{"title":"Naminata Diabate, Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa. Duke University Press, 2020, 259 pp.","authors":"Oladoyin Abiona","doi":"10.1017/pli.2022.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2022.4","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"32 3","pages":"284-286"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138512838","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}
Inspired by the reinvigorating theory of Wai-Chee Dimok and Rita Felski, I argue that The Tempest resonates with current theory and performance of Indigenous resurgence in North America. With reference to the work of Indigenous performance theorist Floyd Favel, political thinkers Leanne Simpson and Glen Sean Coulthard, and to plays and performances by Yvette Nolan, Monique Mojica, Kevin Loring, and Spiderwoman Theatre, I describe resurgence as culturally recuperative practices of movement on the land that make it feel more comfortable, establish an Indigenous sense of sovereignty, and diminish shame. I emphasize the ways in which the physical and imaginative mobilities of Shakespeare’s Boatswain and Gonzalo anticipate the comforting—and insurgent—land-oriented movements of Caliban. I argue that Caliban’s sense of natural sovereignty is understood better in terms of free and secure mobility than in terms of rule or possession.
{"title":"Resistance Movements: The Tempest, Resurgence, and Indigenous Performance on Turtle Island","authors":"Glenn Clark","doi":"10.1017/pli.2022.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2022.2","url":null,"abstract":"Inspired by the reinvigorating theory of Wai-Chee Dimok and Rita Felski, I argue that The Tempest resonates with current theory and performance of Indigenous resurgence in North America. With reference to the work of Indigenous performance theorist Floyd Favel, political thinkers Leanne Simpson and Glen Sean Coulthard, and to plays and performances by Yvette Nolan, Monique Mojica, Kevin Loring, and Spiderwoman Theatre, I describe resurgence as culturally recuperative practices of movement on the land that make it feel more comfortable, establish an Indigenous sense of sovereignty, and diminish shame. I emphasize the ways in which the physical and imaginative mobilities of Shakespeare’s Boatswain and Gonzalo anticipate the comforting—and insurgent—land-oriented movements of Caliban. I argue that Caliban’s sense of natural sovereignty is understood better in terms of free and secure mobility than in terms of rule or possession.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"9 1","pages":"198 - 215"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46890576","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}
The advancement of individual integrity as an alternative to the dissolution that concludes so many African novels is a compelling (and, in Jackson’s sophisticated analysis, convincing) idea. But I am nevertheless left wondering why so many African novels of ideas do end in states of dissociation and disassociation “in which intellection signals not just social illegibility but literal death”?2 I wager that if we approach novelistic form as deeply entangled in aesthetic, cultural, contextual, historical, and philosophical codes, we can trace a historical arch of the genre’s formal limitations for intellection in African contexts that explains this tendency. To illustrate this claim, I wish briefly to discuss S. E. K. Mqhayi’s Ityala lamawele (Lawsuit of the Twins), first published in 1914 with the missionary Lovedale Press and widely considered to be the first isiXhosa novel. To call Ityala lamawele a novel is to stretch the description of that genre a little far. The original 1914 text comprised a mere nine chapters and was no longer
个人完整的进步作为一种替代解体的选择，终结了如此多的非洲小说，这是一个令人信服的想法(在杰克逊的复杂分析中，令人信服)。但我仍然想知道，为什么这么多关于思想的非洲小说最终都以分离和分离的状态结束“在这种状态下，思想不仅标志着社会的难以辨认，而且标志着字面上的死亡”?我敢打赌，如果我们把小说形式深深纠缠在美学、文化、语境、历史和哲学规范中，我们就能追溯出这一类型在非洲语境中对思想的形式限制的历史脉络，从而解释这种趋势。为了说明这一说法，我希望简要地讨论一下S. E. K. Mqhayi的《孪生兄弟的诉讼》(Ityala lamawele)，该书于1914年由传教士洛夫代尔出版社首次出版，被广泛认为是第一部isikhosa小说。把《亚塔拉·拉玛威尔》称为小说，未免把这种类型的描述延伸得太远了。1914年的原版只有九章，现在已经不存在了
{"title":"Communal Intellection and Individualism in the African Novel","authors":"A. Harris","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.48","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.48","url":null,"abstract":"The advancement of individual integrity as an alternative to the dissolution that concludes so many African novels is a compelling (and, in Jackson’s sophisticated analysis, convincing) idea. But I am nevertheless left wondering why so many African novels of ideas do end in states of dissociation and disassociation “in which intellection signals not just social illegibility but literal death”?2 I wager that if we approach novelistic form as deeply entangled in aesthetic, cultural, contextual, historical, and philosophical codes, we can trace a historical arch of the genre’s formal limitations for intellection in African contexts that explains this tendency. To illustrate this claim, I wish briefly to discuss S. E. K. Mqhayi’s Ityala lamawele (Lawsuit of the Twins), first published in 1914 with the missionary Lovedale Press and widely considered to be the first isiXhosa novel. To call Ityala lamawele a novel is to stretch the description of that genre a little far. The original 1914 text comprised a mere nine chapters and was no longer","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"9 1","pages":"256 - 262"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44820268","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}
