Pub Date : 2024-01-31DOI: 10.25159/2663-6565/12196
J. Alexander
Niyi Osundare’s revolutionary poetics is rooted in his distinctive ability to maximise his bilingual linguistic repertoire to express Yoruba thoughts in English words. In this article, I analyse the creative and stylistic strategies that Osundare deploys to domesticate the English language using poems from his collection The Word Is an Egg (2000). I argue that Osundare uses his autonomy and agency as an African writer to present an alternative perspective on the politics of language in African literature while also meeting the decolonisation imperative of his day. He domesticates the English language by peppering it with Yoruba to create an “African English” or “Yoruba English” in his poetic composition. The article is in five parts. Initially, I situate Osundare as a poet within the Nigerian literary landscape and highlight the critical reception his radical development of Nigerian poetry in English received. A literature review focuses on the contentious language debate in African literature. The third part presents decolonisation theory as the theoretical framework, specifically highlighting language as an African resource for challenging the Western grip on poetry and the hegemony of the English language in African literature. In the fourth part, the domestication of the English language by Osundare, I discuss how he uses English and Yoruba to co-create an African English or Yoruba English in his poetic composition. I conclude by asserting that Osundare’s alternative perspective weakens Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s absolute perspective on language usage in African literature by highlighting the omission and inherent problems in the absolutisation of colonialism in decolonial discourse.
尼伊-奥孙达雷的革命性诗学植根于他的独特能力，即最大限度地发挥其双语语言能力，用英语表达约鲁巴思想。在本文中，我将利用奥孙达雷的诗集《词语是蛋》（2000 年）中的诗句，分析奥孙达雷为驯化英语语言而采取的创造性策略和文体策略。我认为，奥孙达雷利用他作为非洲作家的自主性和能动性，对非洲文学中的语言政治提出了另一种视角，同时也满足了当时非殖民化的需要。他通过在英语中掺入约鲁巴语来驯化英语，从而在其诗歌创作中创造出一种 "非洲英语 "或 "约鲁巴英语"。本文分为五个部分。首先，我将奥孙达雷定位为尼日利亚文学版图中的一位诗人，并强调了他用英语对尼日利亚诗歌进行的激进发展所受到的批评。文献综述侧重于非洲文学中具有争议性的语言辩论。第三部分提出了非殖民化理论作为理论框架，特别强调语言是非洲挑战西方对诗歌的控制和英语在非洲文学中的霸权的一种资源。在第四部分 "奥孙达雷对英语的驯化 "中，我讨论了他如何在诗歌创作中使用英语和约鲁巴语共同创造非洲英语或约鲁巴英语。最后，我断言奥松达雷的另类视角削弱了恩ũgĩ wa Thiong'o关于非洲文学中语言使用的绝对视角，突出了非殖民化话语中殖民主义绝对化的遗漏和固有问题。
{"title":"Domesticating the English Language in Niyi Osundare’s The Word Is an Egg","authors":"J. Alexander","doi":"10.25159/2663-6565/12196","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.25159/2663-6565/12196","url":null,"abstract":"Niyi Osundare’s revolutionary poetics is rooted in his distinctive ability to maximise his bilingual linguistic repertoire to express Yoruba thoughts in English words. In this article, I analyse the creative and stylistic strategies that Osundare deploys to domesticate the English language using poems from his collection The Word Is an Egg (2000). I argue that Osundare uses his autonomy and agency as an African writer to present an alternative perspective on the politics of language in African literature while also meeting the decolonisation imperative of his day. He domesticates the English language by peppering it with Yoruba to create an “African English” or “Yoruba English” in his poetic composition. The article is in five parts. Initially, I situate Osundare as a poet within the Nigerian literary landscape and highlight the critical reception his radical development of Nigerian poetry in English received. A literature review focuses on the contentious language debate in African literature. The third part presents decolonisation theory as the theoretical framework, specifically highlighting language as an African resource for challenging the Western grip on poetry and the hegemony of the English language in African literature. In the fourth part, the domestication of the English language by Osundare, I discuss how he uses English and Yoruba to co-create an African English or Yoruba English in his poetic composition. I conclude by asserting that Osundare’s alternative perspective weakens Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s absolute perspective on language usage in African literature by highlighting the omission and inherent problems in the absolutisation of colonialism in decolonial discourse.","PeriodicalId":499722,"journal":{"name":"Imbizo","volume":"202 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140479302","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-20DOI: 10.25159/2663-6565/14808
