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Telling Stories
The present volume is a highly comprehensive assessment of the postcolonial short story since the thirty-six contributions cover most geographical areas concerned. Another important feature is that it deals not only with exclusive practitioners of the genre (Mansfield, Munro), but also with well-known novelists (Achebe, Armah, Atwood, Carey, Rushdie), so that stimulating comparisons are suggested between shorter and longer works by the same authors. In addition, the volume is of interest for the study of aspects of orality (dialect, dance rhythms, circularity and trickster figure for instance) and of the more or less conflictual relationships between the individual (character or implied auth...
European-language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa
The first major comparative study of African writing in western languages, European-language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by Albert S. Gérard, falls into four wide-ranging sections: an overview of early contacts and colonial developments "Under Western Eyes"; chapters on "Black Consciousness" manifest in the debates over Panafricanism and Negritude; a group of essays on mental decolonization expressed in "Black Power" texts at the time of independence struggles; and finally "Comparative Vistas," sketching directions that future comparative study might explore. An introductory e.
New Women's Writing in African Literature
African women writers have come a long way since the 1960s when they were hardly acknowledged or noticed as serious writers. In the past four decades their works have been steadily rising in quantity and quality. Today these writers are seriously redefining images of womanhood, providing new visions, and reshaping erstwhile distorted characterizations of African women in fiction. ERNEST EMENYONU is Professor of the Department of Africana Studies University of Michigan-Flint. North America: Africa World Press; Nigeria: HEBN
Losing Our Heads
What is the fascination that decollation holds for us, as individuals and as a culture? Why does the idea make us laugh and the act make us close our eyes? Losing Our Heads explores in both artistic and cultural contexts the role of the chopped-off head. It asks why the practice of decapitation was once so widespread, why it has diminished—but not, as scenes from contemporary Iraq show, completely disappeared—and why we find it so peculiarly repulsive that we use it as a principal marker to separate ourselves from a more “barbaric”or “primitive” past? Although the topic is grim, Regina Janes’s treatment and conclusions are neither grisly nor gruesome, but continuously instructi...
They Also Write for Kids
Outside the world of children’s literature studies, children’s books by authors of well-known texts “for adults” are often forgotten or marginalized. Although many adults today read contemporary children’s and young adult fiction for pleasure, others continue to see such texts as unsuitable for older audiences, and they are unlikely to cross-read children’s books that were themselves cross-written by authors like Chinua Achebe, Anita Desai, Joy Harjo, or Amy Tan. Meanwhile, these literary voices have produced politically vital works of children’s literature whose complex themes persist across boundaries of expected audience. These works form part of a larger body of activist wr...
(Un)writing Empire
The contributors to the present volume, in espousing and extending the programme of such writers as Edward Said, Benedict Anderson, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak, lay bare the genealogy of 'writing' empire (thereby, in a sense, 'un-writing' it). One focus is the Caribbean: the retrograde agenda of francophone créolité; the re-writing of empire in the postmodern disengagement of Edouard Glissant; resistance to post-colonial allegiances, and the dissolving of binary categories, in contemporary West Indian writing. Essays on India, Malaysia, and Indonesia explore various aspects of cultural self-understanding in Asia: un-writing high culture through hybrid 'shopping' among Western styles; t...
The Cosmos and the Creative Imagination
The essays in this book respond to Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s recent call to explore the relationship between the evolution of the universe and the process of self-individuation in the ontopoietic unfolding of life. The essays approach the sensory manifold in a number of ways. They show that theories of modern science become a strategy for the phenomenological study of works of art, and vice versa. Works of phenomenology and of the arts examine how individual spontaneity connects with the design(s) of the logos – of the whole and of the particulars – while the design(s) rest not on some human concept, but on life itself. Life’s pliable matrices allow us to consider the expansiveness of contemporary science, and to help create a contemporary phenomenological sense of cosmos.
The African Imagination
This collection of essays from eminent scholar F. Abiola Irele provides a comprehensive formulation of what he calls an "African imagination" manifested in the oral traditions and modern literature of Africa and the Black Diaspora. The African Imagination includes Irele's probing critical readings of the works of Chinua Achebe, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Amadou Hampat B , and Ahmadou Kourouma, among others, as well as examinations of the growing presence of African writing in the global literary marketplace and the relationship between African intellectuals and the West. Taken as a whole, this volume makes a superb introduction to African literature and to the work of one of its leading interpreters.
The Tough Alchemy of Ben Okri
Ben Okri's aphorisms : 'Music on the wings of a soaring bird' -- Epistemic ecology and the 'diminishing boundaries of a shrinking world' in 'Heraclitus' Golden River' from Wild -- Ontopoiesis in Okri's poetic oeuvre and A Time for New Dreams -- Recovering our true state of being in 'The Comic Destiny' -- Apologia pro In Arcadia : A neglected masterpiece? -- 'Domesticating infinity' in Mental Fight and Astonishing the Gods -- Redreaming ways of seeing : Intuitive creativity in The Landscapes Within -- Promoting the poetic cause in 'stokus' from Tales of Freedom -- Sowing 'a quilt of harmony' : Eco-phenomenology in 'Lines in Potentis' -- 'A clear lucid stream of everywhereness' in Wild : A pos...
Living on a Horizon
Bessie Head's writing illustrates a fusion of styles, subjects and philosophical and literary influences. This book explores this range by drawing both on postcolonial and feminist theories. Focusing on Head's acute sensitivity to social and historical experiences, the book deals with Head's use of myths and trans-cultural fictions that convey knowledge about her immediate world and the historical domains beyond it. In addition, Bessie Head's autobiographical vision generates an exploration of personal injustices as well as the processes they signal. Hinduism and eastern philosophy were central to Head's philosophical vision, and the book shows how this vision allowed her to explore existential questions and spiritual concerns in innovative and unexpected ways. By using language auto-referentially and symbolically, by drawing on myths and by developing abundantly textured metaphors, Head produces fictions that manifest the notions of freedom and serenity she urgently endorses, and that are as concerned with challenging the realities she confronts as they are with utopian imagining.
