Research in African Literatures articles from September 1993

Research in African Literatures archives from September 1993

The Literature of War.
September 22, 1993... Theodora Akachi Ezeigbo and Liz Gunner, eds. issue of African Languages and Cultures 4.1 (1991): 1-99. This special number contains eight essays that came out of a workshop organized by the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1990....

Introduction to Poetry.
September 22, 1993... Obi Maduakor. Nigeria: Fulladu, 1991. 75 page. In this slim text, Obi Maduakor, a well-known scholar, astute literary critic, and teacher, confronts and accomplishes a noble but daunting task: to introduce poetry reading and appreciation...

Out of Exile: South African Writers Speak.
September 22, 1993... Kevin Goddard and Charles Wessels, eds. NELM Interviews 5. Grahamstown: National English Literary Museum, 1992. 91 pages. Unlike in the U.S., where writers are seldom thought of as major cultural and political figures, in other...

'Dances with bones': Hove's romanticized Africa. (Chenjerai Hove)
September 22, 1993... In 1989, Chenjerai Hove's novel Bones won the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa. Since then it has been translated into many languages(1) and has received enthusiastic reviews.(2) Indeed, it has become something of a cult book--particularly...

The 'Beur nation': toward a theory of 'departenance.'
September 22, 1993... . . . I am the daughter of a great Indian chief, my brother is his son, and my mother is a queen. Next to me, Mireille, is a tramp. (Belghoul 87) Integration will be achieved in any case, but the society that emerges from it...

The passion of perpetua: a generic approach to Beti's 'Perpetue.' (Mongo Beti's novel 'Perpetue et l'habitude du malheur')
September 22, 1993... The interpretation of Mongo Beti's novel Perpetue et l'habitude du mallheur poses several problems, chief among which are those of motivation and focus. As readers we wonder: Why does Essola bother to search out the details of Perpetua's...

Narrating Mande heroism in the Malian novel: negotiating postcolonial identity in Diabate's 'Le Boucher de Kouta.' (Massa Makan Diabate)
September 22, 1993... The purpose of this essay is to examine the novel Le Boucher de Kouta by the Malian writer Massa Makan Diabate. In broad strokes, my project is to determine how an author's social identity along with certain psycho-social concepts particular...

'Only connect': 'Anthills of the Savannah' and Achebe's 'Trouble with Nigeria.' (Chinua Achebe)
September 22, 1993... The work of Chinua Achebe is a valuable locus for studying the interplay of village, ethnic unit, nation-state, and race in the configuration of identity in Africa. Ache be is himself the chief of his village, Ogidi, and at one time he...

Sites of paranoia and taboo: Lessing's 'The Grass is Singing' and Gordimer's 'July's People.' (Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer)
September 22, 1993... Although July's People (1981) appeared thirty-one years after The Grass is Singing (1950), and while the plot-lines and their stylistic and structural treatments are dissimilar, the novels exhibit remarkable congruities. Both encode...

On translating the 'untranslated': Chapter 14 of 'Wer pa Lawino' by Okot p'Bitek.
September 22, 1993... When Okot came to North America in 1967, he was already the Director of the National Theatre in Kampala, Uganda. He had already published Song of Lawino. And he was leading the Ugandan National Dance Troupe: the celebrated "Heartbeat of...

A translation of Pathe Diagne's 'Theses on epistemology of the real and the neo-Pharaonic problematic.'
September 22, 1993... Is there such a thing as African philosophy ? At the first international meeting of the Conseil Interafricain de Philosophie (Inter African Council of Philosophy) held at Cotonou, Benin, in 1978, it was the consensus that what has been...

Literature and change in South Africa.
September 22, 1993... As the shackles of Apartheid's oppression slowly loosen in South Africa we see a surge of creative activity in literary and other fields. Much of the change began in 1989-90 with the release of Nelson Mandela and many other political...

Afa-Warq: Un Intellectuel ethiopien temoin de son temps, 1868-1947.
September 22, 1993... Alain Rouaud. Paris: C.N.R.S., 1991. 363 pages. In the late 1960s, when I started research for the Amharic chapter in my Four African Literatures (1971), three printed pages were enough to summarize all the biographical information that...

Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts: A Guide to Research Practices.
September 22, 1993... Ruth Finnegan. ASA Research Methods in Social Anthropology. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. 284 pages. This volume is the fourth in the British Association of Social Anthropologists' series of "Research Methods in Social...

The Faces of Nigerian Theatre.
September 22, 1993... Geoffrey Axworthy et al. with Chris Nwamuo. Calabar, Nigeria: Centaur Publishers, 1990. 76 pages. In varying degrees, these three books examine the theatrical practices of peoples in Africa and African peoples in the Diaspora within...

Socio-Political Theatre in Nigeria.
September 22, 1993... I. Peter Ukpokodu. Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. 300 pages. In varying degrees, these three books examine the theatrical practices of peoples in Africa and African peoples in the Diaspora within specific cultural...

Archetypes, Imprecators, and Victims of Fate: Origins and Developments of Satire in Black Drama.
September 22, 1993... Femi Euba. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1989. 199 pages. In varying degrees, these three books examine the theatrical practices of peoples in Africa and African peoples in the Diaspora within specific cultural perspectives....

African Cinema.
September 22, 1993... Manthia Diawara. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992. African Cinema is a difficult volume to review. It is published as if it were a book, when, in fact, it is a collection of previously published essays and dissertation chapters. To...

Literary research in South Africa: the case of the National English Literary Museum.
September 22, 1993... As Stephen Gray has noted, South African English literature has really only come into its own since the early 1970s (4). Having spent nearly a century in the shadow of the metropolitan literary canon, South African literature is only now...

The birth of an African literary language: the case of Amharic.
September 22, 1993... Amharic, the African-Semitic tongue that is the national language of Ethiopia, has been spoken now for close to a thousand years. Furthermore, it emerged as the principal successor tongue and daughter language to Classical Ethiopia (Ge'ez)...

Notes on two sacred Afro-Cuban songs in contemporary settings.
September 22, 1993... If hunting is not those heads on the wall, neither is African praise-poetry limited to those books on the shelf, nor to spindly trophies of fieldwork stopped in its tracks for want of funding. No, it's here for the listening, live and on...