Israel Oluwaseun Adeleke
Sexuality is a topical preoccupation in literature whether queer, perverse or conventional. In some societies, sexuality is a pious topic that hardly receives literary and critical attention. Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s Season of Crimson Blossoms narrativises sexuality in a strict Islamic society and focalises the sexual interplay between Binta and Reza. This article examines the sexuality in the novel through Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. Freud proposes that suppressed desires, an unresolved Oedipus complex, and past traumas impact people’s current behaviour. I contend that repressed wishes and the traumas of lingering parent-child conflicts stimulate the eros between Binta and Reza in the narrative and that Ibrahim’s subtle patriarchal ideology underlies the outcome of their sexuality. The memory and trauma of parent-child schisms experienced by Binta and Reza transmute to fetishism that leads to psychic transference, which collapses desired filial personalities into symbolic sexual figures. I conceive this conflation as symbolically incestuous and interrogate the novel’s conscious and unconscious layers by appropriating Freud’s topographical taxonomy of the psyche as a metaphor. The unconscious symptomises the patriarchal ideology that undercuts the conscious female sexual desires depicted, and this latently sustains established cultural precepts that repress emancipatory sexuality.
无论是同性恋、变态还是传统文学，性都是一个热门话题。在一些社会中，性是一个虔诚的话题，很难受到文学和批评界的关注。阿布巴卡尔-亚当-易卜拉欣（Abubakar Adam Ibrahim）的《绯红花季》叙述了一个严格的伊斯兰社会中的性问题，重点描写了宾塔和雷扎之间的性互动。本文通过西格蒙德-弗洛伊德的精神分析理论来探讨小说中的性问题。弗洛伊德认为，被压抑的欲望、悬而未决的俄狄浦斯情结以及过去的创伤会影响人们当前的行为。我认为，在叙事中，被压抑的愿望和挥之不去的亲子冲突创伤激发了宾塔和雷扎之间的情欲，而易卜拉欣微妙的父权意识形态则是他们性行为结果的基础。 宾塔和雷扎经历的亲子分裂的记忆和创伤转化为恋物癖，导致精神移情，将理想中的孝顺人格坍缩为象征性的性形象。我将这种融合视为象征性的乱伦，并借用弗洛伊德的心理地形分类法作为隐喻，对小说的意识层和无意识层进行了拷问。无意识象征着父权制意识形态，这种意识形态削弱了所描绘的有意识的女性性欲望，并潜移默化地维持着压制解放性欲的既定文化观念。
{"title":"Sexuality in Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s Season of Crimson Blossoms","authors":"Israel Oluwaseun Adeleke","doi":"10.25159/2663-6565/14808","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.25159/2663-6565/14808","url":null,"abstract":"Sexuality is a topical preoccupation in literature whether queer, perverse or conventional. In some societies, sexuality is a pious topic that hardly receives literary and critical attention. Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s Season of Crimson Blossoms narrativises sexuality in a strict Islamic society and focalises the sexual interplay between Binta and Reza. This article examines the sexuality in the novel through Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. Freud proposes that suppressed desires, an unresolved Oedipus complex, and past traumas impact people’s current behaviour. I contend that repressed wishes and the traumas of lingering parent-child conflicts stimulate the eros between Binta and Reza in the narrative and that Ibrahim’s subtle patriarchal ideology underlies the outcome of their sexuality. The memory and trauma of parent-child schisms experienced by Binta and Reza transmute to fetishism that leads to psychic transference, which collapses desired filial personalities into symbolic sexual figures. I conceive this conflation as symbolically incestuous and interrogate the novel’s conscious and unconscious layers by appropriating Freud’s topographical taxonomy of the psyche as a metaphor. The unconscious symptomises the patriarchal ideology that undercuts the conscious female sexual desires depicted, and this latently sustains established cultural precepts that repress emancipatory sexuality.","PeriodicalId":499722,"journal":{"name":"Imbizo","volume":"25 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138955139","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-20DOI: 10.25159/2663-6565/14346