Abstract Teju Cole’s Open City is often read as the quintessential Western cosmopolitan novel. But despite the protagonist’s fixation with European aestheticism, the presence of African antecedents looms almost as an unacknowledged shadow in the acclaimed cosmopolitan novel. This article traces how Yorùbá visual registers about perception, subjectivity, and representation provide interpretative cues for understanding the meta-text of Cole’s novel in ways that illuminate the conflicted, contradictory itineraries of the postcolonial African transnational figure. I argue that Yorùbá conceptual registers relating to visuality, especially the concept of Àwòrán and its insistence on intersubjective relations and the visual call of images, highlight a visual hermeneutics that inflect the construction of personhood in Open City. By tracing the centrality of Yorùbá optic codes to Cole’s project, the article concludes that the novel’s philosophically dense conversation with aspects of Yorùbá culture demonstrates how conceptual registers from African cultures might contour Afro-diasporic texts.
{"title":"(In)Sights from Àwòrán: Yorùbá Epistemologies and the Limits of Cartesian Vision in Teju Cole’s Open City","authors":"U. Inyang","doi":"10.1017/pli.2022.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2022.7","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Teju Cole’s Open City is often read as the quintessential Western cosmopolitan novel. But despite the protagonist’s fixation with European aestheticism, the presence of African antecedents looms almost as an unacknowledged shadow in the acclaimed cosmopolitan novel. This article traces how Yorùbá visual registers about perception, subjectivity, and representation provide interpretative cues for understanding the meta-text of Cole’s novel in ways that illuminate the conflicted, contradictory itineraries of the postcolonial African transnational figure. I argue that Yorùbá conceptual registers relating to visuality, especially the concept of Àwòrán and its insistence on intersubjective relations and the visual call of images, highlight a visual hermeneutics that inflect the construction of personhood in Open City. By tracing the centrality of Yorùbá optic codes to Cole’s project, the article concludes that the novel’s philosophically dense conversation with aspects of Yorùbá culture demonstrates how conceptual registers from African cultures might contour Afro-diasporic texts.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"9 1","pages":"216 - 236"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44778890","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}
On October 12, 2016, #FeesMustFall student leaders at the University of Cape Town gathered to discuss the decolonization of science. A video-recording of this event offers an illuminating perspective of the high-stakes involved in the decolonial debate: “If I personally were committed to enforcing decolonization,” declares the primary speaker, “science as a whole is a product of Western modernity and the whole thing should be scratched off.”1 Despite the ensuing laughter, the speaker continues, insisting that “we have to restart science from... an African perspective, from our perspective of how we’ve experienced science.”2 She then proceeds to develop this idea with reference to a place in Kwazulu-Natal where people believe that it is possible, through black magic or witchcraft, “to send lightning to strike someone,” before clinching her pointwith the challenging question: “Can you explain that scientifically?”3 Amid the concatenation of voices raised either in affirmation or protest in response to the speaker’s claim, a member of the audience can be heard saying, “It’s not true.”4 At this point, the chair calls the audience to order and addresses the voice of dissent directly. “When we started this,” she begins, “we agreed on
{"title":"“Undoing the Laws of the Universe”: Reading Jeanne-Marie Jackson’s The African Novel of Ideas after #FeesMustFall","authors":"Simon van Schalkwyk","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.50","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.50","url":null,"abstract":"On October 12, 2016, #FeesMustFall student leaders at the University of Cape Town gathered to discuss the decolonization of science. A video-recording of this event offers an illuminating perspective of the high-stakes involved in the decolonial debate: “If I personally were committed to enforcing decolonization,” declares the primary speaker, “science as a whole is a product of Western modernity and the whole thing should be scratched off.”1 Despite the ensuing laughter, the speaker continues, insisting that “we have to restart science from... an African perspective, from our perspective of how we’ve experienced science.”2 She then proceeds to develop this idea with reference to a place in Kwazulu-Natal where people believe that it is possible, through black magic or witchcraft, “to send lightning to strike someone,” before clinching her pointwith the challenging question: “Can you explain that scientifically?”3 Amid the concatenation of voices raised either in affirmation or protest in response to the speaker’s claim, a member of the audience can be heard saying, “It’s not true.”4 At this point, the chair calls the audience to order and addresses the voice of dissent directly. “When we started this,” she begins, “we agreed on","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"9 1","pages":"263 - 272"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47506439","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}
