Research in African Literatures articles from December 2004

Research in African Literatures archives from December 2004

Ethnography, literature, and art in the work of Anne Eisner (Putnam): making sense of colonial life in the Ituri forest.(Critical Essay)
December 22, 2004... ABSTRACT This paper traces the transformation of ethnology and interpretation in the work of artist Anne Eisner (Putnam) and anthropologist Colin Turnbull. Eisner, who made her home at the edge of the Ituri Forest of the former Belgian...

From ethnography to the African novel: the example of Doguicimi (1938) by Paul Hazoume (Dahomey) *.(Critical Essay)
December 22, 2004... In memory of Richard Bjornson "From Ethnography to the Novel"--this title could be understood in several possible ways. 1) On the individual level, it could mean that the author had taken ethnographic material and built it into his...

Conserving the cogito: rereading Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist.(Critical Essay)
December 22, 2004... ABSTRACT Setting itself within the ongoing debate surrounding the political and aesthetic commitments of the author's work, this essay provides an alternative to broadly political readings of Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist,...

Ordinary secrets and the bounds of memory: traversing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Farida Karodia's Other Secrets and Beverley Naidoo's Out of Bounds.
December 22, 2004... ABSTRACT This article investigates South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a form of cultural articulation in dialogue with Farida Karodia's Other Secrets and Beverley Naidoo's Out of Bounds. I situate the TRC as an...

The gendered politics of untranslated language and aporia in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Petals of Blood.(Critical Essay)
December 22, 2004... ABSTRACT Petals of Blood, the fourth and the last novel that Ngugi wa Thiong'o wrote in English and published in 1977, contains numerous moments of untranslated African expressions that presage his 1986 abandonment of English as a...

African Muslim communities in Diaspora: the quest for a Muslim space in Ken Bugul's Le baobab fou.
December 22, 2004... ABSTRACT The essay explores the Islamic dimension of the novel Le baobab fou (The Abandoned Baobab) by the Senegalese author Ken Bugul to demonstrate that the identity crisis felt by the protagonist Ken in the novel is not only of an...

Feminism and the Question of "Woman" in Assia Djebar's Vaste est la prison.(Critical Essay)
December 22, 2004... ABSTRACT This article analyzes the Algerian writer Assia Djebar's uncertain and ambiguous relationship with feminism. While her work is clearly preoccupied with women's experiences, the notion of a collective feminine identity remains a...

Double vision: the role of the visual and the visionary in Nina Bouraoui's La voyeuse interdite (Forbidden Vision).(Critical Essay)
December 22, 2004... ABSTRACT This article looks at the thematics of the visual and the visionary in La voyeuse interdite, the first publication of the Franco-Algerian writer Nina Bouraoui. Engaging with a range of theoretical approaches relevant to...

Slaves, viejos, and the Internationale: modernity and global contact in Jacques Roumain's Gouverneurs de la rosee.(Critical Essay)
December 22, 2004... ABSTRACT This article analyzes the depiction of contact and revolutionary politics in Jacques Roumain's Gouverneurs de la rose (1944). While this novel is often interpreted as participating in a narrow cultural nationalism, I show the...

On Dapo Adelugba and Theater studies in Nigeria.(Book Review)
December 22, 2004... WORK REVIEWED: Dapo Adelugba On Theatre Practice In Nigeria ADEMOLA DASYLVA (INTERVIEWER) Ibadan: Ibadan Cultural Studies Group, U of Ibadan 2003. 298 pp. Dapo Adelugba on Theatre Practice in Nigeria is the first publication under...

Hearing voices, or, Who you calling postcolonial? The evolution of Djebar's poetics.(Critical Essay)
December 22, 2004... BOOKS DISCUSSED: Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin BY JACQUES DERRIDA. TRANS. PATRICK MENSAH Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.95 pp. Ces voix qui m'assiegent BY ASSIA DJEBAR Paris: Albin Michel, 1999. 271...

Philosophy and the Postcolonial Condition in Africa.(Book Review)
December 22, 2004... F. ABIOLA IRELE Harvard University BOOK REVIEWED: The Struggle for Meaning BY PAULIN HOUNTONDJI. Trans. John Conteh-Morgan. Foreword by Anthony Kwame Appiah. Athens: Ohio UP, 2002. xiv + 308 pp. ISBN 0-889680-225-6. Paulin...

Geo/Graphies: Mapping the Imagination in French and Francophone Literature and Film.(Book Review)
December 22, 2004... ED. FREEMAN G. HENRY Spec. issue of FLS 30 (2003):1-217. This volume of French Literature Series, the 2002 proceedings of the University of South Carolina French literature conference, sets itself an ambitious goal in exploring imagined...

The French Encounter with Africans: White Responses to Blacks, 1530-1880.(Book Review)
December 22, 2004... BY WILLIAM B. COHEN 1980. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2003. ISBN 0-253-21650-8 paper, xxviii + 360 pp. Foreword by James D. Le Sueur This paperback edition of an important study linking French and African history is a welcome appearance. It...

Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature.(Book Review)
December 22, 2004... BY NICK NESBITT Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2003. xviii + 258 pp. ISBN 0-8139-2150-3. This book by Nick Nesbitt is a strong piece of scholarship and provides a much-needed addition to the body of critical work on French...

Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls: Seeking Subjecthood through Madness in Francophone Women's Writing of Africa and the Caribbean.(Book Review)
December 22, 2004... BY VALERIE ORLANDO Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2003. xviii + 197 pp. ISBN 0-7391-0563-9 paper. In Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls Valerie Orlando develops her own notion of the Deleuzo-Guattarian theory of "becoming-woman" that...

Des transpositions francophones du mythe de Chaka.(Book Review)
December 22, 2004... BY KAHIUDI CLAVER MABANA Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2002. 190 pp. ISBN 3-906769-40-2 This book retraces the transpositions of the myth of Chaka by a certain number of African francophone poets and playwrights. Most important,...

Nicht nur Mythen und Marchen: Afrika-Literaturwissenschaft als Herausforderung.(Book Review)
December 22, 2004... ED. FLORA VEIT-WILD Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2003. ISBN 3-88476-618-X paper. 211 pp. This informative anthology (the title translates to "Not only Myths and Fairy Tales: African Literary Studies as Challenge")...

Women and the Amistad Connection--Sierra Leone Krio Society.(Book Review)
December 22, 2004... BY FILOMINA CHIOMA STEADY Rochester, VT: Schenkman, 2001. 305 pp. Annexes, bibliography, index. Filomina Steady, a well-known scholar of feminism in Africa and the diaspora (see The Black Woman Cross-Culturally, Schenkman, 1985) as...

Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius.(Book Review)
December 22, 2004... BY LAWRENCE JACKSON New York: Wiley, 2002. 498 pp. ISBN 0-471-35414-7 cloth. Lawrence Jackson's detailed and excellent biography shows the trajectory of Ellison's career, his rise from essayist and editor to celebrated novelist....

The People's Poet: Emerging Perspectives on Niyi Osundare.(Book Review)
December 22, 2004... ED. ABDUL-RASHEED NA'ALLAH Trenton: Africa World P, 2003. 629 pp. ISBN 0-86543-849-8 paper. Niyi Osundare's growth as a poet is perceived in most essays in this collection as evolutionary, with his latest volume, Waiting Laughter...

Books received.
December 22, 2004... African Voices in the African American Heritage, by Betty M. Kuyk (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2003) The Arab Avant-Garde: Experiments on North African Art and Literature, by Andrea Flores Khalil (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004) Archives...