African Literary Texts Research Articles

Re-visioning Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments: A Corpus Stylistic Analysis Using Wmatrix

The numerous literary explorations of Ayi Kwei Armah’s novels reveal his aesthetic creativity and relevance in addressing African and diasporic issues that have contemporary relevance. Guided by two objectives, this corpus study set out to analyse the narration and thematisation of Armah’s Fragments (1970) through part-of-speech and semantic domain tags using Wmatrix. We compared Fragments as a target corpus with two other novels by Armah. Results of the analysis suggest that Armah alternates between homodiegetic narrative in character dialogues and monologues, which dominate the main heterodiegetic discourse narration. He also provides a critical perspective on the immediacy of a historic and instantaneous present by giving a specific past account that projects a possible continuity of events in Ghana and Africa. Additionally, Armah discusses the geographic mobility of characters as a metaphor for a quest for a place of being and identity. These findings illustrate the value of applying computational tools like Wmatrix to examine African literary texts and provide a base for further studies.

Women Writing Women: Re-Defining the Identity of African Women in African Literary Texts

Women Writing Women: Re-Defining the Identity of African Women in African Literary Texts

Citizenship and social status in Miriam Tlali's Muriel at Metropolitan

An interactional feminist stance was reflected in South African literary texts as early as the 1970s. Miriam Tlali's pioneering work Muriel at Metropolitan (1975), for example, explores how black women are most palpably confronted with intersecting oppressions and inequalities because of mutually reinforcing axes of race, ethnicity, gender, and class. These social categories provided the basis to differentiate groups from each other and were utilised to produce unequal power relations. Such inequalities were not only created by the apartheid regime, but also by African Customary Law, although the latter was subject to the twin influences of colonialism and apartheid. In this article I analyse five key passages of the novel through an intersectional lens by looking into the correlation between these systems, intersectional axes, citizenship, and social status. The close reading of the extracts shows that the characters' civil rights are curtailed, and their social status reduced through inter alia dehumanising stereotypes, racial and gendered naming strategies, and polarising pronouns. Furthermore, the discursive counterreactions of the black female protagonist Muriel are charted. These consist of rational argumentation, norm-breaking, objectification, and distancing techniques. Her retorts represent her resistance against multiple subjugations and take the shape of what is now called intersectional feminism(s).

Subtle-Radical Female Subversion as a Means of Self-Empowerment in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood

In this article, we use two African literary texts written by African women to demonstrate ways in which women use very subtle but radical ways to circumvent patriarchal norms. We re-read Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood to demonstrate subtle-radical ways in which women subvert patriarchal expectations. We utilise African radical feminism as a literary theory to frame our analysis. Furthermore, we problematise the ideology of using radical means as a way to survive and argue that women ought to survive and live a meaningful, free life post survival. To do this, we bring to light the subtle-radical ways in which characters such as Tambudzai, Lucia, and Adaku subvert gender role expectations in order to emancipate themselves from the shackles of patriarchal expectations. We find that women who use conventional radical resistive ways tend to have the full force of patriarchy’s weight clamped down on them, while those who use subtle-radical means tend to get their freedom and succeed.

Le traducteur face à la variation : quelques problèmes théoriques et méthodologiques

The Translator and Variation: Some theoretical and methodological problems
 Novels whose writing language is strongly influenced by the belonging society of the author have inspired many theoretical and methodological works in translation studies. This contribution is part of these works. It starts from considerations on translation and presents some characteristics of the African (sub-Saharan) literary texts before identifying, from a corpus of seven novels, some traps that the translator will face, which may be linked to the aesthetic orientations of the novelists. Most often, they find themselves in a situation of explicit or implicit translation when they are inspired, for example, by oral literature. Thus, they insert into their texts elements belonging to socio-culture and endogenous varieties of French using two techniques: transposition and transfer. Transposition is the integration, in the text, of a borrowing or a previously translated word. Transfer, on the other hand, consists of incorporating borrowings and neologisms as they are used in a specific context. It sometimes happens that, for certain words, equivalents appear in the text or in footnotes. It would be an illusion to believe that the translator's task is lightened when the author has done the work of a "lexicographer". If the interpretative theory seems appropriate for the translation of said texts, it may happen, despite the extralinguistic competence of the translator (knowledge of the social, cultural, and situational context relevant to the utterance), that the quest for the genesis of meaning requires a considerable investment and that the reexpression of the author's meaning proves difficult, if not impossible. The cooperative approach could therefore be preferred. The solution may be, for the sociolinguistic or sociocultural specialist from which culture the text to be translated originates, who is working on behalf of a translation team, to decode the terms that cannot be reexpressed in the target language, maintained as they are and explained.