Lwando Majikijela
This article is an explorative study of the documentary film Out of This World (2017), which captures the narratives and experiences of queer individuals in Johannesburg, South Africa, through a series of snapshots. Guided by activist and host Mykki Blanco, the film explores queer creative cultures in post-apartheid South Africa using YouTube as a platform. It exposes the lived realities of queer voices often silenced and marginalised, bringing visibility to stories of urban CBD and township queer experiences. The film navigates the experiences of the “born-free” generation within the queer community, as they grapple with continued marginalisation. Utilising social media, the film exemplifies self-fashioned queer visualities in post-apartheid South Africa, enabling visibility and belonging for some queer individuals. The film employs YouTube as a visual media to understand how black queer people forge spaces of visibility, countering historical oppression and erasure. The article serves to explore and discuss how black queer masculinities are represented on YouTube in the film Out of This World. The article will employ Grant Andrews’s concept of “mirror” and “mirroring,” utilising visual media to foster recognition and identity in the post-apartheid context. The project uses qualitative visual content analysis to unpack the complex social and cultural dynamics represented in these texts, and the analysis demonstrates how these visual texts are themselves sites of resistance and of imagining and claiming “liveable lives” that the transgressive vulnerabilities allow for.
本文是对纪录片《Out of This World》（2017 年）的探索性研究，该片通过一系列快照捕捉了南非约翰内斯堡同性恋者的叙事和经历。在活动家兼主持人迈基-布兰科（Mykki Blanco）的指导下，该片以 YouTube 为平台，探索了种族隔离后南非的同性恋创意文化。影片揭露了经常被压制和边缘化的同性恋者的生活现实，让人们看到了城市中央商务区和乡镇同性恋者的经历。影片讲述了同性恋群体中 "自由出生 "一代的经历，以及他们如何应对持续边缘化的问题。影片利用社交媒体，展示了种族隔离后南非同性恋者自我塑造的视觉形象，为一些同性恋者带来了能见度和归属感。影片利用 YouTube 这一视觉媒体来了解黑人同性恋者如何打造可视空间，对抗历史上的压迫和抹杀。本文旨在探讨和讨论电影《走出这个世界》中 YouTube 是如何表现黑人同性恋男子气概的。文章将采用格兰特-安德鲁斯（Grant Andrews）的 "镜像 "和 "镜像 "概念，利用视觉媒体在后种族隔离背景下促进认可和身份认同。该项目使用定性视觉内容分析来解读这些文本所代表的复杂的社会和文化动态，分析表明了这些视觉文本本身是如何进行抵抗的，以及如何想象和主张 "可生活的生活"，而这正是越轨的脆弱性所允许的。
{"title":"The Representation of Black Queer Masculinities on YouTube in the Film Out of This World","authors":"Lwando Majikijela","doi":"10.25159/2663-6565/14346","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.25159/2663-6565/14346","url":null,"abstract":"This article is an explorative study of the documentary film Out of This World (2017), which captures the narratives and experiences of queer individuals in Johannesburg, South Africa, through a series of snapshots. Guided by activist and host Mykki Blanco, the film explores queer creative cultures in post-apartheid South Africa using YouTube as a platform. It exposes the lived realities of queer voices often silenced and marginalised, bringing visibility to stories of urban CBD and township queer experiences. The film navigates the experiences of the “born-free” generation within the queer community, as they grapple with continued marginalisation. Utilising social media, the film exemplifies self-fashioned queer visualities in post-apartheid South Africa, enabling visibility and belonging for some queer individuals. The film employs YouTube as a visual media to understand how black queer people forge spaces of visibility, countering historical oppression and erasure. The article serves to explore and discuss how black queer masculinities are represented on YouTube in the film Out of This World. The article will employ Grant Andrews’s concept of “mirror” and “mirroring,” utilising visual media to foster recognition and identity in the post-apartheid context. The project uses qualitative visual content analysis to unpack the complex social and cultural dynamics represented in these texts, and the analysis demonstrates how these visual texts are themselves sites of resistance and of imagining and claiming “liveable lives” that the transgressive vulnerabilities allow for.","PeriodicalId":499722,"journal":{"name":"Imbizo","volume":"48 22","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138955550","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-20DOI: 10.25159/2663-6565/13635
