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“The inspired and well crafted poetry of Joyce Ash is a feast of life deepened and intensified through her poetic search for meaning. Here is a poet whose every movement into language challenges us out of our sentimental approaches to living. Her merciless insights translate reality into what it used to be, taking us to the long forgotten world where language, cultural roots, womanhood, and nature itself are experienced as vital parts of the republic of the self. Beautiful Fire is a book that shows us what poetry can be, a book that stays with you long after you have finished reading it.” Amir Or, author of Wings “Beautiful Fire radiates intimacy, passion, and sensitivity. This poetry touches us to our deepest core and awakens the warm emotions and humanity we can’t ignore. Joyce Ash gathers images into a honeycomb that the reader tastes and keeps on devouring its sweetness. The highly imagistic poems proffer an enduring message that resonates with our private and public selves.” Tanure Ojaide, Poet and Frank Porter Graham Professor of Africana Studies, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte
This volume presents new research and critical debates in African book history, and brings together a range of disciplinary perspectives by leading scholars in the subject. It includes case studies from across Africa, ranging from third-century manuscript traditions to twenty-first century internet communications.
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.
Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon illuminates how issues of ideal womanhood shaped the Anglophone Cameroonian nationalist movement in the first decade of independence in Cameroon, a west-central African country. Drawing upon history, political science, gender studies, and feminist epistemologies, the book examines how formally educated women sought to protect the cultural values and the self-determination of the Anglophone Cameroonian state as Francophone Cameroon prepared to dismantle the federal republic. The book defines and uses the concept of embodied nationalism to illustrate the political importance of women’s everyday behavior—the clothes they wore, the foods they cooked, whether they gossiped, and their deference to their husbands. The result, in this fascinating approach, reveals that West Cameroon, which included English-speaking areas, was a progressive and autonomous nation. The author’s sources include oral interviews and archival records such as women’s newspaper advice columns, Cameroon’s first cooking book, and the first novel published by an Anglophone Cameroonian woman.
Guided by postcolonial theory and the ideas of some Western and African philosophers this study's in-depth analysis of the novels of three Anglophone Cameroonian authors addresses the question of how principles of nation formation and nationalism are influenced by both colonialism and pre-colonial in situ constituents. The analysis focuses on how nations represented in the imaginary worlds constructed by the novelists are dominated by aspects such as ethnicity, corruption, authoritarianism, nepotism, solidarity and communitarianism which marginalize the masses, leaving them in misery and abject poverty. Tracing the historical settings of the novels from 1948 till present day, the study delineates the writers' representation of the Anglophones of Cameroon as being marginalized as well as suffering from self-marginalization and also demonstrates how postcolonial misery in Africa is not caused solely by colonialism but by several other aspects. This study reads the works of these Anglophone novelists not only as representing aspects in a nation but as tools of renegotiating a better society and a way forward for this nation.
"Most of the chapters in this book were presented at the Sixth LOITASA [Language of instruction in Tanzania and South Africa] Workshop held at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa in May 2009"--P. 4 of cover.
Among the material are treaties concluded by Britain with Southern Cameroons coastal Kings and Chiefs; and the boundary treaties of the Southern Cameroons, treaties defining the frontiers with Nigeria to the west and the frontier with Cameroun Republic to the east. The book contains documents that attest to the Southern Cameroons as a fully self-governing country, ready for sovereign statehood. These include debates in the Southern Cameroons House of Assembly; and the various Constitutions of the Southern Cameroons. The book also reproduces British declassified documents on the Southern Cameroons covering the three critical years from 1959 to 1961, documents which speak to the inglorious stewardship of Great Britain in the Southern Cameroons. This book removes lingering doubts in some quarters that the people of the Southern Cameroons were cheated of independence. Its contents are further evidence of their inalienable right and sacred duty to assert their independence.
This handbook provides a critical overview of literature dealing with groups of people or regions that suffer marginalization within Africa. The contributors examine a multiplicity of minority discourses expressed in African literature, including those who are culturally, socially, politically, religiously, economically, and sexually marginalized in literary and artistic creations. Chapters and sections of the book are structured to identify major areas of minority articulation of their condition and strategies deployed against the repression, persecution, oppression, suppression, domination, and tyranny of the majority or dominant group. Bringing together diverse perspectives to give a holistic representation of the African reality, this handbook is an important read for scholars and students of comparative and postcolonial literature and African studies.
A highly original and immersive new biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky, published to mark the 200th anniversary of his birth
This book deals with the important subject of governance and development. Even more significantly, the book has the merits of critically evaluating the concept of good governance in an African context, identifying the internal factors that impinge on good governance and development, and proposing solutions. It provides empirical evidence on the extent to which inappropriate governing strategies are the main internal obstacle to development in Cameroon. The authors discuss factors contributing to precarious and problematic governance from multidisciplinary perspectives, and demonstrate the extent to which such inadequacies impede positive social change. To promote effective development, the authors argue for the implementation of a good governance strategy that comprises, inter alia: adopting appropriate development strategies; decentralizing administration to make for popular participation and ensure accountability; taking the necessary steps to fight corruption; and ensuring the enforcement of property and cultural rights.