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The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge Studies in World Literature)
by Sarah QuesadaThe African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature unearths a buried African archive within widely-read Latinx writers of the last fifty years. It challenges dominant narratives in World Literature and transatlantic studies that ignore Africa's impact in broader Latin American culture. Sarah Quesada argues that these canonical works evoke textual memorials of African memory. She shows how the African Atlantic haunts modern Latinx and Caribbean writing, and examines the disavowal or distortion of the African subject in the constructions of national, racial, sexual, and spiritual Latinx identity. Quesada shows how themes such as the 19th century 'scramble for Africa,' the decolonizing wars, Black internationalism, and the neoliberal turn are embedded in key narratives. Drawing from multilingual archives about West and Central Africa, she examines how the legacies of colonial French, Iberian, British and U.S. Imperialisms have impacted on the relationships between African and Latinx identities. This is the first book-length project to address the African colonial and imperial inheritance of Latinx literature.
An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence
by Zeinab BadawiAlready a major international bestseller, Zeinab Badawi’s sweeping and much-needed survey of African history traces the continent’s extraordinary legacy from prehistory to the present from the African perspective.“Equal parts gripping and galvanizing. . . . Researched across more than 30 countries, it brings the dazzling civilizations of pre-colonial Africa vividly to life. A book that feels both long-overdue—and wholly worth the wait.” —British VogueEveryone is originally from Africa, and this book is therefore for everyone.For too long, Africa’s history has been dominated by western narratives of slavery and colonialism, or simply ignored. Now, Zeinab Badawi sets the record straight.In this fascinating book, Badawi guides us through Africa’s spectacular history—from the very origins of our species, through ancient civilizations and medieval empires with remarkable queens and kings, to the miseries of conquest and the elation of independence. Visiting more than thirty African countries to interview countless historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and local storytellers, she unearths buried histories from across the continent and gives Africa its rightful place in our global story.The result is a gripping new account of Africa: an epic, sweeping history of the oldest inhabited continent on the planet, told through the voices of Africans themselves.
African Identities: Pan-Africanisms and Black Identities
by Kadiatu KannehThis fascinating and well researched study explores the meaning generated by `Africa' and `Blackness' throughout the century. Using literary texts, autobiography, ethnography, and historical documents, African Identities discusses how ideas of Africa as an origin, as a cultural whole, or as a complicated political problematic, emerge as signifiers for analysis of modernity, nationhood and racial difference. Kanneh provides detailed readings of a range of literary texts, including novels by: * Toni Morrison * Alice Walker * Gloria Naylor * Ngugi Wa Thiong'o * Chinua Achebe * and V.S. Naipaul. For anyone interested in literature, history, anthropology, political writing, feminist or cultural analysis, this book opens up new areas of thought across disciplines.
African Immigrants in Contemporary Spanish Texts: Crossing the Strait (New Hispanisms: Cultural and Literary Studies)
by Debra Faszer-McMahon Victoria L. KetzAround the turn of 21st Century, Spain welcomed more than six million foreigners, many of them from various parts of the African continent. How African immigrants represent themselves and are represented in contemporary Spanish texts is the subject of this interdisciplinary collection. Analyzing blogs, films, translations, and literary works by contemporary authors including Donato Ndongo (Ecquatorial Guinea), Abderrahman El Fathi (Morocco), Chus Gutiérrez (Spain), Juan Bonilla (Spain), and Bahia Mahmud Awah (Western Sahara), the contributors interrogate how Spanish cultural texts represent, idealize, or sympathize with the plight of immigrants, as well as the ways in which immigrants themselves represent Spain and Spanish culture. At the same time, these works shed light on issues related to Spain’s racial, ethnic, and sexual boundaries; the appeal of images of Africa in the contemporary marketplace; and the role of Spain’s economic crisis in shaping attitudes towards immigration. Taken together, the essays are a convincing reminder that cultural texts provide a mirror into the perceptions of a society during times of change.