Peace Mukwara, Tatenda Mangosho
The aim of this article is to set post-2000 street theatre in Zimbabwe apart from earlier post-1980 postcolonial theatre as representing a new radical aesthetic based on “hidden” rather than “public” transcripts and representing new forms of subaltern aesthetic practice of more direct engagement with audiences. This article analyses performance techniques whose effect is to disguise the playing of resistance against Zimbabwe’s authoritarian regime. The article applies a combination of public and hidden transcript theory and post-linear theory, examining how street theatre adopts techniques that produce and disguise resistance, making the performance appear innocuous. The focus is on how post-linear techniques, which reject dominant theatre practice, provide convenient cover for subordinate groups, appearing less confrontational and placing the hidden transcript beyond the reach of the dominant. Through a combination of James C. Scott’s theory and post-linear theories, the article interrogates the use of performance techniques as necessary in rendering the performance innocuous in contexts where authoritarian regimes censor critical and divergent art.
{"title":"Tactics of Resistance in Zimbabwean Post-2000 Street Theatre Performances","authors":"Peace Mukwara, Tatenda Mangosho","doi":"10.25159/2663-6565/13635","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.25159/2663-6565/13635","url":null,"abstract":"The aim of this article is to set post-2000 street theatre in Zimbabwe apart from earlier post-1980 postcolonial theatre as representing a new radical aesthetic based on “hidden” rather than “public” transcripts and representing new forms of subaltern aesthetic practice of more direct engagement with audiences. This article analyses performance techniques whose effect is to disguise the playing of resistance against Zimbabwe’s authoritarian regime. The article applies a combination of public and hidden transcript theory and post-linear theory, examining how street theatre adopts techniques that produce and disguise resistance, making the performance appear innocuous. The focus is on how post-linear techniques, which reject dominant theatre practice, provide convenient cover for subordinate groups, appearing less confrontational and placing the hidden transcript beyond the reach of the dominant. Through a combination of James C. Scott’s theory and post-linear theories, the article interrogates the use of performance techniques as necessary in rendering the performance innocuous in contexts where authoritarian regimes censor critical and divergent art.","PeriodicalId":499722,"journal":{"name":"Imbizo","volume":"32 43","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138994288","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-20DOI: 10.25159/2663-6565/14562
So Azumurana
In this article, I analyse Peter Abrahams’s Mine Boy. Apart from the fact that the novel has not received the critical attention it deserves despite its remarkable status as the first South African novel to address the plight of black South Africans, the negative criticisms that the novel has attracted are noteworthy. Moreover, the few who have attempted to analyse it have done so along the axis of either the rural-urban poetics or the liberal or Marxist ideals. How Albert Camus’s concept of the absurd figures in the novel has thereby been ignored. Drawing on this concept of the absurd as conceptualised and depicted in Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus and The Outsider, I argue that it is basically this concept that Abrahams employs in constituting his narrative. While not pushing the argument too far that Abrahams’s Mine Boy is an absurdist novel, I nevertheless demonstrate and conclude that it is simultaneously about the suffering and the heroism of black South African characters, which translates to them being the true image of the absurd.
