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The edifice of colonial Africa starts cracking as the Black experience with colonialism becomes intimately personal. There is Martin Paul Samba, whose adopted German aristocratic home as a student does not consider him material for a son-in-law. There are also Prince Rudolph Douala Manga Bell and Dr Bele who go to school with Samba in Germany. And then, of course, Princess Zara, the youthful Amazon warrior who is rescued from a slave ship on the shores of Kamerun. Supported by the Douala princes, Martin Paul Samba champions the cause of the exploited, in a central drama pitting Kamerunian nationalism against German colonialism. This is the story of youthful endeavours and loves, of some of Africa's best and brightest, immediately before and after the First World War.
In this eclectic and compelling book, Ambanasom sets out to achieve three primary objectives: to introduce the reader to the extensive body of Cameroonian novels in English, to re-examine the distorting and limiting criteria upon which the critical assessment of the Cameroonian novel in English has so far been based, and to bridge the widening chasm between literary theory and actual critical practice. To achieve these objectives, Ambanasom begins by elaborating an alternative and flexible theoretical framework which he christens the 'Socio-Artistic Approach' and which, according to him, is 'concerned with both a text's thematic, moral, cultural or ideological issues, on the one hand, and its central literary analysis, on the other.' He then proceeds to use this new critical framework to examine twenty-seven major Cameroonian novels in English.
Many view Kaiser Wilhelm II as having personally ruled Germany, dominating its politics, and choreographing its leap to global power, but The Kaiser and the Colonies shows that he played a surprisingly muted role in the German Empire in contrast to the lively, varied, innovative responses to German imperialism from monarchs around the world.
"This is a cogent analysis of the complexities of gender in the work of nine contemporary Anglophone and Francophone novelists. . . . offers illuminating interpretations of worthy writers . . . " —Multicultural Review "This book reaffirms Bessie Head's remark that books are a tool, in this case a tool that allows readers to understand better the rich lives and the condition of African women. Excellent notes and a rich bibliography." —Choice ". . . a college-level analysis which will appeal to any interested in African studies and literature." —The Bookwatch This book applies gender as a category of analysis to the works of nine sub-Saharan women writers: Aidoo, Bá, Beyala, Dangarembga, Emecheta, Head, Liking, Tlali, and Zanga Tsogo. The author appropriates western feminist theories of gender in an African literary context, and in the process, she finds and names critical theory that is African, indigenous, self-determining, which she then melds with western feminist theory and comes out with an over-arching theory that enriches western, post-colonial and African critical perspectives.
Against a disturbing political backdrop and through an in-depth appraisal of selected illustrative texts from major genres—poetry, prose, and drama—Emmanuel Fru Doh presents the origins and growth of a young but potent literature. To him, Anglophone-Cameroon literature is a weapon in the hands of an oppressed English speaking minority in his native Cameroon, Africa, who were unfairly manipulated by the United Nations and Britain into a skewed federation in the name of an independence deal.
The vast majority of existing ecocritical studies, even those which espouse the “postcolonial ecocritical” perspective, operate within a first-world sensibility, speaking on behalf of subalternized human communities and degraded landscapes without actually eliciting the voices of the impacted communities. Ecocriticism of the Global South seeks to allow scholars from (or intimately familiar with) underrepresented regions to “write back” to the world’s centers of political and military and economic power, expressing views of the intersections of nature and culture from the perspective of developing countries. This approach highlights what activist and writer Vandana Shiva has describ...
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