out each other’s work, despite language barriers and censorship, and that several points of confluence can be identified. This article focuses on five significant encounters or movements and considers how these might be illustrative of broader issues within transnational studies of these groups and writers.","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":"66 1","pages":"63 - 75"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41916538","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-12DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2023.2128490
E. Smuts
Abstract In this essay I read Bessie Head’s novel When Rain Clouds Gather from a broadly eco-materialist perspective, arguing that the social transformation of the protagonist, Makhaya Maseko, is fundamentally bound up with the text’s nuanced descriptions of the physical environment. Charting Maseko’s departure from the toxic milieu of apartheid South Africa, and his gradual process of settling into a new lifeworld in the village of Golema Mmidi, I argue that his familiarization with the material grounds of life in a new clime provides an elemental coherence that enables the structuring of his personal narrative into a meaningful system. Through a series of close readings, I demonstrate that the novel’s expression of a composite ecological being is also reflected in the stylistic idiosyncrasies of Head’s writing. Throughout, I draw on Head’s correspondence, and on biographical aspects of her life, to situate Makhaya’s journey against a larger theme of struggling to make a home in the face of social alienation and the bureaucratic indifference of the nation-state. Reference to the work of anthropologists like Tim Ingold and Hannah Knox situates my argument in the context of a larger ontological move in debates around the relationship between nature and culture.
{"title":"Elemental Humanity in Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather","authors":"E. Smuts","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2023.2128490","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2023.2128490","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this essay I read Bessie Head’s novel When Rain Clouds Gather from a broadly eco-materialist perspective, arguing that the social transformation of the protagonist, Makhaya Maseko, is fundamentally bound up with the text’s nuanced descriptions of the physical environment. Charting Maseko’s departure from the toxic milieu of apartheid South Africa, and his gradual process of settling into a new lifeworld in the village of Golema Mmidi, I argue that his familiarization with the material grounds of life in a new clime provides an elemental coherence that enables the structuring of his personal narrative into a meaningful system. Through a series of close readings, I demonstrate that the novel’s expression of a composite ecological being is also reflected in the stylistic idiosyncrasies of Head’s writing. Throughout, I draw on Head’s correspondence, and on biographical aspects of her life, to situate Makhaya’s journey against a larger theme of struggling to make a home in the face of social alienation and the bureaucratic indifference of the nation-state. Reference to the work of anthropologists like Tim Ingold and Hannah Knox situates my argument in the context of a larger ontological move in debates around the relationship between nature and culture.","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":"66 1","pages":"1 - 13"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48241991","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-12DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2023.2128508
Majed Aladylah
Abstract In The Arsonists’ City (2021), Arab American novelist Hala Alyan casts a piercing spotlight on how diasporic and transnational voices are burdened with cultural ambivalences, negative stereotypes, prejudices and discriminations. This paper shows how Hollywood cinema does not help the protagonist, Mazna, to remodel her diasporic identity to be a successful actress. A Syrian actress who has emigrated from Syria to Lebanon and then to the USA to achieve her dream and identity, Mazna’s life turns upside down when Hollywood forces her to take on negative terrorist, sexualized and culturally insensitive roles in films. As this article discusses, Alyan uncovers how these roles dehumanize and trample the Arab races and cultures. It is in this sense that the diasporic novelist draws attention to Hollywood’s negative stereotypes, prejudices and injustices in relation to the representation of an Arab actress in Hollywood cinema. In being thus represented, Mazna is exploited and humiliated when she is forced to perform in naïve and trivial scenes in American movies. Alyan explores Mazna’s diasporic journey as an exterior space over which political, religious and cultural dilemmas conglomerate. Consequently, Alyan opens up spaces based upon cross-cultural tolerance, acceptance, living with difference and valuing religious and cultural diversity.