Environment, Climate Change, Insecurity and World Peace: A Critical Examination of Selected African Literary Texts

The interest in African literary texts has increased significantly in recent times within the academic community. However, crucial issues such as climate change, environment, insecurity, and world peace have not received adequate attention from scholars, despite their relevance. This study aims to explore these topics in African literary texts of various genres by employing the ecocriticism of selected African texts as a theoretical framework and using content analysis as the primary methodology. The corpus of this study focuses on the works of Ramonu Sanusi (novel Un Nègre a violé une Blonde à Dallas), Niyi Osundare (poem “They Too Are the Earth”), David Rubadiri (poem “African Thundersorm”), and Ahmed Yerima (play Ipomu), all of whom have been selected for sharing the primary objective of this work - to shed light on the environmental realities of modern society by describing the rates of environmental and climate change and their adverse effects on humanity. Moreover, the authors emphasize the need for world peace to ensure global sustainable development. By critically analyzing the African literary texts, this research seeks to contribute to the academic understanding of these significant global issues and the critical role that literature can play in addressing them.
 Keywords: African literature, climate change, Environment, Insecurity, World Peace.

Postsecular Pilgrimage in Malek Bennabi’s Lebbeik: pèlerinage de pauvres and Abdelkébir Khatibi’s Pèlerinage d’un artiste amoureux

Abstract This paper explores representations of the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca in two North African literary texts, Malek Bennabi’s Lebbeik (1947) and Abdelkébir Khatibi’s Pèlerinage d’un artiste amoureux (2003). It considers the divergent ways in which pilgrimage is used to explore the place of both literature and religion, as well as their interrelation, when it comes to working out ethics and values on individual and collective levels in Bennabi’s late-colonial Algeria, and Khatibi’s postcolonial Morocco. Drawing on Alain Badiou’s notion of the event as an occurrence that is retrospectively determined to have disrupted the status quo, and contrasting this with Derek Attridge’s idea of literature as a disruptive event with indeterminate outcomes, I consider the different ways in which both the pilgrimage and the narratives representing it can be seen as events, implicitly imparting reflections and even teachings on life and how to approach it in both texts.

Digital African Literatures and the Coloniality of Data

AbstractDigital iterations of African literary texts present scholarly opportunities to interrogate how literature produced and circulated on digital media becomes entangled with the capitalist politics of datafication. In the data paradigm described in the article, literary representations are subject to the workings of neoliberal capital and the constraints of algorithmic systems. Through a postcolonial approach that puts the digital humanities in conversation with African literary studies, the article transcends how digital technologies have evidently changed African literature and tackles the costs of digital literary cultures and networks from Africa. I examine data relations through an African literary culture, which, in the current moment, indisputably exhibits the attainment of new and complex elements including the integration of digital affordances in the production and critical reception of texts. How African literary expressions in a digital age circulate in market-driven digital platforms like Facebook and YouTube makes the subjects of data capitalism or the coloniality of data as important for African literature as the expanded literary networks enabled by the digital.

At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War

At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War

Literature and Sustainable Ecosystem: An Investigation of Selected African Literary Texts

The fact that African literary works have gained considerable patronage in scholarly writings and debates. Most previous studies concern themselves with writers’ styles and themes whereas inadequate attention has been paid to the ecological functionality of the texts. This study, therefore, interrogates the issue of climate change and its effects on human race around the world. Adopting eco-criticism as theoretical framework, a close reading of five purposively selected African literary texts was carried out, with content analysis applied as our methodology. The study reveals that there is a break away from the old tradition of praise songs for Africa, as a continent, and a blind attack on the colonial imperialists. In the selected texts, the writers demonstrate the environmental realities of the modern society by depicting the indices of climate change and its adverse effects on man. It is observed that climate is the topmost factor which affects agriculture (crop and livestock production). Drought, flooding and desertification often cause displacement of people and other living organisms and only a safe environment can guarantee a sustainable national development. The study concludes that the world needs to come together in the fight against environmental degradation for sustainable development.

