Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Language, Literature, and the Dynamics of Conflict
Informed by a global space animated by various conflicts, this book brings a refreshing perspective on how the disciplines of literature and language engage this phenomenon. In its shift from a purely political interrogation of conflict, the volume provides a broad analytic canvas on which human behaviour in such contexts can be examined. This is an ultimate invitation to a re-visioning of socio-cultural parameters of identity construction, borders, natural resources, religion, cultural values, beliefs, governance, ideology, and globalisation. The book’s varied perspective, animated by a rich diversity of literary and linguistic approaches, gives it an interdisciplinary emphasis that will appeal to readers across disciplines. Its ultimate message is that conflict is not subject-bound. The liberal analysis of different aspects makes the volume an invaluable asset not only to literature and language scholars but also to everyone with inclinations towards conflict creation and management.
Dennis Brutus' Poetics of Revolt
This book is a refreshing and innovative reading of Dennis Brutus’ poetry, underlining its concern for suffering humanity in the apartheid context and beyond. Through a cogent critical analysis of the poetry from a multifaceted perspective, the work brings to the fore the different motifs, strategies and artistry with which Brutus succeeds in initiating revolt through art. It explains how the poet’s engagement with the poetics of place, apartheid laws, police brutality, questions of travel and language foregrounds these as tropes or metaphors for reinforcing the despicable apartheid image and influencing popular revolt against the system.
Bearing Witness
Bearing Witness: Poems from a Land in Turmoil is a poetic response to the devastating Anglophone Crisis/Ambazonian Conflict in Cameroon that has killed thousands of children, women and men, displaced over half a million people and left hundreds of communities in ruins. The poems in this volume capture an all-encompassing landscape marked by alienation, despair, displacement, loss, anger, trauma, as well as courage, hope, heroism, justice and resilience. These poems also engender psychic healing which has the potential of turning victims into survivors. With over 100 poems by 73 poets—seasoned and emerging, old and young, men and women—this collection is not only a guidepost of collective memory, but also the definitive literary work of this period in Cameroon’s checkered history.
Environmental Transformations
Investigates what literary strategies African writers adopt to convey the impact of climate transformation and environmental change.
Magical Realism in Africa
Magical realism has deep roots across many African languages and regions. This book explores African magical realism from a transregional and inclusive approach, drawing on contributions from different literary genres across the continent. The chapters in this book constitute a sustained and insightful reflection on the salient components of this literary genre as well as evaluating its connections to themes of conflict, violence, women’s rights, trauma, oppression, culture, governance, and connecting to the African self. As well as theorizing magical realism, this book engages with African expressive performance across various formats, novels, plays, and films. This book investigates African magical realism from its origins up to the present day, where local oral traditions link indigenous cosmogonic stories with Western literature, as well as with the specific narrative traditions of Arabo‐Islamic literature. The rich analysis draws on works from across the continent, including Egypt, Sudan, Mauritania, Cameroon, Kenya, Tanzania, Angola, and Mozambique. This book is a timely contribution to debates within African literature, cultural anthropology, ethnography, and folklore.
Focus on Egypt
As well as a rare examination of Egyptian literature, this volume includes a non-themed section of Featured Articles and a Literary Supplement.
Who is Afraid of Mongo wa Swolenka
In Who is Afraid of Mongo Wa Swolenka? a book launch is planned which, from information given to His Royal Excellency Gbadarango Binyambutu Buthablaisi, by a traitorous intellectual seeking preferment; and by his security agents, is a campaign led by disgruntled writers and intellectuals of Nubialand for the return of their exiled colleague and international award winner, Professor Mongo Wa Swolenka. How the celebrated leader of Nubialand and master of gunocratic politics responds to the prevailing circumstances is the nerve centre of dialogue, action and morality in the play. - John Nkemngong Nkengasong, Writer and critic, University of Yaounde I, Cameroon.
Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Cameroon
Cameroon is a land of much promise, but a land of unfulfilled promises. It has the potential to be an economically developed and democratic society but the struggle to live up to its potential has not gone well. Since independence there have been only two presidents of Cameroon; the current one has been in office since 1982. Endowed with a variety of climates and agricultural environments, numerous minerals and substantial forests, and a dynamic population, this is a country that should be a leader of Africa. Instead, we find a country almost paralyzed by corruption and poor management, a country with a low life expectancy and serious health problems, and a country from which the most talent...
Homage and Courtship
Here is a collection of sixty-two beautifully crafted poems on some of the deepest of human emotions. They celebrate love, constancy, beauty, marriage, birth and death; in the poems are hailed intellectual labour, leadership and duty. Occasionally, the poet depicts the states of his mind against the backdrop of nature, interfusing description, memory and meditation in a manner essentially romantic. The best in Ambanasom's poetry is matter and manner combined. The striking force of the poems lies in the intriguing relationship between romanticism and romance. Ambanasom's romanticism is concerned with the concept of nature as a universal being or a cosmic entity, nostalgia, the attempt to link his childhood with the present and the future, and the response to nature at different levels of his development. The poet also demonstrates a penchant for rural subject matter, places and people. In the poet of romance there is a more direct expression of basic human emotions, in particular of love that is enchanting, possessing, seductive, and alluring. We find in the poems, love that is reciprocal and imbued with constancy and understanding.
Letter from America
Inspired by Alistair Cooke’s masterpiece “Letter from America” (1934-2004) that depicted the transformation of British culture in the United States of America, Ndi-Shang’s text redefines ‘America’, focusing on the melting pot engendered by African, indigenous, European and Asian cultures in Latin America through the case of Peru, the erstwhile epicentre of Spanish empire in Latin America. It is a reflection on the triangular relationship between Africa, Europe and America against the backdrop of slavery and (neo-)colonialism which continue to define intimate experiences, daily interactions, personal trajectories and human relations in a ‘globalized world’. Ndi-Shang probes into the legacies of racial inequalities but also the possibilities of a new ethic of encounter amongst human beings/cultures. The text is based on an intricate interweaving of the humorous with the tragic, the personal with the global, the historical with the current and the real with the creative.
