Postcolonial African Literature Research Articles

Gender Representation in Postcolonial African Literature

Purpose: The aim of the study was to assess the gender representation in postcolonial African literature. Materials and Methods: This study adopted a desk methodology. A desk study research design is commonly known as secondary data collection. This is basically collecting data from existing resources preferably because of its low cost advantage as compared to a field research. Our current study looked into already published studies and reports as the data was easily accessed through online journals and libraries. Findings: The study found that authors often critique patriarchal structures and colonial legacies that have influenced gender dynamics. Female characters in these narratives are depicted as resilient and multifaceted, challenging traditional roles and seeking empowerment. Works by writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Tsitsi Dangarembga highlight the struggles and triumphs of women navigating postcolonial societies, reflecting broader themes of identity, autonomy, and resistance. Additionally, postcolonial African literature often explores the intersectionality of gender with race, class, and ethnicity, offering a nuanced understanding of the lived experiences of African women and men in a rapidly changing world. Implications to Theory, Practice and Policy: Postcolonial theory, feminist literary theory and queer theory may be used to anchor future studies on assessing the gender representation in postcolonial African literature. Supporting emerging authors through literary grants and mentorship programs is essential for promoting diversity and inclusivity in literary production. Promoting gender-inclusive literary awards can incentivize authors to explore and challenge traditional gender norms in their works.

Examination of Post-independence Failures in Uganda as Represented in Moses Isegawa’s Abyssinian Chronicles

Postcolonial crisis, failures, confusion, absurdities and pain have continued to provoke debate in Ugandan literature. Poets, dramatists and novelists have all tried to reveal the effects of colonialism on Africa and written about the selfishness, tyranny, dictatorship and corruption of the post-independence leaders. In a foreword by Ngugi of “Unmasking the African Dictator: Essays on Postcolonial African Literature,” he points out that even civilian regimes became undistinguishable from the military, as both mirror the images of the undemocratic and authoritarianism of the colonial era as the dawn of independence was followed by dwindling hope (Ndigirigi, 2014). As Uganda lurches into the aftermath and legacy of colonial powers, Moses Isegawa’s novel Abyssinian Chronicles is one of those that weaves personal narratives and issues of post- independence pain, failures and confusion in postcolonial Uganda. The novel tells a story of the arbitrariness of the life of characters due to the selfishness, incompetence, inadequacies and the hypocrisy of the first generation of leaders after colonialism.

The representation of women in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's The River Between and AGrain ofWheat: An ideological approach

This study examines how women are portrayed from an ideological perspective in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's The River Between and A Grain of Wheat. Ideology refers to a set of beliefs or principles that shape a person or group of people's understanding of the world and their place in it. Literary representation refers to the way in which ideas, characters and events are portrayed in literature. The relationship between ideology and literary representation is complex, but in general, literature can reflect and shape the ideology of an individual or group. The study critically interprets the novels using concepts such as dominant, authorial, esthetic, patriarchal and gendered ideologies and conducts a qualitative analysis of the data. The results show that powerful ideologies constrain women. Ngũgĩ's authorial ideology emphasizes the various roles that women fulfill in society. The study shows how the portrayal of women in the two novels reflects the social reality of the times in which the women lived. They are portrayed as the main custodians of their traditions and culture. The novels portray women as central figures who have played and continue to play an important role in shaping the Kenyan nation. Overall, the study contributes to the scholarly discourse on the representation of women in post-colonial African literature.

Inverted Disillusionment in Postcolonial African Literature

This study introduces the concept of inverted disillusionment as a new conceptual framework for reading African literature of the postcolonial era. It is conceived to philosophically account for the collective complicity of the people in their predicament in postcolonial Africa. It thus re-examines the concept of post-independence disillusionment of postcolonial theory, which blames postcolonial-era realities of disillusionment on African leaders and, consequently, places disillusionment and indifference to development in a broader context of human features everywhere. Achille Mbembe’s version of postcolonial theory and Derrida’s deconstructive operation are adopted as a framework, while textual evidence is drawn from selected literature to authenticate the ideological standpoints conceived as indices of the study. Theoretically and philosophically conceived, inverted disillusionment is foregrounded as an alternative engagement paradigm in reading African literature of the postcolonial era. It sits at the crossroads of postcolonial African literature and criticism as it advocates the extension of the frontiers of disillusionment in African Literature.