African Impressions: How African Worldviews Shaped the British Geographical Imagination across the Early Enlightenment
by Rebekah MitseinNineteenth-century European representations of Africa are notorious for depicting the continent with a blank interior. But there was a time when British writers filled Africa with landed empires and contiguous trade routes linked together by a network of rivers. This geographical narrative proliferated in fictional and nonfictional texts alike, and it was born not from fanciful speculation but from British interpretations of what Africans said and showed about themselves and their worlds. Investigations of the representation of Africa in British texts have typically concluded that the continent operated in the British imagination as a completely invented space with no meaningful connection to actual African worlds, or as an inert realm onto which writers projected their expansionist fantasies. With African Impressions, Rebekah Mitsein revises that narrative, demonstrating that African elites successfully projected expressions of their sovereignty, wealth, right to power, geopolitical clout, and religious exceptionalism into Europe long before Europeans entered sub-Saharan Africa. Mitsein considers the ways that African self-representation continued to drive European impressions of the continent across the early Enlightenment, fueling desires to find the sources of West Africa’s gold and the city states along the Niger, to establish a relationship with the Christian kingdom of Prester John, and to discover the source of the Nile. Through an analysis of a range of genres, including travel narratives, geography books, maps, verse, and fiction, Mitsein shows how African strategies of self-representation and European strategies for representing Africa grew increasingly inextricable, as the ideas that Africans presented about themselves and their worlds migrated from contact zones to texts and back again. The geographical narratives that arose from this cycle, which unfolded over hundreds of years, were made to fit expansionist agendas, but they remained rooted in the African worlds and worldviews that shaped them.
African-Language Literatures: Perspectives on isiZulu fiction and popular black television series
by Innocentia Jabulisile MhlambiAfrican-language writing is in crisis. The conditions under which African writing developed in the past (only remotely similar to those of Western models), resulted in an inability of Eurocentric literary models to explore the hermeneutic world of African language poetics inherited from the oral and the modern worlds. Existing modes of criticism in the study of this literary tradition are often unsuited for a nuanced understanding of the intrinsic and extrinsic aspects at play in the composition, production and reading of these literatures. In African-Language Literatures, Innocentia Jabulisile Mhlambi charts new directions in the study of African-language literatures generally and isiZulu fiction in particular by proposing that African popular arts and culture models be considered as a logical solution to current debates and challenges. Mhlambi shows how the popular arts and culture approach brings into relationship the oral and written forms, the local and the international, and elitist and popular genres, and locates and places the resultant emerging, eclectic culture into its socio-historical context. She uses this theoretical approach to explore – in a wide range of cultural products – what matters or what is of interest to the people, irrespective of social hierarchies and predispositions. It is her contention that, in profound ways the African-language literary tradition evinces diversity, complexity and fluidity, and that this should be seen as an invitation to look at systems of meaning which do not hide their connections with the facts of power and material life.
African Languages and Literatures in the 21st Century
by Esther Mukewa Lisanza Leonard MuakaThis edited book examines the crucial role still played by African languages in pedagogy and literatures in the 21st century, generating insights into how they effectively serve cultural needs across the African continent and beyond. Boldly positioning African languages as key resources in the 21st century, chapters focus on themes such as language revolt by marginalized groups at grassroots level, the experience of American students learning African languages, female empowerment through the use of African languages in music, film and literary works, and immigration issues. The contributions are written by scholars of language, literature, education and linguistics, and the book will be of interest to students and scholars in these and related areas.
African Languages/Langues Africaines: Volume 5 (1) 1979 (Linguistic Surveys of Africa #27)
by Kahombo Mateene P. AkụJụobi Nwachukwu David DalbyVolume 5 (1) of African Languages originally published in 1979, is a special issue focussing on the Bantu languages in Tanzania. The languages are discussed according to 4 regions of Tanzania and although the sub-grouping is lexicostatistical, the classification is borne out by other consdierations, such as phonology and verbal morphology.
African Languages/Langues Africaines: Volume 5 (2) 1979 (Linguistic Surveys of Africa #28)
by Kahombo Mateene P. AkụJụobi Nwachukwu David DalbyVolume 5 (2) of African Languages originally published in 1979, is a special issue focussing on languages and education in Africa. There are chapters on African language education from a socio-linguistic perspective, the problems of bi-lingualism and multi-lingualism in Zaire and small languages in primary education.
