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Uniting a sense of the political dimensions of language appropriation with a serious, yet accessible linguistic terminology, The African Palimpsest examines the strategies of `indigenization? whereby West African writers have made their literary English or French distinctively `African'. Through the apt metaphor of the palimpsest ? a surface that has been written on, written over, partially erased and written over again ? the book examines such well-known West African writers as Achebe, Armah, Ekwensi, Kourouma, Okara, Saro?Wiwa, Soyinka and Tutuola as well as lesser-known writers from francophone and anglophone Africa. Providing a great variety of case-studies in Nigerian Pidgin, Akan, Igbo...
Elderly slaves contributed substantially to the creation and perpetuation of the unique African American culture and antebellum plantation society in the South. Interwoven with this major argument are two subthemes. One centers on the fact that by the late antebellum period elderly slaves were some of the chief transmitters of Africanism; the other focuses on how gender based distinctions of the elderly became blurred. Although the roles of the elderly often changed, elderly slaves contributed to the plantation economy. It is also true that those old people who were incapacitated posed serious economic and social concerns for owners, although many of the problems of elderly care were solved by the compassion of slave community members (Ph.D. Dissertation, The Ohio State University, 1992; revised with new preface and index)
Robert G. Gregory challenges the apparent assumption that non-Western peoples lack a significant indigenous philanthropic culture. Focusing on the large South Asian community in East Africa, he relates how, over a century, they built a philanthropic culture of great magnitude, and how it finally collapsed under the ascendency of increasing state regulation and policies directed against non-African communities.Compelled by poverty to seek better oppurtunities overseas, most Asians arrived in East Africa as peasant farmers. Denied access to productive land and sensing economic opportunity, they turned to business. Despite severe forms of racial discrimination in the colonial society, they suff...
First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Since its publication in 1967, Burden of Empire has been widely praised and criticized for its controversial approach to the problem of colonialism in Africa. The authors have challenged the new "orthodoxy" about Africa—the belief that little but evil and exploitation has resulted from the era of European colonialism.
A handbook for the herpetologist professional, student, or amateur anxious to acquaint himself with African Amphibia. The geographic location and climatic variety of Malawi make it possible for this small country to support a large number of frogs and toads, many of them representative of much of sub-Sahara Africa. This book contributes greatly to the relatively sparse literature on African Amphibia. Professor Stewart bases her book on extensive field notes made during a year s stay in Malawi, supplemented by museum and literature research. A talented draftsman as well as a trained biologist, she has provided over sixty detailed drawings to accompany her species descriptions. In addition, tw...
While providing critical perspectives on women, gender, sex and sexuality, and the colonial encounter, she considers how it was possible for this woman to take on the office and responsibilities of a traditionally male role.
Discusses contemporary medievalism in studies ranging from Brazil to West Africa, from Manila to New York. Across the world, revivals of medieval practices, images, and tales flourish as never before. The essays collected here, informed by approaches from Global Studies and the critical discourse on the concept of a "Global Middle Ages", explore the many facets of contemporary medievalism: post-colonial responses to the enforced dissemination of Western medievalisms, attempts to retrieve pre-modern cultural traditions that were interrupted by colonialism, the tentative forging of a global "medieval" imaginary from the world's repository of magical tales and figures, and the deployment across...
Composed by a premier scholar of African literature, this volume is a comprehensive guide to the literary traditions of Gambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana, and Nigeria, five distinct countries bound by their experience with colonialism. Oyekan Owomoyela begins with an overview of the authors, texts, and historical events that have shaped the development of postwar Anglophone literatures in this region, exploring shifts in theme and the role of foreign sponsorship and illuminating recent debates regarding the language, identity, gender, and social commitments of various authors and their works. His introduction concludes with a bibliography of key critical texts. The second half of the volu...
The English language is now a lingua franca spoken by about two billion people. This insightful study considers how a "bridge language" affects world literature by analyzing what it is, how it works, what are its themes, what it means for canons, and how it is mediated. Cultural criticism often employs perspectives of race, citizenship, and colonialism, as well as considerations of scale (archipelagic, planetary), form (analogies between the literary and the social), and technologies (as they inflect artifacts). These approaches help rethink the new dynamics of anglophone literature, but they have often overlooked one of the basic elements of literature – the language itself. Literatures i...