Seven Falls from Olumirin’s Pot: African Eco-Spirituality and Myths of Erin-Ijesha Waterfalls in Nigeria

ABSTRACT Contemporary critics of ecocriticism have explored ecologies dynamically across different genres in postcolonial African literature, especially in Nigeria’s Niger Delta region. However, they overlook African Eco-spirituality underpinned by indigenous African religion and conservative practices to address impending global ecological crises. The primary data were thirty (30) simple random interviews conducted with local entertainers, paramount rulers, residents, pedestrians, market women, commercial drivers, cyclists, and skilled labourers at Erin-Ijesha, Olumirin waterfall site in Oriade LGA in Osun State and Aba-Oke Efon Alaaye LGA Ekiti State, Nigeria. The study modelled Ikechukwu Kanu’s (2021) sources of African eco-spirituality, namely proverbs, gods and deities of nature, mythologies, totems and taboos, to explore indigenous practices and mythologies among indigenes of Aba-Oke/Erin-Ijesha. The study concludes that Aba-Oke and Erin-Ijesha communities promote attitudes of gratitude, reverence and stewardship for various life forms, which could catalyse change to mediate the damaged ecosystems and slow down the impending climate crisis.

Magical Realism as the Third Eye: A Postcolonial Re- reading of Ben Okri's The Famished Road

The Famished Road , a novel published in 1991 by Okri which won the Booker Prize . The novel can be interpreted as political allegory , a type of literature in which the characters and events in the text " represent , or ' allegorize , ' historical personages and events , " enabling narrative to serve as a model for political discourse . This article introduces postcolonial studies , focusing particularly on African postcolonial literature . And it also. deals with Hybridizing Political Criticism in The Famished Road : A Study of the Abiku Life " , deals with one of the most important postcolonial aspects called hybridity and how it is reflected in the very nature of its abiku protagonist , Azaro and the rest of the characters . The third chapter titled " Recreating Fragmented Histories of Post colonial Societies " , discusses how the resources of language that have been used to establish the themes of the supernatural and the colonial power . The concluding chapter comes up with a closure where the ideas discussed in the previous chapters are consolidated and establishes Okri's affirmation of Nigeria's complex identity .

Formulating a Translation Model for Postcolonial African Literature Through the Study of Selected Works of Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Efua Sutherland and Ola Rotimi

Postcolonial theory focuses on addressing gaps that are encountered when dealing with literary works or contexts that are minor or peripheral. It explores ways in which dominated or colonized culture can adapt tools of the dominant discourse to fight against its political or cultural dominance. Postcolonial studies serve as a useful tool for translating texts from one language to another. One has to be conversant with the approaches used by postcolonial writers to be able to appreciate their texts and eventually translate them. This paper used the methodology of textual analysis to examine portions of the selected works of four postcolonial African writers; namely, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Efua Sutherland and Ola Rotimi, to bring out key strategies by which these writers decolonized the minds of their African audience. The main decolonizing strategies discussed include adaptation, vernacularization and pidginization. Based on the findings from the analyses, the paper proposes some translation principles for dealing with postcolonial texts. The paper contributes not only to translation studies in Africa but also contributes to the decolonization of Christianity in Africa.

African postcolonial fiction and the poetics of eco-cultural decadence: Re-reading Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Sembène Ousmane’s Xala

In the depiction of post-independence Africa, the collapse of traditional moral values is a major preoccupation. This concern is often represented in the form of despicable behaviors exhibited by characters, often influenced by Western ideologies, and also in metaphors of decay or decadence. Decadence, from the literary sense of the word, could be interpreted as the moral or cultural rottenness of a community and in the literal usage of the term, it can be understood as an environmental uncleanness. Morally, a society is decayed if its moral principles and philosophies of living are weak while in the physical manifestation of the sense of the term, a decayed environment is associated with filth, pollution and physical rottenness. This paper examines the deployment of decadence as symptomatic of moral collapse and of environmental defacement in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Sembène Ousmane’s Xala. We read these texts in a theoretical context drawn from insights in postcolonial ecocriticism. While our analysis will concentrate on the ecopolitical force of the narratives, we will also examine the aestheticization of decay as a narrative device – a metaphor that foregrounds humans’ role, either by their complacency or collaboration, in destroying their environment. A critical attention will be paid to how the degradation of the environment results in the degradation of the humans as well. We conclude by pointing out that the representation of physical and moral decadence in postcolonial African literature is one way of indicting humans for degrading the environment in their quest for material acquisition.

