African Literature Research Articles

Examining the Contribution of Selected African Novels to the Naming Rites

In the African context, a new-born baby receives his or her names during the naming ceremony. After receiving all the names, these names play a very important role in the existence of an African family. But with colonization, the way Africans received names has drastically changed because of the interference of the new cultures that were brought by the colonizers. One of the main factors that are part of the changes is Christianity. It is this regard that African writers in the quest of African dignity try to depict through the various novels in this article in which circumstances names are given, and how the naming ceremonies are affected with colonization until in this era of Globalization. These naming ceremonies have great importance in the existence of Africans and that is why they have been painted vividly in African literature.

The reality of poetic structure in modern African literature written in Arabic language Analytical descriptive study

This research ends with an explanation of the poetic structure of African poetry written in Arabic. The aim of the study is related to knowing the new poetic structure of African poetry, which can only be achieved after knowing the poetic structure of the Arabs. It is known that ancient Arabic poetic structure proceeds from the initial introductions to the basic purpose of the poem, as mentioned by critics, and we find a multiplicity of themes within it. As for new poetry, it has its own structure which differs. of the traditional structure in terms of linguistic aspect, forms and themes. African literature written in Arabic knew these literary facts, and African poets paid attention in their poetic productions to the new poetic structure which differs from the vertical structure of poetry. Using poetic models, we were able to explain the poetic structure of old and new African poetry written in Arabic.

Linguopoetic Analysis of the Perception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe Novel in Kyrgyz and Russian Cultures

This article analyzes the linguopoetic perception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe novel in Kyrgyz and Russian cultures. The goal of the study is not only to analyze the linguistic and poetic means used in the translation and adaptation of the novel into Kyrgyz and Russian languages but also to identify the differences and similarities in the interpretation of the text by representatives of both cultures. The paper examines the cultural contexts that influence the perception of the novel and analyzes how these contexts are reflected in the lexical and stylistic features of the translation. Special attention is given to how Kyrgyz and Russian ethnocultural values manifest in the interpretation of the plot and imagery of the work. The study reveals the features of the linguocultural adaptation of the novel and allows conclusions to be drawn about the significance of the linguopoetic approach in comparative literary studies. In the concluding part of this work, we will review the interpretation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's work in contemporary African American studies, focusing primarily on the interpretation of the novel proposed by Henry Louis Gates Jr., a leading historian, and theorist of African American literature, which reflects the radical Afrocentrism of the 1960s and 1990s.

Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart: A Study from a Feminist Perspective

The 20th century saw the emergence of feminist theory and gender studies as literary concepts. African literature from the 1890s examines gender issues and women's identities from various perspectives. "Things Fall Apart" prompts a gender dynamics study. It examines a range of feminist concerns that represent power dynamics, femininity, and masculinity. Achebe, influenced by colonialist literature, presents an image of pre-colonial Igbo culture to refute Eurocentric myths. The research focuses on patriarchy, its substantial effects on gender, and how it limits and influences women's lives. The analysis, which takes feminist perspectives, looks at the nuances of patriarchy and the ways that female characters Ezinma, Nneka, and Ekwefi resist in anticipation of social norms. Along with scientific publications and research papers, the book serves as the main source. This study dissects patriarchy's role in dismantling gender equilibrium. .