The final chapter of Jeanne-Marie Jackson’s The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing (2021) openswith a characterization of the novel as the genre par excellence of disruption, failure, and, via reference to György Lukács, the loss of totality. This is, Jackson continues, one of two stories commonly told about the novel. The other treats the novel as a liberal and bourgeois institution, where narratives of individual development serve to sustain social and, increasingly, geopolitical inequalities. Although the latter has had greater traction in African literary studies, neither story is properly satisfactory for Jackson. There follows from this an analysis of works in which “it is the idea of ideas that provides some relief from a grotesquely disjointed and disorienting web of global systems.”1 The qualification “some relief” is key: the exploration of philosophical questions in fiction is not for Jackson a recuperating alternative. It is one among several modalities engaged in the works she analyzes, but one that has tended to be overlooked—even dismissed—by the predominant paradigms of African literary studies as it currently stands. Enter the novel of ideas, alternately referred to here as the philosophical novel. In Jackson’s thinking, the “novel of ideas” is less a taxonomizing literarycritical designation (a set of features that a work must or must not have) than a tool for breaching a set of critical impasses. At no point does Jackson undertake a systematic excavation of the form comparable to what one finds in Sianne Ngai’s recent Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (2020), nor
珍妮·玛丽·杰克逊（Jeanne Marie Jackson）的《非洲思想小说：全球写作时代的哲学与个人主义》（The African Novel of Ideas:Philosophy and Individism in The Age of Global Writing，2021）的最后一章开篇将小说描述为一种颠覆、失败的优秀类型，并通过引用吉尔·卢卡奇（György Lukács）的话，将其描述为整体性的丧失。杰克逊继续说道，这是关于这部小说的两个常见故事之一。另一种则将小说视为一种自由主义和资产阶级的制度，在这种制度中，个人发展的叙事有助于维持社会不平等，以及日益严重的地缘政治不平等。尽管后者在非洲文学研究中有更大的吸引力，但这两个故事都不能让杰克逊满意。从这一点出发，我们对作品进行了分析，其中“正是思想的理念从一个怪诞的、脱节的、迷失方向的全球系统网络中提供了一些解脱。”1“某种解脱”的资格是关键：对小说中哲学问题的探索对杰克逊来说并不是一种疗养的选择。这是她分析的作品中的几种模式之一，但目前非洲文学研究的主流范式往往忽视甚至忽视了这种模式。进入思想小说，这里交替称为哲学小说。在杰克逊的思想中，“思想小说”与其说是一种对文学批评的分类指定（一部作品必须具备或不必须具备的一系列特征），不如说是一个打破一系列批评僵局的工具。杰克逊在任何时候都没有对这种形式进行系统的挖掘，就像人们在Sianne Ngai最近的《吉米克理论：审美判断和资本主义形式》（2020）中所发现的那样，也没有
{"title":"The African Novel at the Vanguard","authors":"Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.49","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.49","url":null,"abstract":"The final chapter of Jeanne-Marie Jackson’s The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing (2021) openswith a characterization of the novel as the genre par excellence of disruption, failure, and, via reference to György Lukács, the loss of totality. This is, Jackson continues, one of two stories commonly told about the novel. The other treats the novel as a liberal and bourgeois institution, where narratives of individual development serve to sustain social and, increasingly, geopolitical inequalities. Although the latter has had greater traction in African literary studies, neither story is properly satisfactory for Jackson. There follows from this an analysis of works in which “it is the idea of ideas that provides some relief from a grotesquely disjointed and disorienting web of global systems.”1 The qualification “some relief” is key: the exploration of philosophical questions in fiction is not for Jackson a recuperating alternative. It is one among several modalities engaged in the works she analyzes, but one that has tended to be overlooked—even dismissed—by the predominant paradigms of African literary studies as it currently stands. Enter the novel of ideas, alternately referred to here as the philosophical novel. In Jackson’s thinking, the “novel of ideas” is less a taxonomizing literarycritical designation (a set of features that a work must or must not have) than a tool for breaching a set of critical impasses. At no point does Jackson undertake a systematic excavation of the form comparable to what one finds in Sianne Ngai’s recent Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (2020), nor","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"9 1","pages":"243 - 250"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43139134","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}
African literature. On the contrary, though, the book’s depth in theory does not detract from the quality of its central argument, which is clearly well researched andwell written. It will, therefore, be an excellent resource text for many graduate-level courses on postcolonial literature. Besides, as I stressed earlier, this is a book that will get you to reread and reexamine most texts within the postcolonial literary canon, and also provide a template for creating a decolonized curriculum within postcolonial literary discourse and scholarship.