African Languages/Langues Africaines: Volume 3 1977 (Linguistic Surveys of Africa #25)
by P. AkỤJỤobi NwachukwuVolume 3 of African Languages includes articles originally published in 1977, written in French and English on educational, literary, cultural, historical and socio-linguistic aspects of language in Africa, as well as descriptive and comparative studies. Among others there are chapters on the national language issue in Africa (Akan in Ghana), a socio-linguistic case study of the Hausa language in Nigeria and assimiliation and lexical coinages in Igbo.
African Languages/Langues Africaines: Volume 4 1978 (Linguistic Surveys of Africa #26)
by P. Akụjụobi NwachukwuVolume 4 of African Languages includes articles originally published in 1978, written in French and English on educational, literary, cultural, historical and socio-linguistic aspects of language in Africa, as well as descriptive and comparative studies. Among others there are chapters on lexical innovation in Zambian languages, Portuguese creole of Sénégal, the application of ethics in Hausa didactic poetry.
African Languages/Langues Africaines: Volume 2 1976 (Linguistic Surveys of Africa #24)
by P. AkỤjỤobi NwachukwuVolume 2 of African Languages includes articles originally published in 1976, written in French and English on educational, literary, cultural, historical and socio-linguistic aspects of language in Africa, as well as descriptive and comparative studies. Among others there are chapters on an early Vai manuscript from Liberia, John Clarke's unidentified Nago dialect and swahili secondary education in Tanzania.
African Languages/Langues Africaines: Volume 1 1975 (Linguistic Surveys of Africa #23)
by Various AuthorsVolume 1 of African Languages include articles originally published in 1975 and written in French and English on educational, literary, cultural, historical and socio-linguistic aspects of language in Africa, as well as descriptive and comparative studies. Among others there are chapters on African oral literature, the standardization of languages and education in Nigeria and a description of Shona spelling.
African Literature and Social Change: Tribe, Nation, Race
by Olakunle George“George rethinks the entirety of African literature by considering texts from the 19th century and mid-20th century alongside canonical texts.” —Neil ten Kortenaar, author of Debt, Law, RealismAlert to the ways in which critical theory and imaginative literature can enrich each other, African Literature and Social Change reframes the ongoing project of African literature. Concentrating on texts that are not usually considered together—writings by little-known black missionaries, so called “black whitemen,” and better-known 20th century intellectuals and creative writers—Olakunle George shows the ways in which these writings have addressed notions of ethnicity, nation, and race and how the debates need to be rehistoricized today. George presents Africa as a site of complex desires and contradictions, refashioning the way African literature is positioned within current discussions of globalism, diaspora, and postcolonialism.“A bold exploration of the complexity of different modes of writing about Africa in the context of current debates on the nature of the literary in the production of African knowledge. Concerned with a rhetoric of self-writing as it has developed over two hundred years, Olakunle George attends to local details within the larger configurations of colonial discourse in this ambitious and timely work. It is a caution against the neglect of the conditions of possibility that made an African literature possible.” —Simon Gikandi, author of Slavery and the Culture of Taste“A new and welcome addition to the field of African literary studies, Olakunle George’s African Literature and Social Change is dense where it needs to be and glories in productive close readings when its objects call for it.” —Comparative Literature Studies
African Literature and the CIA: Networks of Authorship and Publishing (Elements in Publishing and Book Culture)
by Caroline DavisDuring the period of decolonisation in Africa, the CIA subsidised a number of African authors, editors and publishers as part of its anti-communist covert propaganda strategy. Managed by two front organisations, the Congress of Cultural Freedom and the Farfield Foundation, its Africa programme stretched across the continent, with hubs in Ibadan, Kampala, Nairobi, Cape Town and Johannesburg. This Element unravels the hidden networks and associations underpinning African literary publishing in the 1960s; it investigates the success of the CIA in disrupting and infiltrating African literary magazines and publishing firms, and determines the extent to which new circuits of cultural and literary power emerged. Based on new archival evidence relating to the Transcription Centre, The Classic and The New African, it includes case studies of Wole Soyinka, Nat Nakasa and Bessie Head, which assess how their literary careers were influenced by these transnational literary institutions, and their response to these interventions.