El traductor visible de literatura poscolonial ante la tentación del exotismo

Building upon The Translator’s Invisibility by L. Venuti and related work by Susan Bassnett, Ovidi Carbonell, Anuradha Dingwaney, Samia Mehrez and Mahasweta Sengupta, among others, this paper argues for the visibility of the postcolonial literature translator and draws a carefull line between proper visibility – as we define it – and a counterproductive exotism that may arise as the side-product of a poorly understood visibility. Our discussion focuses on the particular case of postcolonial lusophone African literature. In particular, we analyze the translation strategy adopted by the author of this paper for the translation from portuguese to catalan of A Varanda do Frangipani, a novel by Mia Couto from Mozambique.

Achmat Dangor (1948-2020) and M.G. Vassanji (1950-): The Reception of Two Afrindian Voices in Spain

Dangor (Johannesburg, 1948-2020) and Vassanji (Nairobi, b1950) are two contemporary Indian-African (“Afrindian”) diasporic writers who share a hybrid combination of Indianness and Africanness. Both writers have been translated into Spanish and, in the case of Vassanji, Catalan. The number of translations is rich enough to establish many description-based contrasts, and the proposal of future guidelines for translating Afrindian writers. The description takes into account the powerful autobiographical overtones typical of African writing, and describes how they have been made available to Spanish readers. A representative sample of exoticizing textual units from the original texts will be compared with their translation solutions in order to explore if exoticizing is the right method for this kind of postcolonial African Indian literature. The results indicate that exoticizing has been clearly favoured by the translators

Understanding Currents and Theories in Indian and African Postcolonial Literature: Themes, Tropes and Discourse in the Wider Context of Postcolonialism

The postcolonial narratives we see today are a study in contrast and tell a different tale from their colonial predecessors as minorities and individuals finally have found the voice and position to tell their stories. Histories written about our culture and societies have now found a new purpose and voice. The stories we have passed down from generation to generation through both oral and written histories, continue to morph and change with the tide of time as they re-centre our cultural narratives and shared experiences. As a result, the study of diaspora and transnationalism have altered the way in which we view identity in different forms of multimedia and literature. In this paper, the primary question which will be examined is, how and to what extent does Indian post-colonial literature figure in the formation of identity in contemporary art and literature in the context of ongoing postcolonial ideas and currents? by means of famous and notable postcolonial literary works and theories of Indian authors and theoreticians, with a special focus on the question and notion of identity. This paper works on drawing parallels between themes in Indian and African postcolonial literary works, especially themes such as power, hegemony, east meets west, among others. In this paper, European transnationalism will also be analysed as a case study to better understand postcolonialism in different contexts. The paper will seek to explore some of the gaps in the study of diasporic identity and postcolonial studies and explore some of the changes and key milestones in the evolution of the discourse over the decades.

Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic African Literature: Memories and Futures Past by Christopher Ouma

Reviewed by: Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic African Literature: Memories and Futures Past by Christopher Ouma Sakiru Adebayo Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic African Literature: Memories and Futures Past BY CHRISTOPHER OUMA Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. ix+ 202 pp. ISBN 9783030362560 paper. Contemporary African literary works are largely informed by the experience of childhood. They use images, figures, and memories of childhood to engage with questions of identity, migration, and all sorts of displacement. This is the main argument in Christopher Ouma’s outstanding book Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic African Literature: Memories and Futures Past. After the end of colonial rule, many African countries experienced different kinds of military and civilian dictatorships, especially in the 70s and 80s—an era that also coincided with the Cold War. The period after colonial rule in Africa was equally marked by many civil wars, which began with Biafra (1967–70); these wars were, no doubt, a manifestation of a terrible colonial hangover. Hence, during this period (of the 70s and 80s), many African countries could be said to be experiencing a crisis of nationhood that culminated in a great exodus from Africa to the West. This, according to Ouma, caused the “project of identity to shift from nations to individuals, who invariably felt their identity overdetermined by their experience of the crisis of nationhood” (2). Therefore, while earlier African writings construed the nation-state as a teleological and geopolitical entity, contemporary African writers capture the zeitgeist [End Page 227] of the 80s by challenging—through the trope of childhood—the temporal linearity, cultural homogeneity, and logical coherence that characterized these earlier conceptions of the nation-state. In other words, according to Ouma, childhood becomes a significant marker of postcoloniality. The category of the “child/ren” becomes symbolic and even pivotal in constructing and understanding postcolonial African literature precisely because it is inaugurated by and shot through with experiences and memories of childhood. It is therefore not surprising that in the attempts to mark one generation from the other and delineate literary genealogies, contemporary African writers have come up with monikers such as “children of the postcolony,” “children of the cold war,” “children of oil boom,” “children of the revolution,” and so on. This book investigates the childhood experiences of these eras, as chronicled by contemporary (diasporic) African writers who have now come of age in a new millennium. Ouma begins the book by providing a very detailed historiography of childhood in African literature. He traces the portrayal of an Afrocentric childhood in Camara Laye’s The African Child (1959), to the intricacies of colonial childhood in Ferdinand Oyono’s Houseboy (1966), down to how childhood in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God (1964) created a space for experimentation, “which is the very essence of childhood” (14). Ouma argues that childhood in early modern African literature was “symbolic of transience, mobility and becoming even though within the binary frameworks of traditional and modern values” (14). He also sketches out feminist representations of childhood in the works of Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa, Zaynab Alkali, and Ama Ata Aidoo, among others. He shows how gendered childhoods in African literature have been read in relation to the critiques of motherhood. He, however, notes that the rise of African feminist literary criticism brought attention to the idea of “girlhood” in literary childhood studies. Ouma proceeds to highlight the representation of childhood in African life writings and memoirs, especially in notable works such as Wole Soyinka’s Ake: The Years of Childhood (1981), Chinua Achebe’s Home and Exile (2000), and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Dreams in a Time of War (2010) and its sequel, In the House of the Interpreter (2012). Ouma makes an important observation that, while these memoirs by the older generation of African writers follow the classic bildungsroman style, contemporary African memoirs, especially child soldier narratives, tend to be “anti-bildungsroman” and nonlinear. While the period of the 70s, 80s, and 90s could arguably be said to have seen the rise of children as a substantial part of the population in Africa, Ouma is certain that “it was this period that consolidated global media images of broken and malnourished children’s bodies augmented by the reality...

