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Drawing on the ever contentious and antagonistic relationship between the writer and the state, especially in the postcolony, the chapters assembled in this collection delineate Bill F. Ndi, the poet and playwright’s arduous and sometimes dangerous role as a custodian or guardian of the socioeconomics and politico-cultures of the Cameroonian postcolony and Africa at large. The chapters insist that granted The Cameroons’ quadruple experience of colonialism (through the Germans, the French, the British and La République du Cameroun), Cameroun and British Southern Cameroons’ history needs to purge itself of the epistemic and ontological violence of Francophonecentric historiography. “B...
This volume is a blend of language and literature papers highlighting linguistic functionality and topicality in poetry, novels, translation and education. It sheds light on the fictionalised reality of a strained official linguistic cohabitation in Cameroon as instantiated in present-day colonial legacy claims. It deals with issues of translation as a stylistic exercise whereby the translator has some creativity licence when rendering the source text into the target language, thus embracing Skopos theory’s view of translation as a purposeful activity determined by the target text and audience. This book also looks at an educational conception of translation as opposed to a professional tr...
In a nuanced consideration of the Cameroonian experience, Yearning for (Dis) Connections makes critical interventions into debates about coexistence, citizenship, identity formation and performance, democracy and modernity in Cameroon. The essays in the book ranges across Francophone and Anglophone Cameroons to provide a challenging assessment of the common ways of writing and thinking for and of and about the Cameroonian world. The book criticises the blinders of Cameroon's Francophonecentred leadership, analysing its failure to heed Anglophone Cameroon's ontological and epistemological critiques of Cameroon's ongoing exclusions masked by pretences of a Francophone universalism. Yosimbom us...
Living (In)Dependence: Critical Perspectives on Global Interdependence embraces a multidisciplinary approach to the interconnectedness of independence and dependence in every ramification of the words. These scholars and academics, from different disciplinary area, examine “independence” & “dependence”, not simply as polar opposites in their Saussurian sense but as a binary embedded in the concept of “independence”. Herein, scholars have had to challenge their perceived or preconceived notions about “Independence” and “dependence” from their respective disciplinary discursive perspectives. This book is a rare gift to the curious reader thirsty for knowledge and understand...
This book is a timely addition to debates and explorations on the epistemological relevance of African proverbs, especially with growing calls for the decolonisation of African curricula. The editors and contributors have chosen to reflect on the diverse ways of being and becoming African as a permanent work in progress by drawing inspiration from Chinua Achebe's harnessing of the effectualness of oratory, especially his use of proverbs in his works. The book recognises and celebrates the fact that Achebe's proverbial Igbo imaginations of being and becoming African are compelling because they are instructive about the lives, stories, struggles and aspirations of the rainbow of people that ma...
This is a study of how Donald J. Trump, his populist credentials notwithstanding, borrows without acknowledgment and stubbornly refuses to come to terms with his indebtedness. Taken together with mobility and conviviality, the principle of incompleteness enables us to distinguish between inclusionary and exclusionary forms of populism, and when it is fuelled by ambitions of superiority and zero-sum games of conquest. Nyamnjoh challenges the reader to reflect on how stifling frameworks of citizenship and belonging predicated upon hierarchies of humanity and mobility, and driven by a burning but elusive quest for completeness, can be constructively transcended by humility and conviviality inspired by taking incompleteness seriously. Nyamnjoh argues that the logic and practice of incompleteness is a healthy antidote to name-calling and scapegoating others as undesirable outsiders, depending on the brand of populism at play. Recognising incompleteness also helps to question sterile and problematic binaries such as those between elites and the impoverished masses among whom populists go to fish for political visibility, prominence and success.
In 2018 South Africa's so-called "mother city", Cape Town came into the global spotlight as being the first city in the world to (almost) "run out of water," a crisis that only exacerbated the pressures placed upon a population staggering under socio-economic and politically-tinged environmental predicaments. Japan on the other hand has long sustained an international reputation for the massive scale of natural and anthropocentric crises its people have faced, overcome, and succumbed to. The most recent (pre-Pandemic) occurrence of which being the 2011 tsunami and Fukushima Daiima nuclear plant accident. What comes to mind when Japan, South Africa, and the notion of resilience are mentioned ...
Harry Garuba’s Shadow and Dream, a slim yet highly influential collection which immediately gained a cult following, has continued to elicit the awe of poets and lovers of literature within the Nigerian literary scene. First published in 1982 when Garuba was still in his early twenties, it demonstrates an uncommon maturity, vision and understated confidence that have rarely been encountered ever since its initial release. With the publication of this edition together with a new foreword and introduction, Garuba’s landmark work moves from cult status to canonical validation.
Whose knowledge counts? Why delve deep to understand self, history and intercontinental relations? How do people and communities heal from the wounds of colonization and related trauma passed from generation to generation? Such intractable questions are explored in this collection of essays on decolonization. To decolonize means to humxnize, which is of even greater urgency in the 21 st century with colonization showing itself in new forms. Perspectives from several continents suggest pathways toward more convivial and equitable relations in society, and each chapter is presented in conversation with an illustration. The book will inspire young leaders, educators, activists, policymakers, re...
This book is an interdisciplinary theological exploration of Haile Gerima's cinema, an Ethiopian filmmaker and storyteller who successfully translated African folkloric orality and wove other indigenous art forms into the language of cinema. Gerima's five decades legacy of Pan-African cinema embodies 'symbolic resistance' against Afro-pessimistic and stereotypical mis/disrepresentations, both manifestations of neo-colonialism. In response, he uses "camera as a weapon" to resist exotic otherness and alienation invented by conventional cinema. Through an alternative moving pictures, he depicted dignified images of Africa towards decolonising cinema and liberating the mind. His memory-films ach...