{"title":"Images of the Absurd: Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus and The Outsider and Peter Abrahams’s Mine Boy","authors":"So Azumurana","doi":"10.25159/2663-6565/14562","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.25159/2663-6565/14562","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I analyse Peter Abrahams’s Mine Boy. Apart from the fact that the novel has not received the critical attention it deserves despite its remarkable status as the first South African novel to address the plight of black South Africans, the negative criticisms that the novel has attracted are noteworthy. Moreover, the few who have attempted to analyse it have done so along the axis of either the rural-urban poetics or the liberal or Marxist ideals. How Albert Camus’s concept of the absurd figures in the novel has thereby been ignored. Drawing on this concept of the absurd as conceptualised and depicted in Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus and The Outsider, I argue that it is basically this concept that Abrahams employs in constituting his narrative. While not pushing the argument too far that Abrahams’s Mine Boy is an absurdist novel, I nevertheless demonstrate and conclude that it is simultaneously about the suffering and the heroism of black South African characters, which translates to them being the true image of the absurd.","PeriodicalId":499722,"journal":{"name":"Imbizo","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138956137","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-20DOI: 10.25159/2663-6565/13646
John Wakota
This article uses poems from Shilia Kaaya’s The Bleeding Heart (2009) and Dominic Rugaimukamu’s Harnessed Memory: Poems from Baba (2022) to make a case for the importance of literary intervention in the process of revealing new insights about contemporary environmental challenges. Kaaya’s and Rugaimukamu’s eco-poems overflow with personas’ reflections about contemporary environmental concerns—all pleading to be analysed. By examining the selected eco-poems, the article discusses the epistemics of reading contemporary environmental concerns in general and specifically affords us an opportunity to encounter and “feel” this environmental pressure. This way, the article shows how poetry offers us a new site of reading and encountering this crisis—an approach that may help us to understand it in new ways. Borrowing insights from ecocritical theories, the article triangulates environment, environmental nostalgia, and diagnostic poetics to explore various ways through which the poems imagine, re-imagine, and respond to the contemporary environmental precarity in Tanzania. The environmental concerns captured in the poems illuminate and even complicate our understanding of how the sociocultural, political, and economic realities of our times influence our environment.
{"title":"Poetics of Environmental Imagination and Nostalgia in Contemporary Tanzanian Poetry","authors":"John Wakota","doi":"10.25159/2663-6565/13646","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.25159/2663-6565/13646","url":null,"abstract":"This article uses poems from Shilia Kaaya’s The Bleeding Heart (2009) and Dominic Rugaimukamu’s Harnessed Memory: Poems from Baba (2022) to make a case for the importance of literary intervention in the process of revealing new insights about contemporary environmental challenges. Kaaya’s and Rugaimukamu’s eco-poems overflow with personas’ reflections about contemporary environmental concerns—all pleading to be analysed. By examining the selected eco-poems, the article discusses the epistemics of reading contemporary environmental concerns in general and specifically affords us an opportunity to encounter and “feel” this environmental pressure. This way, the article shows how poetry offers us a new site of reading and encountering this crisis—an approach that may help us to understand it in new ways. Borrowing insights from ecocritical theories, the article triangulates environment, environmental nostalgia, and diagnostic poetics to explore various ways through which the poems imagine, re-imagine, and respond to the contemporary environmental precarity in Tanzania. The environmental concerns captured in the poems illuminate and even complicate our understanding of how the sociocultural, political, and economic realities of our times influence our environment. ","PeriodicalId":499722,"journal":{"name":"Imbizo","volume":"2 23","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-12-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138956554","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-10DOI: 10.25159/2663-6565/12345
Lobna Ben Salem
In postcolonial literature, magic realism and science fiction are two subgenres that have worked diligently to contest realism as a Western novelistic tradition. In the South African context, the fantastic initiates a process of psychic liberation from old (white) world-narrative domination and its cognitive codes. It recapitulates problems of historical consciousness in (post)apartheid cultures and interrogates inherited notions of imperial history. This article reads two “fantastic” texts that belong to a similar postcolonial culture―South Africa―and strives to explain the ways in which these texts recapitulate, in both their narrative discourse and their thematic content, the “real” social and historical context in which (post)apartheid South African culture exists and thrives. Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying and Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City use magic realism and science fiction respectively to re-view and debunk inherited literary modes of colonial discourse and to work towards more authentic yet challenging codes of recognition. By so doing, they offer positive and liberating responses to emerging cultural forms.