African Literature, Animism and Politics: Animism And Politics (Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures #Vol. 4)
by Caroline RooneyThis book marks an important contribution to colonial and postcolonial studies in its clarification of the African discourse of consciousness and its far-reaching analyses of a literature of animism. It will be of great interest to scholars in many fields including literary and critical theory, philosophy, anthropology, politics and psychoanalysis.
African Literatures in English: East and West (Longman Literature In English Series)
by Gareth GriffithsHere is an introduction to the history of English writing from East and West Africa drawing on a range of texts from the slave diaspora to the post-war upsurge in African English language and literature from these regions.
African Media and Communication: Foundational Conversations (Routledge Contemporary Africa)
by Viola C. Milton Winston ManoThis book provides an important set of critical reflections from a selection of foundational scholars of African media and communication studies through biographical method. The book interrogates the center of mainstream academic scholarship by providing the foundational history and origins of an Africanist conceptual model while highlighting its significance globally.The editors use biographical and life story interviews to critically review the respondents’ interpretations of their key works and arguments in relation to key moments in the field, the continent and globally. Though the book is focussed on recovering pioneering arguments by key thinkers in African media and communication, efforts of individual academics are to be understood in the context of their work with others and within institutions that are networked, locally and globally. By bringing together many of the leading figures of African communication and media studies in a single volume, this book provides a critical corrective to the dearth of knowledge and information about who the key thinkers are and what their key arguments, theories and models for media and communication in African contexts entail.As such, it will be of interest to scholars of media and communications in Africa, and the global south.
The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing
by Jeanne-Marie JacksonAn ambitious look at the African novel and its connections to African philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuriesThe African Novel of Ideas focuses on the role of the philosophical novel and the place of philosophy more broadly in the intellectual life of the African continent, from the early twentieth century to today. Examining works from the Gold Coast, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, and tracing how such writers as J. E. Casely Hayford, Imraan Coovadia, Tendai Huchu, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, and Stanlake Samkange reconcile deep contemplation with their social situations, Jeanne-Marie Jackson offers a new way of reading and understanding African literature.Jackson begins with Fante anticolonial worldliness in prenationalist Ghana, moves through efforts to systematize Shona philosophy in 1970s Zimbabwe, looks at the Ugandan novel Kintu as a treatise on pluralistic rationality, and arrives at the treatment of “philosophical suicide” by current southern African writers. As Jackson charts philosophy's evolution from a dominant to marginal presence in African literary discourse across the past hundred years, she assesses the push and pull of subjective experience and abstract thought.The first major transnational exploration of African literature in conversation with philosophy, The African Novel of Ideas redefines the place of the African experience within literary history.
African Perspectives on Literary Translation (Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting Studies)
by Judith Inggs Ella WehrmeyerThis collection serves as a showcase for literary translation research with a focus on African perspectives, highlighting theoretical and methodological developments in the discipline while shedding further light on the literary landscape in Africa. The book offers a framework for understanding key approaches and topics in literary translation situated in the African context, covering foundational concepts as well as new directions within the field. The first half of the volume focuses on the translation product, exploring such topics as translation strategies, literary genres, and self-translation, while the second half examines process and reception, allowing for an in-depth look at agency, habitus, and ethics. Each chapter is structured to allow for the introduction of a given theoretical aspect of literary translation followed by a summary of a completed research project with an African focus showing theory in practice, offering a model for readers to build their own literary translation research projects while also underscoring the range of perspectives and unique challenges to literary translation work in Africa. This unique volume is a key resource for students and scholars in translation studies, giving visibility to African perspectives on literary translation while pointing the way forward for future research directions.
African Perspectives on the Teaching and Learning of English in Higher Education (Global South Perspectives on TESOL)
by Alexandra Esimaje Bertus Van Rooy ‘Demola Jolayemi Daniel Nkemleke Ernest KluThis book brings together the work of African scholars and educators directly involved in initiatives to improve the teaching and learning of English in higher education across Africa. Offering alternative perspectives across different African countries with examples of decolonised practice in research, the book provides a critical discussion and examples of successful practice in the teaching of English in Africa. Each chapter of the book reports on a specific context and a specific teaching and/or learning initiative in higher education, with emphasis on comparability of information and on clear evaluation and critical analysis of the intervention. The editors offer a thoughtful comparison of different methods, strategies and results to provide an authoritative reference to effective strategies for English teaching and learning. The book paints a cohesive picture of the field of English language teaching in Africa and will be of great interest to researchers, scholars and postgraduate students in the areas of applied linguistics, English teaching and comparative education.