{"title":"Acting Across Diaspora: Transnational Spaces and Voices in Hala Alyan’s The Arsonists’ City","authors":"Majed Aladylah","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2023.2128508","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2023.2128508","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In The Arsonists’ City (2021), Arab American novelist Hala Alyan casts a piercing spotlight on how diasporic and transnational voices are burdened with cultural ambivalences, negative stereotypes, prejudices and discriminations. This paper shows how Hollywood cinema does not help the protagonist, Mazna, to remodel her diasporic identity to be a successful actress. A Syrian actress who has emigrated from Syria to Lebanon and then to the USA to achieve her dream and identity, Mazna’s life turns upside down when Hollywood forces her to take on negative terrorist, sexualized and culturally insensitive roles in films. As this article discusses, Alyan uncovers how these roles dehumanize and trample the Arab races and cultures. It is in this sense that the diasporic novelist draws attention to Hollywood’s negative stereotypes, prejudices and injustices in relation to the representation of an Arab actress in Hollywood cinema. In being thus represented, Mazna is exploited and humiliated when she is forced to perform in naïve and trivial scenes in American movies. Alyan explores Mazna’s diasporic journey as an exterior space over which political, religious and cultural dilemmas conglomerate. Consequently, Alyan opens up spaces based upon cross-cultural tolerance, acceptance, living with difference and valuing religious and cultural diversity.","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":"66 1","pages":"54 - 62"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47401454","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-12DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2023.2128495
Charika Swanepoel
Abstract This paper considers the shared preoccupation with unity in the later works of W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot with the aim of emphasizing the likeness in their thinking despite their vastly different theological stances. The unity strived for by both poets involves a dedicated resolution or transformation of contraries. Yeats scholars such as George Bornstein have termed Yeats’s dedication to all things opposite his ‘antinomial vision’ and Eliot scholars such as Jewel Spears Brooker refer to Eliot’s ‘dialectical imagination’. This paper is aimed at further developing the established view of these comparable tendencies by pointing to a three-part pattern that emerges from Yeats and Eliot’s later works. This pattern suggests a similar process behind their ‘antinomial vision’ and ‘dialectical imagination’ that entails: 1) a concern with opposites, 2) an ensuing inarticulacy, and 3) a capacity for incarnation. While this paper analyses Yeats and Eliot’s individual contributions, it draws broad philosophical patterns between them and illustrates the similarities and parallels that incidentally emerge from the comparison.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-27DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2022.2096764
Published in English Studies in Africa (Vol. 65, No. 2, 2022)
《非洲英语研究》(第65卷第2期，2022年)
{"title":"Notes on Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2022.2096764","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2022.2096764","url":null,"abstract":"Published in English Studies in Africa (Vol. 65, No. 2, 2022)","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":" 44","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138492535","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-27DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2022.2096762
Published in English Studies in Africa (Vol. 65, No. 2, 2022)
《非洲英语研究》(第65卷第2期，2022年)
{"title":"“Black Hamlet”","authors":"","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2022.2096762","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2022.2096762","url":null,"abstract":"Published in English Studies in Africa (Vol. 65, No. 2, 2022)","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":" 13","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138494450","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2022.2096751
Harry Olufunwa
Abstract This article examines Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference from the perspective of the novel’s seminal ‘I Am Powerful’ scene the multiple interpretations of which encapsulate the issues of feminine independence of thought and action which the novel portrays through Deola Bello, the main character. As aspiration, motto and model of ideal behaviour, ‘I Am Powerful’ is very significant to her situation as a black woman reacting to the various pressures of life in a major western metropolis, particularly her desire to engage in meaningful relationships and live a fulfilling life on her own terms, rather than those prescribed to her by others. The article refracts ‘I Am Powerful’ through the perspectives of agency, autonomy and audacity which serve as markers of Deola’s growth. It is argued that each element marks a specific stage in her progression towards an increased self-awareness which incorporates a better understanding of the dilemmas, triumphs and challenges she encounters as a black woman in the diaspora.