IDENTITY CONFUSION IN DOROTHY WEST’S THE LIVING IS EASY

Literature is a media for conveying the authors’ ideas and feelings to the payers, or it is a mean of relief for them to bare their souls. In this context, literature involves an enormous place in human life. In this regard, African American literature has an important place in American literature and culture. It is also one of the strongest pillars of the literature produced by black writers in the United States of America. African American literature goes and continues in the course of history as oral literature from generation to generation. Since African Americans’ place changes gradually in the USA- due to racism in particular- their viewpoint of literature changes, too. African American history predates the foundation of the United States of America as an independent country, so their literature has deep roots, consisting of rich oral culture in poetry, including gospel music, blues, rap, and spirituals along with written poetry, and slave narrations. Although African Americans come from slave ancestors, they have been able to leave a deep effect on the literature of the United States when they are brought to the continent of America. African American literature is mainly based on autobiographical spiritual narratives, and before the American Civil War African Americans’ literature consists of memoirs of people who escape from slavery. So, African American literature has witnessed the problem of racial discrimination in its existential aspect. But in the progress of time, black writers go deep into verbal literature and perform their own experiences. Dorothy West, in her novel Living is Easy criticizes the blacks who mimes the whites. When we scrutinize, it is possible to penetrate that the writer wants to reflect her own experiences via narration and criticizes her own past. Writing is a kind of purgation for West since she writes about herself. In this study, we aim to point out the impulses that foster Dorothy West’s narration from a Freudian point of view.

Harmonizing Africa’s linguistic symphony: navigating the complexities of translating African literature using a postcolonial theory

Harmonizing Africa’s linguistic symphony: navigating the complexities of translating African literature using a postcolonial theory

Gendering visions of the postcolonial modernist state through names: a literary onomastic analysis of Nii Ayikwei Parkes’s Tail of the Blue Bird (2009)

African literature is a crucial arena for deconstructing norms, and imagining communities or alternative modes of sociality and being. In many postcolonial African literary works, particularly those grappling with the legacy of European colonisation and the challenges of nation-building, the modernist state is frequently depicted as an entity emblematic of violence and dispossession inflicted upon the populace. However, it is also sometimes portrayed as offering a degree of hope and possibility amidst the turmoil. Drawing on literary onomastics and insights from Rights and Feminist theories, the article examines Parkes’ strategic use of names to articulate ethicality in Tail of the Blue Bird. Parkes argues for a true decolonisation by radically replacing and reassessing the patriarchal ideology that creates violence and trauma in postcolonial societies. This should happen by embracing the feminine principles represented by the main female characters in the novel. The article shows that the semiotics and character roles of Esi Mensisi and Yaa Somu as women constitute crucial sites for Parkes’ rumination on human flourishing and ethicality in the postcolonial modernist state. The article has implications for studies on literary onomastics, characterisation, and how African writers attempt to reimagine postcolonial politics and sociality.

The Moral Law of Ngozi Crime in Two Zimbabwean Novels: The Case of Emmanuel Ribeiro’s Muchadura (1967) and Solomon Mwapangidza’s Rebel Soldier (2013)

The modern Western-inspired Literature and Law movement has inspired African works of art in which the creative imagination perceives itself as a form of moral law. In Africa, a literature and law movement has given rise to dynamic discourses of human rights. Human rights scholars have then tended to read imaginative works with a legal handbook on the side to try to verify the veracity of legal acts in works of art. In these legal-literary perspectives, the question regarding the extent to which the literary imagination imagines itself as a source of indigenous law is undervalued. This current desktop study examines what can be gained by prefacing African and indigenous literature as the point of departure when debating the elements of a contemporary literature and law movement in Africa. My unit of analysis consists of two novels, Muchadura (You shall confess) by Emmanuel Ribeiro, and Rebel Soldier (2013) by Solomon Mwapangidza. My argument is that in the two novels the narrativisation of the ngozi crime challenges current understandings of transitional justices such as retributive, compensatory, restorative, distributive, and emancipatory justices and denies the stability ascribed to them in African legal scholarship.