My Africa Reads

‘My Africa Reads’ is a memoir that looks back at my reading history. The ‘Preamble’ identifies authors who influenced my worldview during my secondary and tertiary education in the UK and who remained my companions during the first decade of my return to Nigeria. From this immersion in Eurocentric literature, the memoir progresses to my encounter with postcolonial African literature in the collective setting of the Africa Book Group (ABG), which I joined in 2002 and led from 2014 to 2018. The memoir looks at authors and literature that the international women of ABG have engaged with, and at meetings at which guest experts spoke on aspects of African studies and affairs. It highlights the power of ABG—a shared reading experience—to advance that part of my cultural liberation facilitated by good postcolonial literature and open, unconstrained discussions with other women.

IGBO NAMING COSMOLOGY AND NAMESYMBOLIZATION IN CHINUA ACHEBE’S TETRALOGY

Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God and A Man of the People, the first four novels by Chinua Achebe, the contemporary Nigerian novelist, are among the most outstanding works of African postcolonial literature. As a matter of fact, each of these four novels focuses on a different colonial or postcolonial phase of history in Nigeria and through them Achebe intends to provide an authentic record of the negative and positive impacts of ‘hybridity’ on different aspects of the life of native subjects. Briefly stated, Achebe is largely successful in taking advantages of variable discursive tools he structures based on the potentials of the hybrid, Igbo-English he adopts. Thus, it might be deduced that reading these four novels in line with each other, and as chains or sequels of Tetralogy, might result in providing a more vivid picture of the Nigerian (African) subjects and the identity crises emerging in them as a result of colonization. To provide an account of the matter, the present study seeks to focus on one of the discursive strategies Achebe relies on in those four novels: Igbo Naming Cosmology and Name-symbolization.

Genocide and Postcolonial African Literature

This essay provides a critical review of the field of postcolonial African genocide writing. The review makes a case for scholarly recognition of the discourse of African genocide literature. The essay advances some broad claims, among which include the following: that genocidal atrocities in Africa have provoked a body of imaginative literature, which, among other things, has attempted to imagine the conditions giving rise to African genocides, and that this body of literature underlines a confluence of sensibilities shaping atrocity writings and their critical receptions in Africa since the mid-twentieth century. The review provides a critical overview of fictional narratives as well as their scholarly receptions bordering on genocidal atrocities in the Nigerian and Rwandan contexts.

Interpreting Post colonialism in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road

Postcolonial theory and criticism started to gain prominence from the last two decades. It consists of the study of literature which has been formerly colonised by the imperial masters. It includes the new literatures which got affected by the colonial process. The new literatures named as “Commonwealth literature” covers the literature from the Latin America, South Asia and Africa respectively. The African Literature had the most adverse effects of the colonisation process. As a result, the natives cannot forget their painful historical past. The writers of the African literature have embedded the painful histories with the rich oral tradition. Postcolonial African Literature discusses African oral traditions, gender identities, nationalism. This paper analyses the characteristic features which Ben Okri employs in his literary text, The Famished Road. The paper aims at determining the extent to which these features reflect the postcolonial literary ideal. This paper investigates the attributes of postcolonialism like hybridity, nationalism etc. Apart from these, Okri also reflects on the themes of corruption, dispossession, colonial and neo-colonial domination, and identity crisis.