African Philosophic Sagacity in Selected African Languages and Proverbs
by Wilfred LajulThis book explores African philosophic sagacity, or wisdom philosophy, as proposed by Odera Oruka in his “Four Trends in Current African Philosophy” (1981), which he later expanded to six trends (1998). Oruka defines philosophic sagacity as wisdom philosophy, or philosophy of the wise men of Africa who are independent, liberal and non-conformist thinkers, and who often deviate from the accepted common norms of their societies. This book takes philosophic sagacity discourse beyond Oruka’s definition by encompassing traditional wise sayings and proverbs. It combines individual liberal thinkers and the communal ideas, and cherishes both rational and emotional engagement, offering a broader understanding of African philosophic sagacity. Wilfred Lajul opens the door for new researchers to venture into the study of African languages, wisdom sayings, and proverbs, and helps to unveil the content of this philosophy from the perspective of different African societies.
An African Philosophy of Personhood, Morality, and Politics
by Motsamai MolefeThis book explores the salient ethical idea of personhood in African philosophy. It is a philosophical exposition that pursues the ethical and political consequences of the normative idea of personhood as a robust or even foundational ethical category. Personhood refers to the moral achievements of the moral agent usually captured in terms of a virtuous character, which have consequences for both morality and politics. The aim is not to argue for the plausibility of the ethical and political consequences of the idea of personhood. Rather, the book showcases some of the moral-political content and consequences of the account it presents.
African Radio and Minority Languages: Participation and Representation (Routledge African Media, Culture and Communication Studies)
by null Limukani MatheWithin Africa, radio provides an important platform for accommodating diverse linguistic groups and enabling speakers to express themselves in their own local languages. This book investigates how radio broadcasting across the continent provides a platform for cultural participation and the representation of minority language speakers in a contested public sphere. In African media, a fierce contest wages for representation and participation, in which majority languages often emerge at the exclusion of minority ethnolinguistic groups. This book considers the important role that radio can play in broadcasting in minority languages. Drawing on in-depth original analysis, ethnographic observation and interviews with minority language radio hosts and guests from across South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Malawi, Namibia, Mozambique, Lesotho and Kenya, this book considers to what extent African radio is accommodative of minority languages and what the challenges and prospects are for this. Ultimately, the book argues that radio’s three-tier system of broadcasting through analogue and digital radio leaves the medium of radio particularly well placed to provide equal access for ethnolinguistic groups in Africa.This ambitious and broad-ranging study will be an essential read for scholars and students of media studies and sociolinguistics in Africa.
African Shakespeare: Subversions, Appropriations, Negotiations (Routledge Studies in African Literature)
by Ifeoluwa Aboluwade Serena Talento Pepetual Mforbe Chiangong Oliver NyambiAfrican Shakespeare: Subversions, Appropriations, Negotiations uncovers the multidimensional inventions, synergies, and experimentations that have emerged from performative, political, literary, and conceptual encounters with Shakespeare and his oeuvre in African contexts. Divided into three broad and overlapping parts, the chapters of the book critically explore issues of decoloniality and postcoloniality; nation-building and state corruption; history and memory; gender and feminism; translation and adaptation from diverse theoretical standpoints. The book displaces the emphasis on Shakespeare’s works to productively illuminate the multi-layered significance of African epistemes, politico-aesthetics, languages and socio-cultural realities to the practice and process of literary and theatrical intervention and creation. Building on and extending extant scholarship in the field of African Shakespeare, the contributions in the volume not only enhance knowledge of African Shakespearean creations but also enrich African Studies and Shakespeare Studies by opening up new possibilities for transdisciplinary dialogues and cross-fertilization.The book will be useful for students and scholars of African Theatre and Performance, Cultural Studies, (Global) Shakespeare Studies, Translation and Adaptation Studies and Post-colonial Studies.