Leveraging implementation science for secondary prevention of cervical cancer in South Africa

Aim Cervical cancer is the second most common cancer and the top cause of cancer deaths amongst women in South Africa. Evidence-based interventions for secondary prevention of cervical cancer (cervical screening followed by treatment of identified pre-cancerous lesions) are available in South Africa’s health system, yet cervical cancer incidence remains high. This paper argues that this is partly due to implementation failure, i.e., deploying a good intervention ineffectively. Interventions found efficacious in controlled research settings may not achieve desired health outcomes when deployed in the real world due to implementation failure. Methods The field of implementation science offers frameworks for enhancing effective implementation. These frameworks guide the identification of implementation barriers and selection of context-relevant strategies for addressing them. This paper applies implementation science frameworks to secondary prevention in South Africa and promotes using such frameworks in cervical cancer prevention programming. Findings The problem of secondary prevention of cervical cancer in South Africa is contextualised. The paper conceptualises effective implementation as the attainment of implementation outcomes including acceptability, adoption, appropriateness, feasibility, fidelity, implementation cost, reach, and sustainability of evidence-based interventions. Drawing from the South African literature, examples of ineffective and failed implementation of secondary prevention interventions are presented including: low acceptability of screening by users and providers, sub-optimal adoption of screening provision by providers, low feasibility of hospital-centred pre-cancer treatment provision, low implementation fidelity, and limited reach of screening and pre-cancer treatment. Finally, using two examples, the paper provides practical guidance on how implementation science frameworks could be leveraged in South Africa to mitigate implementation failure. Conclusions Greater application of and capacity building in implementation science are recommended to contribute towards strengthening cervical cancer secondary prevention in South Africa.

Oral Poetic Techniques as Decolonial Creative Strategies in Osundare’s The Word is an Egg

Modern Nigerian poetry in English was dominated in the 1950s and 1960s by the writing of Wole Soyinka, John Pepper Clark, and Christopher Okigbo. The trio, regarded as pioneers and the first generation of Nigerian poets, succeeded largely with their adoption of modernist techniques to convey African material. By the 1970s, their writing came under scrutiny with the call to decolonise African literature and, by extension, Nigerian poetry in English. In this article, I demonstrate how Niyi Osundare demystifies the form and language of Nigerian poetry in English by the creative deployment of oral techniques in selected poems. I argue that Osundare, as a Nigerian second-generation poet, decolonises and democratises modern Nigerian poetry by delinking from his predecessors’ Eurocentric conception of poetry. The article is in five parts. The first part provides an introduction, the second is a background review of the development of Nigerian poetry in English from which the research problem, purpose, and aim are identified. The third part is on the structure of The Word is an Egg. The fourth part analyses the oral poetic techniques employed by Osundare as decolonial creative strategies, and the fifth provides a concluding attestation of the transformative nature of Osundare’s poetic art.

As die Cape Flats Kon Praat: Locality and the Literature of Precarious Living

This paper discusses the importance of Brian Fredericks’s short story collection, As die Cape Flats Kon Praat (If the Cape Flats Could Speak), published in 2020. The nine stories in the collection present different narratives of male characters and their experiences on the living areas outside Cape Town collectively known as the Cape Flats. These areas are synonymous with poverty and violence, identifiers that simultaneously suggest urgent attention but also reductive stereotyping. Two of the stories in the collection are examined here for information they provide about the intersections between gang culture and family relations, as well as how both are shaped by senses of place. How geographical space (here, space that was engineered during apartheid) influences and is influenced by the movements and actions of people is a point of theoretical interest in this article. This is supported by a short study of the workings of Cape Flats gangs and the transactional role played by violence. Fredericks’s collection joins a growing and necessary library of redress that reflects the value of Cape Flats narratives as essential to South African literature. That this collection includes the language of Afrikaaps, which is undergoing a similar re-evaluation in recent knowledge production, underscores the relevance of newer output that sheds light on the social codes, cultural grammars, and moral economies of a hitherto underrepresented literary region.