{"title":"South African Literature and the “Strange Seductiveness” of the Fantastic","authors":"Lobna Ben Salem","doi":"10.25159/2663-6565/12345","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.25159/2663-6565/12345","url":null,"abstract":"In postcolonial literature, magic realism and science fiction are two subgenres that have worked diligently to contest realism as a Western novelistic tradition. In the South African context, the fantastic initiates a process of psychic liberation from old (white) world-narrative domination and its cognitive codes. It recapitulates problems of historical consciousness in (post)apartheid cultures and interrogates inherited notions of imperial history. This article reads two “fantastic” texts that belong to a similar postcolonial culture―South Africa―and strives to explain the ways in which these texts recapitulate, in both their narrative discourse and their thematic content, the “real” social and historical context in which (post)apartheid South African culture exists and thrives. Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying and Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City use magic realism and science fiction respectively to re-view and debunk inherited literary modes of colonial discourse and to work towards more authentic yet challenging codes of recognition. By so doing, they offer positive and liberating responses to emerging cultural forms.","PeriodicalId":499722,"journal":{"name":"Imbizo","volume":" 44","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135191645","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-27DOI: 10.25159/2663-6565/12447
Dzunisani Sibuyi
In this article, I investigate Mandla Langa’s short story “The Dead Men Who Lost Their Bones” by applying Gérard Genette’s narrative discourse along with Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogic imagination to the text. By highlighting the way in which Langa employs narrational strategies to generate meaning in the story, I aim to correct the critical neglect of this aspect of his work. It is established that two narrational modes of the intradiegetic-homodiegetic and the intradiegetic-metadiegetic are employed by two central characters in the narrative. The first character narrator is Clementine, the daughter of the second narrator, Simeon Ngozi. This produces a heterodiegetic narrative, that is, a multiple narrative strategy. This multi-voiced polyphonic narrative accentuates the plight of the main characters and their struggles under oppressive and exploitative conditions in apartheid South Africa. It also generates sympathy for these events, as well as for Clementine and her father.
{"title":"Generating Sympathy for Specific Characters and Events in Mandla Langa’s “The Dead Men Who Lost Their Bones”","authors":"Dzunisani Sibuyi","doi":"10.25159/2663-6565/12447","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.25159/2663-6565/12447","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I investigate Mandla Langa’s short story “The Dead Men Who Lost Their Bones” by applying Gérard Genette’s narrative discourse along with Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogic imagination to the text. By highlighting the way in which Langa employs narrational strategies to generate meaning in the story, I aim to correct the critical neglect of this aspect of his work. It is established that two narrational modes of the intradiegetic-homodiegetic and the intradiegetic-metadiegetic are employed by two central characters in the narrative. The first character narrator is Clementine, the daughter of the second narrator, Simeon Ngozi. This produces a heterodiegetic narrative, that is, a multiple narrative strategy. This multi-voiced polyphonic narrative accentuates the plight of the main characters and their struggles under oppressive and exploitative conditions in apartheid South Africa. It also generates sympathy for these events, as well as for Clementine and her father.","PeriodicalId":499722,"journal":{"name":"Imbizo","volume":"52 8","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136317870","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-11DOI: 10.25159/2663-6565/12532
Mathias Iroro Orhero
This article applies the theoretical positions of some scholars from the Subaltern Studies Collective to the reading of poetry by Niger Delta writers. I argue that the Niger Delta people are subaltern in the Nigerian national space due to their disadvantaged sociopolitical position as well as the resource conflict that has left the region at the mercy of the state and its agents. With insights from the writings of Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gyan Prakash, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Partha Chatterjee, I read the subaltern themes of agency and resistance in Obari Gomba’s The Ascent Stone and Stephen Kekeghe’s Rumbling Sky. In adopting this framework, I draw from Guha’s original theorisation of peasant insurgency and the structure of power as well as later theorisations of relational power discourse and subaltern agency. My close reading of selected poems reveals the figure of the Niger Delta subaltern as the architect of their own destiny and whose resistance haunts the dominant discourse of the nation. The notions of insurgency, the nation and its fragments, failed revolutions, and relational power discourse are deployed as hermeneutical strategies. My adoption of this theoretical approach recovers its insights for the reading of literary works by writers from minority groups.
