Research in African Literatures articles

Recent articles from Research in African Literatures

Translating Aural Aesthetics in Contemporary African Narratives: A Case Study
March 22, 2013... Choosing to focus on the translation of aesthetic features in a postcolonial europhone text raises tricky questions: How are these features to be articulated? What intertextual connections can one establish and why? Although everyone agrees that no text emerges from a vacuum, critics of African...

Political Strictures and Latex Caricatures in Kenya: Buttressing Mzee Masculinity in the XYZ Show
March 22, 2013... INTRODUCTION In the XYZ clip "It Wasn't Me," the exaggerated caricatured latex puppets representing Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki and Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta proclaim their supposedly undeniable innocence in the violence that took place after the highly contested December 2007...

When Chaos Is the God of an Era: Rediscovering an Axis Mundi in Ben Okri's Starbook (2007)
March 22, 2013... INTRODUCTION This article hopes to show--albeit cursorily--that an interview with Ben Okri in February 2011 provides a guide on how best to read his latest novel, Starbook (2007), and to understand life, both contingent upon the most inner and most intense view of reality, embodying both...

Narrative Decomposition for Utopian (Re-)Composition: The New (Wo)Man in Olive Schreiner's from Man to Man
March 22, 2013... Revolving around the hotly debated Woman Question, New Woman texts sought to address a variety of women's demands for equal rights and to call for the formation of the New Woman. In so doing, they also intended to take up the Man Question, projecting an expectation of reformation in men and...

Must la Victime Be Feminine? Postcolonial Violence, Gender Ambiguity, and Homoerotic Desire in Sony Labou Tansi's Je Soussigne Cardiaque
March 22, 2013... The scholarship that has, in recent decades, sought to create a dialogue between queer studies and postcolonial African literatures has produced readings of homoeroticism and gender bending in African contexts by critics such as Chris Dunton (1989), Guarav Desai (2001), and Chantal Zabus...