{"title":"final year undergraduate class, which focuses on romantic influences in African literature. On the contrary, though, the book’s depth in theory does not detract from the quality of its central argument, which is clearly well","authors":"Marian Ofori-Amoafo","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.20","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.20","url":null,"abstract":"African literature. On the contrary, though, the book’s depth in theory does not detract from the quality of its central argument, which is clearly well researched andwell written. It will, therefore, be an excellent resource text for many graduate-level courses on postcolonial literature. Besides, as I stressed earlier, this is a book that will get you to reread and reexamine most texts within the postcolonial literary canon, and also provide a template for creating a decolonized curriculum within postcolonial literary discourse and scholarship.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"9 1","pages":"289 - 291"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49045781","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}
Early 2021 was an uncomfortable time to publish a book that has nothing ostensibly to do with living through a pandemic. And so the thanks that almost always begin roundtable responses like this one are especially heartfelt in this long, weary stretch: I am grateful that Cajetan Iheka, Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra, Bruce Janz, Ashleigh Harris, and Simon Van Schalkwyk took time they almost certainly did not have to craft such thoughtful replies to The African Novel of Ideas. It is a pleasure, too, to be able to steal glimpses of new projects that are fully of their own making. I am happy to have these colleagues and to work in this field. The African Novel of Ideas is my recovery and building out of something that probably cannot exist and yet meaningfully wants to: a mind that coheres through dedication to querying external truths. Time and again, in my work thus far, I have found in African novels an intellect striving to break free of the social and historical vicissitudes by which it nonetheless knows itself to be formed. Equally as often, I have been frustrated by the lack of a developed critical vocabulary to describe this give and take between social attunement and individual reasoning in African contexts often marked by terms of “crisis,” “urgency,” “resistance,” and the like. This does not mean that the aggregate protagonist of The African Novel of Ideas is timely; on the contrary, the trajectory of my book connects philosophical types who begin as mere loners, in preindependence contexts, and become outright pariahs in postcolonial ones. But neither does untimely mean ahistorical. The opening vignette of Simon Van Schalkwyk’s contribution to this forum, set at a University of Cape Town #FeesMustFall gathering in 2016, offers a glimpse of a real-life figure who could well be enfolded intomy book. “Amid the concatenation of voices raised either in affirmation or protest” over whether the decolonization of science should take seriously the idea that one person can send lightning to strike another, Van Schalkwyk writes, a lone audience member “can be heard saying, ‘It’s not true.’” The particular content of this showdown over science and (Zulu) belief
2021年初出版一本表面上与经历疫情无关的书是一个令人不安的时期。因此，在这漫长而疲惫的一段时间里，几乎总是以这样的圆桌回复开始的感谢尤其发自内心：我很感激Cajetan Iheka、MagalíArmillas Tiseyra、Bruce Janz、Ashleigh Harris和Simon Van Schalkwyk花了一些时间，他们几乎肯定不必对《非洲思想小说》做出如此深思熟虑的回复。能够偷窥完全由他们自己制作的新项目也是一种乐趣。我很高兴有这些同事在这个领域工作。《非洲思想小说》是我从一种可能不可能存在但又有意义的东西中恢复和构建出来的：一种通过致力于质疑外部真理而凝聚起来的思想。到目前为止，在我的作品中，我一次又一次地在非洲小说中发现了一种知识分子，他们努力摆脱社会和历史的变迁，尽管如此，他们知道自己是通过这种变迁形成的。同样，我也经常感到沮丧的是，在非洲背景下，缺乏一个成熟的批判性词汇来描述社会协调和个人推理之间的这种互让，通常以“危机”、“紧迫性”、“抵抗”等术语为标志。这并不意味着《非洲思想小说》的总主人公是及时的；相反，我这本书的轨迹将哲学类型联系在一起，他们在依赖前的环境中一开始只是孤独的人，在后殖民时代则成为彻头彻尾的贱民。但不合时宜也不意味着不符合历史。西蒙·范·沙尔克威克（Simon Van Schalkwyk）为本论坛所做贡献的开场白发生在2016年开普敦大学#FeesMustWall的一次聚会上，让我们得以一窥一个现实生活中的人物，他很可能会融入我的书中。Van Schalkwyk写道，在关于科学非殖民化是否应该认真对待一个人可以发出闪电袭击另一个人的想法的“一连串的肯定或抗议声音”中，可以听到一位观众“说，‘这不是真的。’”