{"title":"Niger Delta Subaltern Agency and Resistance in Obari Gomba’s The Ascent Stone and Stephen Kekeghe’s Rumbling Sky","authors":"Mathias Iroro Orhero","doi":"10.25159/2663-6565/12532","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.25159/2663-6565/12532","url":null,"abstract":"This article applies the theoretical positions of some scholars from the Subaltern Studies Collective to the reading of poetry by Niger Delta writers. I argue that the Niger Delta people are subaltern in the Nigerian national space due to their disadvantaged sociopolitical position as well as the resource conflict that has left the region at the mercy of the state and its agents. With insights from the writings of Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gyan Prakash, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Partha Chatterjee, I read the subaltern themes of agency and resistance in Obari Gomba’s The Ascent Stone and Stephen Kekeghe’s Rumbling Sky. In adopting this framework, I draw from Guha’s original theorisation of peasant insurgency and the structure of power as well as later theorisations of relational power discourse and subaltern agency. My close reading of selected poems reveals the figure of the Niger Delta subaltern as the architect of their own destiny and whose resistance haunts the dominant discourse of the nation. The notions of insurgency, the nation and its fragments, failed revolutions, and relational power discourse are deployed as hermeneutical strategies. My adoption of this theoretical approach recovers its insights for the reading of literary works by writers from minority groups.","PeriodicalId":499722,"journal":{"name":"Imbizo","volume":"221 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135492951","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-11DOI: 10.25159/2663-6565/10918
Édith Félicité Koumtoudji
African female critics in general oppose negative portrayals of female characters in African literature and advocate for more positive depictions of these characters. Even though women’s rights are more widely recognised today, patriarchy still adversely affects women’s lives. It is therefore not surprising that African male-authored texts would reflect this situation. This article thus draws on African feminist theory to examine Francis Nyamnjoh’s negative portrayal of female characters in his novel A Nose for Money (2006). It focuses on the protagonist’s four wives and their relationships with their husband and each other. It argues that African male writers can use negative portrayals of female characters to highlight women’s predicaments in order to stir change in society. The article concludes that the negative portrayal of female characters in the novel serves a positive purpose given that it challenges male oppression.
{"title":"The Negative Portrayal of Women in Francis Nyamnjoh’s A Nose for Money as a Challenge to Male Oppression","authors":"Édith Félicité Koumtoudji","doi":"10.25159/2663-6565/10918","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.25159/2663-6565/10918","url":null,"abstract":"African female critics in general oppose negative portrayals of female characters in African literature and advocate for more positive depictions of these characters. Even though women’s rights are more widely recognised today, patriarchy still adversely affects women’s lives. It is therefore not surprising that African male-authored texts would reflect this situation. This article thus draws on African feminist theory to examine Francis Nyamnjoh’s negative portrayal of female characters in his novel A Nose for Money (2006). It focuses on the protagonist’s four wives and their relationships with their husband and each other. It argues that African male writers can use negative portrayals of female characters to highlight women’s predicaments in order to stir change in society. The article concludes that the negative portrayal of female characters in the novel serves a positive purpose given that it challenges male oppression.","PeriodicalId":499722,"journal":{"name":"Imbizo","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135492947","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","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：