The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing By Jeanne-Marie Jackson

Reviewed by: The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing by Jeanne-Marie Jackson Yuan-Chih (Sreddy) Yen The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing BY JEANNE-MARIE JACKSON Princeton UP, 2021. 223 pp. ISBN 9780691186450 paper. There has in the past few years been a strong reckoning with the historically fraught relationship between Africa and questions of universality, evident in works such as Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Jean-Loup Amselle’s In Search of Africa(s): Universalism and Decolonial Thought (first published in French in 2018) and Ato Sekyi-Otu’s Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays. Jeanne-Marie Jackson’s The African Novel of Ideas astutely centers the implications of such considerations within the field of Anglophone African literature and is particularly attentive to the critical possibilities that are opened when the analytical focus is shifted away from the conventional emphasis on this literature’s “political resistance and cultural representation” (2). Jackson proposes that we instead take “African quandaries over form and representation on their own terms” (9), and the “philosophizing individual” (22), with the concomitant concerns about rationality and liberalism, thus becomes one potential foil for thinking through the tensions between the local and the global, between “locatedness and generalization” (28). “[S]eeing the novelized individual” in certain African literary texts “as a tool of philosophical generalization” (22), Jackson maintains, pushes against the usual symptomatic reception of these works, and it is in this way that the “intrinsic universal claims of African conceptuality” (43) can begin to be teased out. Through insightful, extended readings of the works of J. E. Casely Hayford, Stanlake Samkange, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, and Tendai Huchu, which ground the four chapters that make up the two parts of her monograph—titled “National Horizons” and “Global Recessions” to reflect “the dominant interpretive scale of the eras they treat, even where they are complicated or resisted” (19)— Jackson demonstrates how the “act of ‘doing philosophy’ within larger narrative [End Page 200] designs” (17) is just as much a preoccupation for some “African” writers as it is for “Western” ones. The crux of Jackson’s concerns is most clearly articulated in the fourth chapter, “Bodies Impolitic: African Deaths of Philosophical Suicide,” in which she reads Zimbabwean novelist Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate, & the Mathematician alongside South African writers Imraan Coovadia’s Tales of the Metric System and Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive to “meditate more deeply on the trade-offs between self-exploration and self-sublimation, between movement in the world and stillness with one’s thoughts” (156). In tracing what she calls “philosophical suicide” as it is invoked in these particular novels as well as in both Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work and that of earlier African ones such as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, Jackson foregrounds here the contemporary shift “toward socially impotent rather than representative individualism” (147) and gestures to the potential failures of such philosophical individualism in negotiating the conceptual abstractions of the globalizing world. This decidedly contrasts the way in which the writers from the era of national independence that Jackson analyzes in the earlier chapters drew on “philosophy as a force for connecting the reflective individual with a nascent national community” (22). The African Novel of Ideas, which draws impressively on literature from all Anglophone regions of sub-Saharan Africa, is an important study not only for those of us who think with African literature but also for those who are invested in a more thoughtful comparative method, or what Jackson calls “[d]ecolonized conceptual comparison” (44). As Jackson emphasizes in her short epilogue, “[o]ne need not choose between Africa and universality or, for that matter, between Africa and anything else. It’s all there, to anyone committed to looking” (183). Now might be a good time to commit to looking at how certain African poets, in their complex lyric subjectivity and address, join this consequential conversation about individuality, community, and universality. Yuan-Chih (Sreddy) Yen Northwestern University sreddyen@u.northwestern.edu WORKS CITED Diagne, Souleymane Bachir, and Jean-Loup Amselle. In Search of Africa(s): Universalism and Decolonial Thought. Translated by Andrew Brown, Polity, 2020...

Bondage of being born female in selected African literary texts

Many women have been victims of underage marriage, forced marriage, proxy marriage, levirate marriage, denial of education and the ignominy of male-child favouritism. These unwholesome practices have hampered the utilisation of the intellectual endowment of women, and have subjected them to untold trauma and deprivation. These plights are reflected in some female-authored works, and works by men who empathise with women. This study is an exegesis of selected African literary texts discountenancing the highlighted antiquated practices, within the ambit of feminist literary theory, with a view to explicating how the practices can be jettisoned. It is rendered in the course of the exegesis that under-age marriage, forced marriage and levirate marriage are still rampant in Africa; and also that male-child preference remains a phenomenon in the continent. The conclusion arrived at in the study is that no gender is superior to another. Marriage is a matter of choice, preference and mutual agreement between would-be spouses. It should not be imposed on anyone nor should anyone be forced into it. Rather than putting women in bondage, cultural practices which unburden their plights should be encouraged.

