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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Chinua Achebe And The Post-Colonial Esthetic: Writing, Identity, And National Formation, Simon Gikandi
Chinua Achebe And The Post-Colonial Esthetic: Writing, Identity, And National Formation, Simon Gikandi
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Chinua Achebe is recognized as one of Africa's most important and influential writers, and his novels have focused on the ways in which the European tradition of the novel and African modes of expression relate to each other in both complementary and contesting ways. Achebe's novels are informed by an important theory of writing which tries to mediate the politics of the novel as a form of commentary on the emergence and transformation of nationalism which constitutes the African writer's epistemological context. Achebe's esthetic has been overdetermined by the changing discourse on representation and national identity in colonial and post-colonial …
Oligarchy And Orature In The Novels Of Nuruddin Farah, Derek Wright
Oligarchy And Orature In The Novels Of Nuruddin Farah, Derek Wright
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In Farah's fiction Somali oral traditions are shown to possess a resilient strength and even a revolutionary vitality. Yet they are not envisaged polemically, as unsullied alternatives and sources of counter-discourse to post-colonial realities: rather, they are shown to be implicated in their evils and corruptions. Faced with a mode of reality built on oral discourse, where the written word is ruthlessly suppressed, written texts either retreat into secret cipher or are themselves infiltrated by the vaporous oral reality of public life and take on selected elements of oral literary conventions: notably, their fluid indeterminacy of meaning and interpretative openness, …
The Political Alienation Of The Intellectual In Recent Zairian Fiction, Janice Spleth
The Political Alienation Of The Intellectual In Recent Zairian Fiction, Janice Spleth
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
A high proportion of recent Zairian fiction features intellectuals—educators, priests, students, and professionals—as major characters who are in some way alienated from society. This study documents the extent of this occurrence in novels by Mbwil a Mpang Ngal, V. Y. Mudimbe, Bolya Baenga, and Pius Ngandu Nkashama and, at the same time, relates the situation of the intellectual as seen in these works to some of the social and political factors peculiar to Zaire's colonial history and post-independence evolution. Analyses of individual novels provide the basis for a discussion of Belgian colonial policies regarding the évolué, the ambiguous role …