Research in African Literatures articles from December 1995

Research in African Literatures archives from December 1995

Editor's comments.
December 22, 1995... If, as Murray Krieger has suggested, theory can be considered, at least in a provisional approach to the question of how texts function, as a "systematic rationalization of a set of guiding assumptions about the text and its relation to its...

African-language literature and postcolonial criticism.
December 22, 1995... The "postcolonial" criticism of the 1980s and '90s--which both continues and inverts the "Commonwealth" criticism inaugurated in the 1960s--has promoted a binarized, generalized model of the world which has had the effect of eliminating...

Chained letters: African prison diaries and "national allegory".
December 22, 1995... "Books and all forms of writing have always been objects of terror to those who seek to suppress truth," writes Wole Soyinka in the Preface to The Man Died (8). Out of the discourses of African colonialism and neocolonialism arises the prison...

Gordimer's None to Accompany Me: revisionism and interregnum.
December 22, 1995... Have those white South African novelists, committed to the struggle against racism, depended upon apartheid, in a ghastly paradox, for their literary inspiration? Will feted writers such as Gordimer and Coetzee see their international...

African literature and the world system: dystopian fiction, collective experience, and the postcolonial condition.
December 22, 1995... Postcolonial writers, actively engaged in the construction of cultural identities for their new societies, often include strong utopian elements in their work. On the other hand, actual experience in the postcolonial world has been anything...

Ngugi wa Thiong'o's visions of Africa.
December 22, 1995... I was living in a village and also in a colonial situation. Ngugi, Homecoming (48) Landscape as an aspect of fiction has tended to be underrated: less interesting than narrative, rhetoric, or tropology. Yet through landscape the...

Mirrors and centers: a Rortyan reading of Ngugi's liberation aesthetics.
December 22, 1995... Ngugi's aesthetic theories of representation and liberation can be found in a number of seminal essays which make up his larger essay collections that have appeared since the late 1960s. He makes several important claims in these essays which...

Phantasy and repression in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.
December 22, 1995... A recurrent metaphor in criticism of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is that of the penetrating eye whose moral vision illuminates the oneness of truth behind the disparate facts of experience; yet this Platonic metaphor has ignored a...

The development of Niyi Osundare's poetry: a survey of themes and technique.
December 22, 1995... Niyi Osundare has published six books of poetry: Songs of the Marketplace (1983), Village Voices (1984), A Nib in the Pond (1986), The Eye of the Earth (1986), Moonsongs (1988), and Waiting Laughters (1990). From the level of technical...

Poetic serialization: Kiswahili metapoetry on prosodic knots.
December 22, 1995... There have been numerous cases of poetic serialization in Kiswahili. However, in this article I want to reflect on poetic serialization specifically in a contest between the "liberalist" school on the one hand and the "conservationist"...

Indigenous criticisms of Yoruba Orature performances.
December 22, 1995... Olabiyi Yai has rightly observed that, on the one hand, "in the domain of criticisms of oral literature, very little attention has been paid by revolutionary critics" and that, on the other, "criticisms undertaken so far are borrowed from...

Identity text history: the concept of inter/nationalization in African fiction.
December 22, 1995... This paper examines the dialogical relationship between fictionalizing and identity formation, identity formation, and historical textualization in Ayi Kwei Armah's Why Are We So Blest (1972) (1) and Son'-Allah Ibrahim's Zhat (1992). (2)...

Court stories in selected African short narratives.
December 22, 1995... Il n'existe pas une Verite, il y a des verites; chacun detient et expose sa verite. Entre la verite psychique et la verite materielle, il y a une verite fondamentale, objective que l'humanisme professionnel erige en vertu. Seraphin...

Contemporary literary theory and the analysis of indigenous cultures: three examples on the Yoruba.
December 22, 1995... James Clifford and George Marcus's Writing Culture gave theoretical expression to what might be called the "literary turn" in contemporary anthropology. After that work, the project of ethnographies in the representation of cultures can no...

Okigbo and Labyrinths: the death of a poet and the life of a poem.
December 22, 1995... Christopher Okigbo died in 1967 at the age of thirty-five. He was killed in action on the Nuke front during the Nigerian Civil War. His most important work, Labyrinths, with Path of Thunder, was published four years later. It is possibly the...

The Literature Bureau: African influence in Papua New Guinea.(COMMENTARY)
December 22, 1995... The actual processes of literary transfer from European nations to their colonies during the twentieth century are seldom studied and poorly understood. One clear point of access, though, is through the Literature Bureau, an agency designed...

French and British colonial language policies: a comparative view of their impact on African literature.
December 22, 1995... Ma patrie, c'est la langue que j'ecris. Antoine Rivarol (qtd. in Le francais hors de France 19) My homeland is the language I write. "In 1915, Edmond Laforest, a prominent member of the Haitian literary movement called La...

Bibliographie annotee d'Edouard Glissant.
December 22, 1995... Bibliographie annotee d'Edouard Glissant Comp. Alain Baudot. Collection Inventaire, Serie Ecrivains francophones 2. Toronto: GREF, 1993. 755 pages. Edouard Glissant stands out today not only as one of the great intellectual figures of...

Theatre and Performance in Africa.
December 22, 1995... Theatre and Performance in Africa Eckhard Breitinger, ed. Bayreuth African Studies 31. Bayreuth: Eckhard Breitinger, 1994. 216 pages. If you read like I do, then you judge a book not by its cover, but often by its acknowledgments; for the...

The Cambridge Guide to African and Caribbean Theatre.
December 22, 1995... The Cambridge Guide to African and Caribbean Theatre Ed. Martin Banham, Errol Hill, and George Woodyard. Cambridge (England) and New York: Cambridge UP, 1994. 265 pages. 35.00 [pounds sterling] With his voluminous Cambridge Guide to World...

The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region.
December 22, 1995... The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region Diane Roberts. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.228 pages. Ever so often a work comes along at the nexus of Women's Studies, Black Studies, and American/British literary...

Rereading Nadine Gordimer.
December 22, 1995... Rereading Nadine Gordimer Kathrin Wagner. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1994. 292 pages. Nadine Gordimer Dominic Head. Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1994. 221...

Correction.(ANNOUNCEMENTS)(Correction notice)
December 22, 1995... The publisher of Understanding Women: The Challenge of Cross-Cultural Perspectives, reviewed in RAL 26.2 (Summer 1995), is not The Ohio State University Press, but the Department of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University. RAL...