Aeromobilities of diasporic returnees in Francophone African literatures

ABSTRACT Postcolonial literary studies have not paid much attention to literary portrayals of mobility practices partly because the field promotes a reductive understanding of ‘mobility’ as a mere synonym for migration. In order to address this blind spot and to recognise African fictional characters as mobile subjects, the present article focuses on representations of aeromobility in Francophone African literary texts narrating diasporic returnees’ journeys back to their former home countries. As my analysis of five Francophone African return narratives from the 1980s to the 2010s suggests, the aeromobilities of Afrodiasporic returnees are marked by a sense of unease that relates to the issues of (un)belonging and guilt, failures of modernity of the postcolonial nation-state, and the unrealistic expectations that those ‘back home’ have about migrant life. The article underlines the importance of aeromobility in the production of the mobile subjectivity of the returnee and their relationship with the place of return.

“Reading and writing… loudly”: Ikhide R. Ikheloa, online criticism, and African literary studies

ABSTRACT Recent years have seen an increasing number of non-professional readers contribute to the online conversation about African literary texts. While this is evidence of a healthy democratisation of the field, it also raises questions about the impact that this online criticism has upon the academic field of African literary studies. How exactly are scholars of African literature to engage with this opportunity to open up the field to new voices while also retaining the specificity of academic reading and scholarly practice? With these issues in mind, this essay considers the work of Ikhide R. Ikheloa, one of the most visible online critics of African literature. Through an analysis of Ikheloa’s critical practice and his self-presentation as a “reader” (rather than a critic) of literature, the essay argues for a mode of engagement with online criticism that, while sensitive to its particular status as distinct from formal academic scholarship, also understands it as an opportunity to develop and expand the field of study. The essay concludes by considering how questions of social class and language also bear upon scholars’ engagement with online criticism of African literatures.

Religion in African literature: Representation, critique and imagination

AbstractThe study of religion and literature has emerged as a field of considerable academic interest. Although some work has been done on religion and African literature, research in this area tends to be fragmented and dispersed over various fields and disciplines. Reviewing available scholarship in this area, this article explores what engaging with African literary writing brings to the table of the study of religion in Africa. Focussing on postcolonial and contemporary African literature, it identifies a three‐fold contribution: first, the creative representation of religious traditions and dynamics; second, the critique of religious beliefs and institutions, and third, the imagination of alternative religious possibilities. It illustrates these contributions by specifically focussing on issues of (neo)colonialism, gender and sexuality. Hence the article foregrounds the importance of engaging with religion for interpreting African literary texts, and the significance of literary writing for understanding religion as part of African social and cultural life.

Translation and Untranslatability in the Poetry of Dennis Brutus and Keorapetse Kgositsile

This article traces aspects of the history of translation, familiar both in critical works that address South African literature and in South African literary texts, in relation to two poems by the black South African poets Dennis Brutus and Keorapetse Kgositsile. It considers their insinuation of untranslated or translated Afrikaans into an English text as a radical poetic strategy that both reinforces and disrupts established paradigms of the trope of translation. The article focuses on the untitled poem beginning with the line “Here of the things I mark” by Dennis Brutus, published in 1978 at the height of apartheid rule, and the post-apartheid poem “No Serenity Here” by Keorapetse Kgositsile, published in 2009. I consider the ways in which Brutus both confirms and subverts the identification of Afrikaans as the language of apartheid and I suggest that his use of Afrikaans constitutes a practice of resistance that breaches the rigid segregations enforced by apartheid and exposes their permeability. In a close reading of Kgositsile’s “No Serenity Here”, I relate to his use of the trope of translation and of untranslated Afrikaans within the poem as a radical critique both of European colonisation and of post-apartheid South Africa, still unliberated from the perverse legacies of that colonisation. In parsing the anomalies of Brutus’s and Kgositsile’s use of Afrikaans in these poems, I map possible future directions for the historiography of translation in South African poetics.

