Research in African Literatures articles from June 1994

Research in African Literatures archives from June 1994

Erzulie: a women's history of Haiti. (Caribbean Literature)
June 22, 1994... ... They burned all the documents, Ursa, but they didn't burn what they put in their minds. We got to bum out what they put in our minds, like You bum out a wound. Except we got to keep what we need to bear witness. That scar that's left to...

Renunciation and victory in 'Black Shack Alley.' (Caribbean Literature)
June 22, 1994... Can it be said that, as with signs, texts function on the basis of their differences? Of course the work of Joseph Zobel from Martinique benefited from the politico-cultural context of the thirties and fifties. But it has remained in the...

Rape of bodies, rape of souls: from the surgeon to the psychiatrist, from slave trade to the slavery of comfort in the work of Edouard Glissant.
June 22, 1994... The deportation of Blacks created a singular situation in the deadly encounter between Europe and non-European peoples. Indeed, the African slave was subjected in a foreign land to a domination that was just as foreign to his experience (see...

(Dis)placing marginality: cultural identity and creole resistance in Glissant and Maximin. (Edouard Glissant and Daniel Maximin) (Caribbean Literature)
June 22, 1994... I The articulation of resistance holds particular resonance for the literature of the colonized. The process of colonization itself-the subjection to a colonial discourse - generates alterity and dislocation on the part of the...

Mimeticism, reactionary nativism, and the possibility of postcolonial identity in Derek Walcott's 'Dream on Monkey Mountain.' (Caribbean Literature)
June 22, 1994... Establishing both a social and a personal identity which are not determined by the oppressor has been a recurrent theme of subaltern writers, from postcolonials, to women, to racial and ethnic minorities. Whether spoken of in terms of...

Outside the eyes of the Other: George Lamming and definition in 'Of Age and Innocence.' (Caribbean Literature)
June 22, 1994... The subject of Caribbean definition has occupied and engaged almost every writer of the Caribbean region. This is natural because in so many respects writing is a form of self-definition within a certain defined society and culture. Writers...

West Indian mythology and its literary illustrations. (Caribbean Literature)
June 22, 1994... "Mythology is the collection of myths of a people, a civilization, a religion." Those myths may vary from the cosmogonic to the historic (from the transfiguration of a feat of arms into an epic, the creation of heroes from real characters)...

Black African literature from America, myth or reality? Extrapolating from an imaginary history, a story of the imagination, and an anecdote. (Caribbean Literature)
June 22, 1994... I pondered long and hard before deciding to share these thoughts with you. This is not a college lecture, not an academic paper, not a discourse on techniques of literary creation. Instead, a clarification of something of a rather personal...

Does it matter why Walcott received the prize? (Derek Walcott's Nobel Prize) (Caribbean Literature)
June 22, 1994... One of the most celebrated mass,media events in the literary world surrounds the tense moment which occurs each year in October in Stockholm when the Secretary of the Nobel Foundation announces the name of the Prize Winner. The announcement...

Poetique de la relation. (Caribbean Literature)
June 22, 1994... The Modernist Context It is, perhaps, only appropriate to begin a discussion of the idea of creolization with its revaluation of the traditional commonplaces of Caribbean literature - uprooting, identity, and exile - with the retort...

L'Exil, entre l'ancrage et la fuite: l'ecrivain haitien. (Caribbean Literature)
June 22, 1994... The Modernist Context It is, perhaps, only appropriate to begin a discussion of the idea of creolization with its revaluation of the traditional commonplaces of Caribbean literature - uprooting, identity, and exile - with the retort...

Eloge de la creolite. (Caribbean Literature)
June 22, 1994... The Modernist Context It is, perhaps, only appropriate to begin a discussion of the idea of creolization with its revaluation of the traditional commonplaces of Caribbean literature - uprooting, identity, and exile - with the retort...

Lettres creoles: Tracees antillaises et continentales de la litterature, 1655-1975. (Caribbean Literature)
June 22, 1994... The Modernist Context It is, perhaps, only appropriate to begin a discussion of the idea of creolization with its revaluation of the traditional commonplaces of Caribbean literature - uprooting, identity, and exile - with the retort...