{"title":"‘I Am Powerful’: Agency, Autonomy and Audacity in Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference","authors":"Harry Olufunwa","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2022.2096751","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2022.2096751","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference from the perspective of the novel’s seminal ‘I Am Powerful’ scene the multiple interpretations of which encapsulate the issues of feminine independence of thought and action which the novel portrays through Deola Bello, the main character. As aspiration, motto and model of ideal behaviour, ‘I Am Powerful’ is very significant to her situation as a black woman reacting to the various pressures of life in a major western metropolis, particularly her desire to engage in meaningful relationships and live a fulfilling life on her own terms, rather than those prescribed to her by others. The article refracts ‘I Am Powerful’ through the perspectives of agency, autonomy and audacity which serve as markers of Deola’s growth. It is argued that each element marks a specific stage in her progression towards an increased self-awareness which incorporates a better understanding of the dilemmas, triumphs and challenges she encounters as a black woman in the diaspora.","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":"65 1","pages":"24 - 34"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48284230","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2022.2096750
J. Henning
Abstract Sisonke Msimang’s Always Another Country is an intimate account of the lifelong search for ‘home’ by its autobiographical narrator, the child of exiled South African parents. My essay argues that Msimang’s figuring of a complicated, nationally-organized external realm through the exilic subjectivity of its narrator provides an opportunity to read a series of spaces in the text as what Michel Foucault, in ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1986), calls ‘utopias’ and ‘heterotopias’. Simply put, South Africa exists as a non-real space – a utopia – for most of the memoir. It carries down telephone wires and from television screens into the mind of Sonke, where it is reproduced as an alternate, imagined version of itself. On the other hand, ‘real’ spaces – living rooms, principals’ offices, family homes – all develop characteristics of Foucauldian heterogeneity. They are sites within sites or, as Peter Johnson explains, microcosms of reverse social ordering. Rather than producing an overly theoretical rendering of a deeply personal text, my essay aims to show the benefits of Foucauldian approaches in conceptualizing and understanding the complicated ways in which exiled-subjects occupy space in our nationally-organized world.
{"title":"‘Home is Another Country’: A Foucauldian Reading of Sisonke Msimang’s Always Another Country","authors":"J. Henning","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2022.2096750","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2022.2096750","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Sisonke Msimang’s Always Another Country is an intimate account of the lifelong search for ‘home’ by its autobiographical narrator, the child of exiled South African parents. My essay argues that Msimang’s figuring of a complicated, nationally-organized external realm through the exilic subjectivity of its narrator provides an opportunity to read a series of spaces in the text as what Michel Foucault, in ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1986), calls ‘utopias’ and ‘heterotopias’. Simply put, South Africa exists as a non-real space – a utopia – for most of the memoir. It carries down telephone wires and from television screens into the mind of Sonke, where it is reproduced as an alternate, imagined version of itself. On the other hand, ‘real’ spaces – living rooms, principals’ offices, family homes – all develop characteristics of Foucauldian heterogeneity. They are sites within sites or, as Peter Johnson explains, microcosms of reverse social ordering. Rather than producing an overly theoretical rendering of a deeply personal text, my essay aims to show the benefits of Foucauldian approaches in conceptualizing and understanding the complicated ways in which exiled-subjects occupy space in our nationally-organized world.","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":"65 1","pages":"14 - 23"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42854784","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2022.2096754
Imomotimi Armstrong
Abstract This paper begins with the contention that scholars of African oral literature have exhibited a ‘best avoided’ approach towards formula, the most important aspect of the oral-formulaic theory of Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord. It argues that, even in this century, the dominant approaches to the study of African folklore have been performance, Marxism, formalism, structuralism, feminism and functionalism. Therefore, building on the meager literature on formula, this article investigates its occurrence in traditional Ịjọ poetry, particularly in the praise chants of Chief Adolphus Munamuna. It points out that the formula density is high in the bard’s praise poems. This article also notes that formulas are useful and necessary to the Ịjọ bard because they enable him to compose his poems rapidly in the course of performance.
{"title":"Formula in the Praise Chants of Chief Adolphus Munamuna, Ọụbẹbẹ Kẹnị Ịzọn Ibe (The Chief Oral Poet of the Ịzọn Nation)","authors":"Imomotimi Armstrong","doi":"10.1080/00138398.2022.2096754","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2022.2096754","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper begins with the contention that scholars of African oral literature have exhibited a ‘best avoided’ approach towards formula, the most important aspect of the oral-formulaic theory of Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord. It argues that, even in this century, the dominant approaches to the study of African folklore have been performance, Marxism, formalism, structuralism, feminism and functionalism. Therefore, building on the meager literature on formula, this article investigates its occurrence in traditional Ịjọ poetry, particularly in the praise chants of Chief Adolphus Munamuna. It points out that the formula density is high in the bard’s praise poems. This article also notes that formulas are useful and necessary to the Ịjọ bard because they enable him to compose his poems rapidly in the course of performance.","PeriodicalId":42538,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH STUDIES IN AFRICA","volume":"65 1","pages":"44 - 58"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48845798","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"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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