Who Am I: Identity Construction in Pede Hollist’s So The Path Does Not Die

Though ‘identity’ has been extensively discussed in many circles of scholarship, the current winds of migration and association by identity makes a further inroad into the need for more research into identity construction even more imperative. Anti-Semitism, racism, ethnic segregation, religious fanatism and gender discrimination are all tenets of the quest for and the guarding of identity. African literary texts, as fictional replication of life, therefore become ideal avenues for the examination of identity formation processes and characteristics amongst Africans. The array of factors that militate against the being a woman in terms of gender and sexuality and how women navigate the roadblocks are amply depicted in African literary works. This paper, therefore, seeks to bring issues of identity construction into a sharper focus in relation to African women in Pede Hollist’s fictional societies. It also adds to the concretization and clarification of issues relating to subjective, ethnic identity formation and symbolic identity construction as part of the identity negotiation and renegotiation narrative. It purposes to do this by examining Pede Hollist’s So The Path Does Not Die through the lens of Ting-Toomey’s identity negotiation theory, and the subjective, ethnic and symbolic identity construction frameworks as articulated by Helena Grice (1998). It concludes that the principal African women in the novel assert their symbolic ethnic identities by negotiating and re-negotiating various other identities. Eventually, as part of the process of gaining a composite subjective identity, they re-negotiate away from the NEW WAYS identity back to the OLD WAYS identity where they experience harmony and happiness as the outcome. Keywords: Identity Negotiation, African Literature, Feminism, Gender, Migration DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/68-05 Publication date: May 31 st 2020

Ni bonne ni mauvaise : Ferdinand Oyono en traduction allemande

Abstract This paper examines the German translation of two novels by the Cameroonian author Ferdinand Oyono and goes against the normative approach adopted by so many critics of translations of African literary texts. It argues that if the German translation of Ferdinand Oyono is bad in the Bermanian conception, it is mainly because it is a good translation of an original text which means to be read as translation. Hence it is neither good, nor bad.

Native Books and the “English Book”

Those of us working in the american academy have so internalized the grammar of postcolonial theory that we now take for grantedinterstices, hybridity, slippage, andliminality, among other terms commonplace in the discourse of postcolonialism. Beyond the terms themselves, we have taken to heart, absorbed, and extended the lessons from Homi K. Bhabha'sThe Location of Culture.Those lessons furnished a stimulative template for analyzing particular power asymmetries. Nevertheless, scholars have not referred as widely as we might expect to Bhabha's work in general andThe Location of Culturein particular, especially in some fields for which postcolonial theory was supposed to be a natural fit, such as African literary studies. The index ofAfrican Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, a 764-page compendium assembling many of the most important interventions in African literature from the 1970s to the early twenty-first century, is an instructive example: it lists only three entries for Bhabha (Olaniyan and Quayson). Given that postcolonial theory and African literary studies share an interest and a language (the aftermath of British colonialism and English) in their research agendas, we might also ponder the frequency with which postcolonial theory in the vein of Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Edward Said has elicited critique from scholars working with African literary texts and in African studies writ large. Individual persuasion is at work in these critiques but so also undoubtedly are positionality and location. We should read the critiques, then, not for their universal resonance, but for an understanding of debates unfolding in specific locations around the world, as well as in relation to the subject positions of individual scholars and their ideological proclivities.

Afriphone Literature as a Prototypical form of African Literature: Insights from Prototype Theory

What is the most prototypical form of African literature? Shouldn’t we be using African languages to produce African literary texts, shouldn’t we produce more Afriphone African literature compared to Europhone African literature or Afro-Europhone literature? This issue underlies the reality that the vast majority of African writers presumably think in one language and express themselves (speak, enchant, or write) in another. This problematic, crystalized in major debates between Ngugi wa Thiongo and others, on the one hand, and Chinua Achebe and others, on the other hand, has resulted in great challenges as to how we can define or even conceptualize the discipline of African literature. Is it literature written by Africans in African languages for Africans or is it literature written by anybody including non-Africans in non-African languages? Or is it somewhere in-between these two extremes? The paper discusses several positions on this major question in African literature before advancing a novel proposal based on insights and evidence from proto-type theory within Linguistics and the Cognitive Sciences. This proposal leads to a somewhat provocative conclusion about the gradation of African literatures, where African language literatures or Afrophone literatures, comprise the core, proto-typical category in a 21 st Century African literature constellation, whereas foreign language and diasporic literatures such as Afro-European literatures , Afro-American literatures , and Afro-Chinese literatures are the hybrid and thus more recessive, peripheral types of African literature. Keywords: Afriphone literature, African language literature, African literature, proto-type theory, linguistics, cognitive Science