{"title":"A Voice in the Crowd: The African Novel of Ideas Book Forum Response","authors":"J. Jackson","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.51","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.51","url":null,"abstract":"Early 2021 was an uncomfortable time to publish a book that has nothing ostensibly to do with living through a pandemic. And so the thanks that almost always begin roundtable responses like this one are especially heartfelt in this long, weary stretch: I am grateful that Cajetan Iheka, Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra, Bruce Janz, Ashleigh Harris, and Simon Van Schalkwyk took time they almost certainly did not have to craft such thoughtful replies to The African Novel of Ideas. It is a pleasure, too, to be able to steal glimpses of new projects that are fully of their own making. I am happy to have these colleagues and to work in this field. The African Novel of Ideas is my recovery and building out of something that probably cannot exist and yet meaningfully wants to: a mind that coheres through dedication to querying external truths. Time and again, in my work thus far, I have found in African novels an intellect striving to break free of the social and historical vicissitudes by which it nonetheless knows itself to be formed. Equally as often, I have been frustrated by the lack of a developed critical vocabulary to describe this give and take between social attunement and individual reasoning in African contexts often marked by terms of “crisis,” “urgency,” “resistance,” and the like. This does not mean that the aggregate protagonist of The African Novel of Ideas is timely; on the contrary, the trajectory of my book connects philosophical types who begin as mere loners, in preindependence contexts, and become outright pariahs in postcolonial ones. But neither does untimely mean ahistorical. The opening vignette of Simon Van Schalkwyk’s contribution to this forum, set at a University of Cape Town #FeesMustFall gathering in 2016, offers a glimpse of a real-life figure who could well be enfolded intomy book. “Amid the concatenation of voices raised either in affirmation or protest” over whether the decolonization of science should take seriously the idea that one person can send lightning to strike another, Van Schalkwyk writes, a lone audience member “can be heard saying, ‘It’s not true.’” The particular content of this showdown over science and (Zulu) belief","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"9 1","pages":"273 - 277"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45645457","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}
ChinuaAchebe’s gifts to African andworld literatures aremany, but anunheralded aspect is his textualization (and therefore popularization) of the Igbo proverb: “Egbe belu, ugo belu; nke si ibe ya e belu, ka nku kwa ya.” In English, that is: “Let the kite perch and let the eagle perch too, if one saysno to the other, let itswingbreak.” This proverb finds its corollary in the Yoruba saying: “Ojú oṛun tó eỵe ̣e ̣ ́ fò láì f’ara kan ra” (“The sky is wide enough for all to fly without colliding”). I offer these examples from Igbo andYoruba—the twoAfrican languages I ammost comfortable in—to register the accommodationist, tolerant orientation ofAfricanways of being in the world. These proverbs, with correlations across African cultures and languages, index the rejection of absolutisms by making room for alternative possibilities and epistemologies. Enunciated in these vernacular expressions is a denunciation of the single story of a monochromatic Africa. It is important to foreground the multiplicitous affordance of African epistemologies and praxis here because African literary studies, which stresses its social referentiality, often ignores its inheritance of complexity in the simplification of the field’s commonsense. The dominant expression of this commonsense is in the emphasis on community or social collective in the determination of African literature’s political stakes. Again, the interpretation of Achebe’s work is significant in this regard for stressing the writer’s commitment to decolonization within a communitarian ethos. As Simon Gikandi observes, “Achebe’s novels were intended to both represent colonial history as it was—brutal, degrading, and destructive—while celebrating communities that had survived the detritus of this history.”1 African literary criticism has foregrounded the dissolution and celebration of communities in fiction and has pondered the imaginative possibilities in that literature for constituting counter-publics.