Colonial Space: Spatiality in the Discourse of German South West Africa, 1884-1915. (Caribbean Literature)
June 22, 1994... Academic books usually have a title and a subtitle, between which there may be a certain tension. The title of John Noyes's book is Colonial Space, its subtitle Spatiality in the Discourse of German South West Africa 1884-1915. Together they...

Come Back to Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies. (Caribbean Literature)
June 22, 1994... When it comes to the production of poetry in the English language, the West Indies is possibly one of the most prolific regions in the literary world: it has not only given us world class poets such as Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, and...

Zouk: World Music in the West Indies. (Caribbean Literature)
June 22, 1994... For more than a decade, Zouk has been the most popular dance music of the Antilles. Sung in Creole, based on earlier Antillean rhythms, using some West Indian percussion instruments, it is a music of the francophone Caribbean, and its home is...

Litterature et identite creole aux Antilles. (Caribbean Literature)
June 22, 1994... The literature of the Antilles - in its diversity of expression, in its successes that are multiplying through the exceptional production of Edouard Glissant and Maryse Conde and the remarkable emergence of Patrick Chamoiseau and the...

La Litterature franco-antillaise: Haiti, Guadeloupe et Martinique. (Caribbean Literature)
June 22, 1994... The literature of the Antilles - in its diversity of expression, in its successes that are multiplying through the exceptional production of Edouard Glissant and Maryse Conde and the remarkable emergence of Patrick Chamoiseau and the...

The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. (Caribbean Literature)
June 22, 1994... Benitez Rojo's rereading of the Caribbean borrows its central metaphor from the world of science. His point of departure is chaos theory, which holds that in nature order and disorder are not the antithesis of each other, but rather function...

Les Merveilleux exploits de Djeki La Njambe, 2 vols.
June 22, 1994... It is no easy task to bring an oral performance into print, and that is what the editors of these volumes have chosen not to do. They present a bilingual text, with Duala and French on facing pages, which is the result of multiple recording...

Litteratures et ecritures en langues africaines.
June 22, 1994... This book opens with a six-stanza untranslated poem in an unspecified language. (It happens to be tshiLuba.) There is rich irony here since a book purporting to discuss literature in African languages must, of course, deal with the problem of...

The World of African Music: Stern's Guide to Contemporary African Music, vol. 2.
June 22, 1994... The popular music industry in Africa is greatly influenced by its socioeconomic and political contexts. Although some technical facilities exist to support the local production of sound recordings, the need for a wider consumer market and...

Studies in the Short Fiction of Mahfouz and Idris.
June 22, 1994... Studies in the Short Fiction of Mahfouz and Idris is an ambitious book whose major shortcoming is its wide scope. In fact, this book is many books in one. On the one hand, it adopts a comparative approach, introducing Hemingway and Camus...

African Novels and the Question of Orality.
June 22, 1994... The relationship between the modern African novel and narratives recorded from oral sources is of considerable interest to those seeking to distinguish the African version of the novel from what is often viewed as its European progenitor....

African Literature and African Historical Experiences.
June 22, 1994... In my review of one of the earlier published volumes in this series (see World Literature Today 65.3 [1991]: 532), I criticized the absence of rigor in the editorial work of the compilers. The present volume, African Literature and African...

Dambudzo Marechera: A Source Book on his Life and Work.
June 22, 1994... This thoroughly-researched book, consisting of 124 documents linked by passages of biography and commentary, is essential reading for anyone seriously interested in the life and work of one of Africa's most learned, daring, and subversively...

Changing Africa: The First Independent Generation of Independent Cape Verde.
June 22, 1994... In his dedication to Essays in Portuguese-African Literature (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1969), Gerald Moser thanks a luncheon group at that university - "They were the first to hear me report on the, to me, exciting and...

Betrayals of the Body Politic: The Literary Commitments of Nadine Gordimer.
June 22, 1994... How will Nadine Gordimer be read in the next century, when the conflict in South Africa may no longer be dramatic front-page news? Andrew Vogel Ettin offers a persuasive interpretive model for freeing Gordimer's fiction from the limitations...

After the Jihad: The Reign of Ahmad Al-Kabir in the Western Sudan.
June 22, 1994... During the 18th and 19th centuries the Western Sudan witnessed a political and social revolution of remarkable scale. This revolution was led by Muslim visionaries and reformers who sought the destruction of what they considered a corrupt...