Blackism and Pan-Africanism in Post-Colonial African Literature: A Reading of Femi Osofisan’s Plays

This article is a thematic study of Femi Osofisan’s plays that explicitly capture the essence of blackism, nationalism and pan-Africanism as a depiction of the playwright’s ideology and his total commitment to the evolution of a new social order for black people. The article critically discusses the concepts of blackism and pan-Africanism as impelling revolutionary tools that seek to re-establish and reaffirm the primacy, identity, and personality of black people in Africa and in the diaspora. It also discusses blackism as an African renaissance ideology that campaigns for the total emancipation of black people and a convulsive rejection of all forms of colonialism, neo-colonialism, Eurocentrism, nepotism and ethnic chauvinism, while advocating an acceptance of Afrocentrism, unity and oneness of blacks as indispensable tools needed for the dethronement of all forms of racism, discrimination, oppression and dehumanisation of black people. The article hinges the underdevelopment of the black continent on the deliberate attempt of the imperialists and their black cronies who rule with iron hands to keep blacks in perpetual slavery. It countenances Femi Osofisan’s call for unity and solidarity among all blacks as central to the upliftment of Africans. The article recognises Femi Osofisan as a strong, committed and formidable African playwright who utilises theatre as a veritable and radical platform to fight and advocate for the liberation of black people by arousing their revolutionary consciousness and by calling on them to hold their destinies in their hands if they are to be emancipated from the shackles of oppression.

CHINUA ACHEBE’NİN PARÇALANMA (THINGS FALL APART) ADLI ESERİNDE KÜLTÜREL KİMLİĞİN BOZULMASI

Twenty-first century Africa is currently a continent of culturally diverse groups of people, many opposing governments, and fragmented identities due to its long history of colonization and the drastical changes following its independence. Accordingly, the study of post-colonial African literature cannot be complete without the study of Africa’s colonial past and the ideology behind a text. Chinua Achebe is one of the significant writers of African culture who in his novels aims to provide an erudite exegesis of the texts and introduce readers to important contextualizing historical and cultural perspectives it defines. His novels not only represent the history and culture of Africa, but also serve as a direct response to a whole canon of Eurocentric writings presenting Africans as inhuman savages. Particularly, in his Things Fall Apart Achebe paints a grim picture of the colonization of Nigeria by the British and the political turbulence following its colonization. The primary purpose of this paper is to shed light on Achebe’s various ways of representing the self-sufficiency of African nations with a strong sense of cultural identity, and the catastrophic changes in an African society brought along by colonialism, resulting in the distortion of its cultural identity.

Reflections on Cultural Specificity and Dystopian Standardization in Chinua Achebe’s Novels

Although tackling Chinua Achebe’s novels as illustrative pieces of postcolonial African literature, this article moves a step further in tracking down the elements projecting these literary texts into universalization. The major aim is to highlight the stylistic differences between the novels making up the African trilogy (Things Fall Apart - 1958, No Longer at Ease - 1960, Arrow of God - 1964) and his subsequent masterpieces A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). If the African trilogy particularly relies on and therefore has been analyzed in terms of culture-specific items and postcolonial issues, the other two novels acquire new dimensions, giving birth to what can be called dystopian standardization characteristic not only of a certain space or time, but of any society fighting corruption and abusive political systems inevitably leading to oppressive regimes, chaos and collapse.

Body as Capital: Construing Experiential Knowledge of Prostitution and Sex Slavery in Some Postcolonial African Literature

Previous studies on prostitution and sex slavery in African literature have focused chiefly on the thematic concerns of the novels such as the moral dimensions of the act but none of the studies has explored the role of language as a form of representation that enables the reader to infer the psychological conditions and attitudes of discourse participants either as victims of prostitution and sex slavery or as active agents in the sustenance of the act. Working within the systemic linguistic orientation and insights from the notion of phenomenalistic construal, therefore, this study explores the linguistic representation of the inner feelings and attitudes of victims of sex slavery and prostitution in Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon, Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo’s Trafficked, and Ifeanyi Ajaegbo’s Sarah House. The texts under study represent sex slavery and prostitution as forms of physical and mental violence against the victims of the acts and a gross violation of their humanness.