A Companion to African Literatures

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Группа авторов. A Companion to African Literatures

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Guide

Pages

Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture

A COMPANION TO AFRICAN LITERATURES

Notes on Contributors

Preface

1 East and Central Africa: An Introduction

African‐Language Literatures and the Language Question

The Makerere Conference

The Abolition of the English Department

Selected Writers

Diasporic Imaginaries

Present Directions

Bibliography

2 Rereading East African Literature Through a Human Rights Lens: The Example of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not, Child

Bibliography

Notes

3 Of Authenticity and Engagement in Francophone African Cultural Production

The African Author and the Duty Toward Engagement

Language and Postcolonial Performance

Cinema and African Postmodernisms

Writing Without France: Defining New Approaches

Bibliography

Notes

4 Literature and Hybridity in Mauritius and Réunion

Language and Literacy

The Colonial Novel and Hybridity

Fluid Hybridities in the Twentieth and Twenty‐First Centuries

Bibliography

Notes

5 The Representation of Nation and National Identity in Modern Amharic Literature

Constructing and Narrating the Modern Nation, 1896–1960

Walks on a Thin Line between Hope and Despair, 1960–1974

The Quest for Hibretesebawinet, 1974–1991

The Phoenix Rises from the Ashes of Ethnic Strife: 1991 to Present

The Politics of Authorship, Language, and Identity

Acknowledgments

Bibliography. Selected Primary Works

Secondary Works

Notes

6 Swahili Literature (Fasihi ya Kiswahili )

Introduction: The Intercultural Heritage

Oral Literature/Orature (Fasihi Tamshi)

Early Writing: Beginnings in Religious Verse

The Rise of Secular Writing

Poetry of the Nonconforming “Modernists”

Prose

Drama and Theater

Women Writers and Gender Concerns

Swahili Translations

Conclusion

Bibliography

7 North Africa: An Introduction

The Nomenclature: North Africa, the Maghreb, the Mashriq, and Africa

Institutions of Literature

Vectors of Literary Traffic

The Multilingual Imperative

Dominant, Emergent, and Receding Voices and Forms

Conclusion

Bibliography

Notes

8 Nation and Identity in Modern Arabic Literature in Egypt

Bibliography

9 Hyphens & Hymens: francoarab Literature of the Maghreb

Our Letter

Hyphens

… & Hymens

Bibliography

Notes

10 Translation and North African Letters

Arab–Latin American Translation Flows

Sonallah Ibrahim: Warda from Egypt to Cuba

Mohamed Makhzangi: Clandestine in Chernobyl

Bibliography

Notes

11 Cross‐Pollination and Interweavings between the Maghreb and Sub‐Saharan Africa Through Art, Cinema, and Music

Artistic Mnemotechnical Devices to Fight the Intangible Appearance of Ghosts: Clarke, Attia, Koko Bi, Allouache, and Awadi

In Further Pursuit of Alliances and Modes of Resistance Through Contemplation: Zinoun, Sissako, Ndoye, and Abd Al Malek

Conclusion

Acknowledgment

Bibliography

Notes

12 France and North Africa: A Cinematic Retrospective of Centuries of Entangled Relations

Early Encounters Unfold in Film

The Birth of Cinema and the History of Cinematic Relation Between North Africa and France

North Africa in French Cinema

Film Producers of North African Descent in France

Amazigh and Women Filmmaking

Bibliography

Notes

13 Southern Africa: An Introduction

Defining the Region

Southern African Literature: A Mirage?

Coda: Figures of the Frontline

Bibliography

Notes

14 Anglophone Literature of South Africa

British Imperialism and the Segregation Era

Apartheid and the “Interregnum”

Post‐Apartheid and the “Post‐Transition”