An Overview of Caribbean and African Literary Theories

As it is believed, Africa is the cradle of humankind, where humans also left for other parts of the world during the slave trade and also during World War I and II. At the abolition of the slave trade, many African descendants settled where they could call home, like in the Caribbean islands and other parts of the world, as a result of the ancestral and cultural attachment between Africa and the places where the descendants of the slaves where we could see some similarities in their ways of life. We can see these facts also translate into the African and Caribbean writers' literary works, among other spheres of life. The analyses show that while both literatures share common concerns related to colonial legacy and the quest for identity, they are distinguished by unique historical and socio-political contexts that influence their narrative perspectives. For example, African literature tends to focus more on the effects of colonization and decolonization on the African continent, while Caribbean literature often emphasizes the dynamics of the diaspora and the multiple facets of Caribbean identity. In addition, this study examines the use of language and literary techniques specific to each region, as well as the contributions of major literary figures such as aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Monique Ilboudo, Werewe Liking, Wole Soyinka, Maryse Condé and many others. Finally, this comparison offers a deeper understanding of the richness and diversity of postcolonial literature while highlighting the unique voices and shared experiences of African and Caribbean writers.

Preaching Without a Pulpit: Toward a Womanist Hermeneutic of Regeneration in Just Above My Head

In The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois discusses the historical and cultural importance of the Black preacher as “a leader, a politician, an orator, a ‘boss,’… the centre of a group of men.” I propose we reimagine Du Bois’s Black preacher figure—in his words, “the most unique personality developed on American soil”—as a Black woman. Additionally, we should examine the sermon in African American literature as we focus on womanist preachers and spiritual figures such as Margaret Alexander in The Amen Corner, the sisters in Go Tell It on the Mountain, and most significantly, Julia in Just Above My Head. Coining the term, “womanist hermeneutic of regeneration,” this article demonstrates the affective power of examining blue note womanist preachers and spiritual figures in James Baldwin’s work.

Cultural attachés: African literature, the CIA, and the hermeneutics of suspicion

Recent attempts to outline post-critical models of interpretation in literary studies have often fixated on suspicion, paranoia, or unmasking as their foils. But in the early decades of decolonization, it made sense to be paranoid: writers and artists were justified in suspecting that they were being covertly observed, funded, or promoted by para-state actors knee-deep in the Cold War battlefield of culture. Scholars have long debated whether and how covert state sponsorship for the arts matters. In postcolonial studies especially there has been a revival of interest in the CIA’s activities as a cultural patron through its proxy foundation, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Recent research on the CCF has tended to concentrate on what its clandestine sponsorship means for aesthetic autonomy – the notion that the artist has or ought to have some relative autonomy from meddling outside forces, a cherished value of both modernism and mid-century humanism. Focusing on the CCF’s support for African modernism, this essay suggests that we need to look beyond autonomy as our default paradigm for assessing Cold War cultural patronage. Instead of joining the debate over what the CCF did or did not do to African literature, this essay asks: what did they even think they were doing? Drawing on research in the CCF archives, this essay argues that a better way to understand the CCF’s approach is as a practice of attachment. The aim here is to re-describe Cold War cultural patronage – and, along the way, to ask what scholars of decolonization and the Cold War might stand to learn by engaging with ongoing debates about methodology in the broader field of literary studies.

The Postcolonial Unconscious in North African Migrant Fiction

The impact of the postcolonial unconscious on North African migrant fiction has been extensively explored and revealed through both theoretical frameworks and literary practices throughout the postcolonial era. Scholars and writers alike have delved into how the psychological remnants of colonialism continue to influence the narratives, themes, and character development in this body of work. This ongoing examination highlights the deep-seated cultural and psychological legacies that shape the identities and experiences of both individuals and communities within North African migrant literature. As a reflection of the long-lasting consequences of colonial history on people and society, North African migrant writers, like other postcolonial writers worldwide, tackle themes of identity, displacement, and post-colonialism. Theorists like Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Frantz Fanon, and Jacques Derrida have theorized that the unconscious influences language and subject creation, which in turn shapes their narratives. This analysis uses Fanon’s concept of the postcolonial unconscious, which explores the psychological effects of colonialism, such as internalized trauma and cultural hybridity, as a major framework. This study examines how postcolonial unconscious and related themes appear in the writing of North African writers who have immigrated to Europe and the USA, emphasizing the psychological and cultural effects of colonization on both individuals and groups. In addition to offering in-depth examinations of some texts, the paper presents a comprehensive view of the importance of postcolonial literary criticism in comprehending the complexities of postcolonial societies.

