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This is a timely and comprehensive study combining various critical approaches to the fiction of Buchi Emecheta, one of Africa's most illustrious and contentious women writers. Feminist (Showalter, Cixous, Kristeva) and postcolonial approaches (writing back) are taken to Emecheta's texts to illuminate the personal, political and aesthetic ramifications of the production of this “born writer.” Poststructural programmes of analysis are shown to be less relevant to this writer’s fiction than Marxist and Bakhtinian perspectives. Emecheta is shown to be a bridge-builder between two cultures and two worlds in narratives (both challenging and popular) characterized by ambiguity, ambivalence and double-voiced discourse, all of which evince the writer's determination to expose imaginatively the colonial heritage of centre-periphery conflicts, cultural corruption, ethnic discrimination, gender oppression, and the migrant experience in multiracial communities.
The first in a three volume set of Mazrui's most important essays, this volume redefines the meaning of Africanity across geographical space, time and cultures. The resulting definition forces us to reject neo-imperialist paradigms and ontologies of what it means to be African. By encouraging us to think about Africanity as an idea rather than as point of origin, the ideas contained in these essays force us to reposition ourselves in the debate of our place in global cultures and civilisations, and prepare us to take an active role in social and political affairs.
Emmanuel Ngara evaluates the ability of poets to communicate with their readers. His two studies of style and ideology in novels from Africa have made a considerable impact. He has now used the same technique to help students come to terms with the demanding question of poetic style. -- From back cover
The Post-Colonial Studies Readeris the most comprehensive selection of key texts in post-colonial theory and criticism yet compiled. This collection covers a huge range of topics, featuring nearly ninety of the discipline's most widely read works. TheReader's90 extracts are designed to introduce the major issues and debates in the field of post-colonial literary studies. This field itself, however, has become so varied that no collection of readings could encompass every voice which is now giving itself the name "post-colonial." The editors, in order to avoid a volume which is simply a critical canon, have selected works representing arguments with which they do not necessarily agree, but ra...
Indo-Caribbean women writers are virtually invisible in the literary landscape because of cultural and social inhibitions and literary chauvinism. Until recently, the richness and particularities of the experiences of these writers in the field of literature and literary studies were compromised by stereotypical representations of the Indo-Caribbean women that were narrated from a purely masculine or an Afrocentric point of view. This book fills an important gap in an important but underestimated emergent field. The book explores how cultural traditions and female modes of opposition to patriarchal control were transplanted from India and rearticulated in the Indo-Caribbean diaspora to deter...
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'You may never have been, may never go, may never even have heard of the place – but Malawi will repay your attention. It is one of the smallest, poorest countries in Africa, often overlooked; but its relationship with us in the West has been extraordinary.' In a ruined dictator's palace, Alexander Chula – a classicist-turned-doctor, fresh out of Oxford – stumbles upon an oak treasure chest. Inside is a priceless, antique edition of Julius Caesar's Gallic War. This unexpected talisman of Western high culture belongs to the mercurial Dr Banda, a man of many parts: scholarly physician, anti-colonial hero, brutal tyrant, and fallen philosopher-king. Banda leads the author deep into the he...
" ... Documents the history and development of [Post-colonial literatures in English, together with English and American literature] and includes original research relating to the literatures of some 50 countries and territories. In more than 1,600 entries written by more than 600 internationally recognized scholars, it explores the effect of the colonial and post-colonial experience on literatures in English worldwide.
Columbia's guides to postwar African literature paint a unique portrait of the continent's rich and diverse literary traditions. This volume examines the rapid rise and growth of modern literature in the three postcolonial nations of Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Zambia. It tracks the multiple political and economic pressures that have shaped Central African writing since the end of World War II and reveals its authors' heroic efforts to keep their literary traditions alive in the face of extreme poverty and AIDS. Adrian Roscoe begins with a list of key political events. Since writers were composing within both colonial and postcolonial contexts, he pays particular attention to the nature of British...
This book is about home. With Malawi as its focus, it seeks to understand ideas about home as expressed through poetry written by Malawians in English. Although African Literatures are studied those of Malawi have not received agreeable attention. This book surveys poetry by five Malawian writers – Felix Mnthali, Frank Chipasula, Jack Mapanje, Lupenga Mphande, and Steve Chimombo. The discussion negotiates scribed experience of exile, engendered by Dr. Banda’s regime, and shows that the selected poets effectively converse with a sense of home, reflecting on its transformations in their work. Interrogating the strict definitions of home, the argument highlights that far from home-less exiles in fact clarify the sense of what ‘home’ is. The manoeuvre is one of thinking towards an unboundaried ‘home’. This book will be of value not only to readers interested in the cultures of Africa but to all those with an interest in worldwide literary phenomena, and ideas therein of home and exile.