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Selected Anthologies

Notes

15 The Machinery of Life‐Writing Under Zimbabwe’s Third Chimurenga

The Machinery of Life Writing: A Contextual Meaning

Transforming Lives Lived to Lives Told

Bibliography

Notes

16 The Afrikaans Cultural Expressions of the Powerless and Subjugated

Introduction

The Afrikaans of the Powerless and Subjugated

The Indigenous Oral Tradition and its Afrikaans Continuities

Carnivals, Choirs, and the Theater of Reclamation

Alternative Literacies and Religion

Our Foreigners: Kleurlingdigters and ’n Bantoeskrywer

Black Consciousness: Literature, Resistance, and Struggle

Post‐Apartheid: Self‐Discovery, Reclamation, and Dialect

Conclusion

Bibliography

Notes

17 Lusophone Southern African Literature (Angola, Mozambique)

Angola

Mozambique

Bibliography

Notes

18 A Socio‐Critical Survey of Black South African English Poetry, 1900–2000

Emergence of a Mission‐Educated African Elite

Protest Poetry of the 1930s and 1940s

Sharpeville: The Start of a Decade of Silence

The Protest Poets of the 1970s and 1980s

Bibliography. Anthologies

Criticism

Notes

19 West Africa: An Introduction

Geographical Boundaries, Literary Horizons

Postcolonial Self‐Affirmations

Reading the Postnational Moment

Bibliography

Notes

20 West African Literature in English

Things Fall Apart and a New Center

Making It New and African

After 1966

A Literature Reborn

Bibliography

Notes

21 Migration, Literary Imagination, and Mirages in the Francophone Text: Paths to Anthropological Mutilation

The “Lucky Generation” Takes Its Leave

Intertextuality: Textual Migrations and Literary Tradition

The Unrelenting Chimera

On the Road to Anthropological Mutilation

Creative Disorder

Conclusion

Bibliography

Notes

22 Reading Yorùbá Literature

Introduction

Yorùbá Poetry

Yorùbá Drama

Yorùbá Fiction

Conclusion

Bibliography

Note

23 Post‐Hybrid Conjunctive Consciousness in the Literature of the New African Diaspora

I

II

III

IV

Bibliography

24 Outing Africa: On Sexualities, Gender, and Transgender in African Literatures

From the Mid‐Nineteenth Century Through the 1960s and 1970s

From the Late Twentieth Century through the “Turn of the Millennium” on to the Contemporary Moment

Trans Sahara and the New Media

Bibliography. Primary Texts

Filmography

Secondary Texts

Notes

25 African Literature and the European Canon: From Past to Present and Back Again

Background

The Twenty‐First Century

J. E. Casely Hayford as African Comparatist

Bibliography

Notes

26 War, Human Rights, and Historical Representation: Torture as Synecdoche

I

II

III

IV

V

Bibliography

Notes

27 African Literature’s Other Media: Art Film, Nollywood

Nollywood and “Minor Transnationalism”

From Christianity to Corporate Sponsorship

Nollywood Stardom

Performing Ethnicity

Conclusions: The Video Aesthetic in African Cinema

Bibliography

28 Navigating Digital Worlds: African Literary Forms in the Digital Age

New Media Forms and Platforms

Digital Geographies

Facebook Fictionality

New Opportunities and Challenges

Bibliography

Notes

Index

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This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements and certain major authors, in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new perspectives and positions on contexts and on canonical and post‐canonical texts, orientating the beginning student in new fields of study and providing the experienced undergraduate and new graduate with current and new directions, as pioneered and developed by leading scholars in the field.

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The subsequent public memory of this moment in the shorthand of “abolition of the English Department” rendered the memo and the moment open to oversimplification in succeeding renditions. In the process, an important conversation about working assumptions of literary value that determine syllabi decisions has largely been under‐explored, yet it is one of the more interesting and prescient concerns the three academics raised. As they argued, the emphasis on teaching works of “undisputed literary excellence” not only obscures questions of positionality that shape literary value, but is also counterintuitive, as in any society “it is better to study representative works which mirror their society rather than to study a few isolated ‘classics,’ either of their own or of a foreign culture” (441).

In the end, the three main universities in the region – the Universities of Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, and Makerere University – replaced the English Department with Literature Departments. It would be a while, though, before the questions of value were embraced in the spirit proposed by the three scholars, especially where local popular fiction was concerned, as many of these departments retained inherited ideas of great literature and its centrality to literary studies. These same dynamics would later play out as cross‐generational tensions between the academy – primarily the University of Nairobi professoriate – and the emerging generation of young writers affiliated with the Kwani literary magazine and their iconoclastic approach to notions of the literary. A second unforeseen result was that the beneficiaries of the Ngugi–Anyumba–Taban 1972 revolution were left “stuck in their grove of stylistics, oral literature and the nineteenth‐and‐twentieth‐century European canon” to the exclusion of popular literature and cultures and postmodernism (Siundu 2016, 1549–1550). At the same time, it is interesting to revisit these debates and their implications in the region, at a time when the South African academy finds itself confronted by these same issues through student demands for what they term the decolonization of curricula.

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