“We Fervently Pray”: Reading Afro-Protestant Prayer as Genre Intervention in “The Petition of Absalom Jones and Others—People of Colour and Freemen of Philadelphia”

Abstract: While scholars have long documented Christianity’s influence on African American literature and print, few have investigated how specific Afro-Protestant practices inform alternative modes of collective action and writing in the early American republic. This essay follows scholarship’s recent turn by reading Afro-Protestant prayer within discourses of civic and religious petition at the turn of the nineteenth century. Sanders contends that early African American advocates mobilized prayer’s genre flexibility in their public addresses to challenge America’s growing antagonism toward antislavery petitions. These early theorizations of Afro-Protestant prayer as petitionary activism reframe how we understand a tradition of circulated prayers from nineteenth-century print to the present.

Orality in African Literary Works: An Interaction of Oromo Oral Literature with Written Poetry

Orality in African Literary Works: An Interaction of Oromo Oral Literature with Written Poetry

Spatial Dynamics in African Literature: Analyzing Rural and Urban Representations in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts

This paper explores the interplay between colonial and postcolonial spatial dynamics in African literature, focusing on both urban and rural landscapes. It investigates how Anglophone and Francophone African writers portray the intersection of historical and fictional settings, highlighting the influence of colonialism on African topography. By analyzing literary depictions of traditional versus dominant cultures, the study assesses the enduring colonial impact on African landscapes and its reflection in modern and contemporary sub-Saharan fiction.

“We were fishermen”: The postnational reimagination of community in Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen

ABSTRACT This article reads Chigozie Obioma’s Booker-finalist debut novel, The Fishermen, in the light of recent debates on postnationalism in contemporary African literature. The central intervention of the article is its examination of critical, self-reflexive ideations of community in the novel and the argument that such notions of community are vital for resisting theoretical models that presuppose “failure” or “crises” as the framework for conceptualizing contemporary national realities in the African context. Borrowing from Achille Mbembe’s theorization of postcolonial “entanglement” to modify Benedict Anderson’s thesis on the close relationship between enlightenment modernity and national community, the article closely reads the novel as the site of a complex inheritance and reimagination of community. Focusing on narrative voice and entangled temporalities, the article examines the varying registers of the central term “fishermen”. The article proposes that these resistant methodological approaches emerging from postcolonial Nigerian literature represent a layered articulation of alternative collective imaginaries.

Funding sources, colonial legacy, and new firms’ creation in Africa

This study examines the determinants of new firm creation in Africa, focusing on external and internal funding sources and their interactions. It also explores the influence of colonial history by separately analyzing former British and French colonies. The primary goal is to help fill crucial gaps in African literature on the determinants of entrepreneurship. Given Africa's widespread poverty and underdevelopment, understanding what drives entrepreneurship is essential for job creation and economic growth. The study reveals three key findings. First, at the full sample level, remittances are the only external financing source positively associated with new firm creation, while foreign aid and foreign direct investment obstacle it. Internal sources, like savings and credit, do not show significant effects. Second, the subsample analysis reveals heterogeneous results: former British colonies' funding sources align with the overall findings, while in former French colonies, only savings support entrepreneurship. Third, considering control variables, the subsample analysis indicates two distinct entrepreneurship models: opportunity-based in former British colonies and necessity-based in former French colonies. These findings are noteworthy and provide significant policy implications at both national and international levels. Crucially, the positive role of remittances in financing new business initiatives, confirms that migration serves as a mutually beneficial arrangement for both sending African countries and the host countries.