ChinuaAchebe对非洲和世界文学的贡献是很多的，但一个不为人知的方面是他对伊博谚语的文本化(并因此普及):“Egbe belu, ugo belu;我喜欢你，我喜欢你，我喜欢你。”用英语来说，就是:“让风筝和老鹰都在上面栖息，如果一个对另一个说不，就让它的秋千断了吧。”这句谚语在约鲁巴语中得到了推论:“Ojú oṛun tó eỵe * * * fò láì f 'ara kan ra”(“天空足够宽，让所有人都能飞行而不会相撞”)。我举了伊博语和约鲁巴语这两种我最熟悉的非洲语言的例子来说明非洲在世界上的适应主义和宽容取向。这些谚语在非洲文化和语言中具有相关性，通过为其他可能性和认识论留出空间，表明了对绝对主义的拒绝。用这些方言表达出来的是对非洲单色的单一故事的谴责。在这里强调非洲认识论和实践的多样性是很重要的，因为非洲文学研究强调其社会参照性，往往忽略了在该领域常识的简化中其复杂性的继承。这一常识的主要表达是强调共同体或社会集体在非洲文学的政治赌注的决定。再一次，对阿奇贝作品的解释在这方面很重要，因为它强调了作家在社群主义精神下对非殖民化的承诺。正如西蒙·吉坎迪所观察到的，“阿奇贝的小说既要表现殖民历史的残酷、堕落和破坏性，又要庆祝在这段历史的废墟中幸存下来的社区。”非洲文学批评在小说中强调了社区的解体和庆祝，并思考了文学中构成反公众的想象可能性。
{"title":"Individual Epistemes in The African Novel of Ideas","authors":"Cajetan Iheka","doi":"10.1017/pli.2021.47","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2021.47","url":null,"abstract":"ChinuaAchebe’s gifts to African andworld literatures aremany, but anunheralded aspect is his textualization (and therefore popularization) of the Igbo proverb: “Egbe belu, ugo belu; nke si ibe ya e belu, ka nku kwa ya.” In English, that is: “Let the kite perch and let the eagle perch too, if one saysno to the other, let itswingbreak.” This proverb finds its corollary in the Yoruba saying: “Ojú oṛun tó eỵe ̣e ̣ ́ fò láì f’ara kan ra” (“The sky is wide enough for all to fly without colliding”). I offer these examples from Igbo andYoruba—the twoAfrican languages I ammost comfortable in—to register the accommodationist, tolerant orientation ofAfricanways of being in the world. These proverbs, with correlations across African cultures and languages, index the rejection of absolutisms by making room for alternative possibilities and epistemologies. Enunciated in these vernacular expressions is a denunciation of the single story of a monochromatic Africa. It is important to foreground the multiplicitous affordance of African epistemologies and praxis here because African literary studies, which stresses its social referentiality, often ignores its inheritance of complexity in the simplification of the field’s commonsense. The dominant expression of this commonsense is in the emphasis on community or social collective in the determination of African literature’s political stakes. Again, the interpretation of Achebe’s work is significant in this regard for stressing the writer’s commitment to decolonization within a communitarian ethos. As Simon Gikandi observes, “Achebe’s novels were intended to both represent colonial history as it was—brutal, degrading, and destructive—while celebrating communities that had survived the detritus of this history.”1 African literary criticism has foregrounded the dissolution and celebration of communities in fiction and has pondered the imaginative possibilities in that literature for constituting counter-publics.","PeriodicalId":42913,"journal":{"name":"Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry","volume":"9 1","pages":"251 - 255"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43291979","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}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：