Beautyful Ones Research Articles

Showing and Telling as Techniques in Literary Writing: A Study of Selected Corpora from Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

This paper examines Showing and Telling as discrete literary techniques in fiction, through a study of selected samples from Ayi Kwei Armah’s (168) The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. There are a wide range of techniques deployed by literary writers in conveying themes, and such techniques are chosen for specific reasons. This study hinges on theText Analysis Theory. The theory is suitable for the study as it explains how clause structure impinges on the narration of experiences, actions and events in literary texts. The study concludes that showing and telling perform significant functions in narration: providing useful details, describing settings, amplifying themes, making narration believable, and facilitating interpretation of events from readers’ end. Although neither of the two techniques should be extraneous in a literary text, literary writers should combine both techniques for effective writing.

The residual effects of colonialism on transformation in Africa: A post-colonial study of Ayi Kwei Armah’s the Beautyful Ones are not yet Born

The political transition from absolutism to democratization in African societies forced many countries on the continent to redress the past colonial rulership’s wrongs and destruction. After taking reigns from the colonialists, the democratic leadership in various parts of Africa set out to rebuild the continent. This initiative meant rehabilitating the African continent and liberating her from colonial identities. It is during the colonial period that severe conditions were imposed upon African natives and their aboriginal identities marginalized. Today, under autonomous incumbency, Africa is still menaced by colonial vestiges that hinder it from progressing socio-politically and economically. Thus, this qualitative paper aims to probe the colonial legacies in today’s Africa and their impact on the continent’s transformation from a literary perspective. This noted, Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born serves as a primary source of data and a lens through which the residual effects of colonialism on transformation in the African continent are scrutinized. The paper found that the continent is still grappling with socio-political and economic maladies such as inequality, poverty, unemployment and corruption due to the colonial influence that is still predominant in post-colonial Africa among other causes.

Unbearable Black Studies: On the Academic Archetypes

Theorizing the introduction and consolidation of the Social and Political Thought Black Studies Stream (a stream that was introduced prior to George Floyd’s summary execution and the wave of statements and “commitments” that followed in its wake), the author probes how the promise of integration relies on a temporality of belatedness that perpetually defers the content of its offer while simultaneously intensifying white violence. Thinking with Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), a novel attending to the failures of postcolonial Ghana, the author contends with the ruse of promissory liberal gestures made in service of introducing Black studies at York University and their function to stabilize the liberal multicultural university.

Affectability, temporality, and postcolonial subjectification in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

This article engages with Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born to examine what happens when the promise of future-making, conceptually restored with independence, confronts an unchanged, unchangeable present? I argue that Armah’s novel positions affect and affectability as the primary mode of subjectification and subjugation in the postcolony. More specifically, I show how the novel advances a postcolonial theory of affect that scrutinizes the progressivist temporal politics that founds the postcolonial state and the affective economies that sustain it. In turn, I argue that disaffection becomes the primary way the novel resists the progressivist ethos of the postcolony as it enables Armah’s protagonist to reckon with the tragedy of freedoms unrealized and recognize himself as a subject in and of history.

Corruption and Decadence in Ayi Kwei Armah’s the Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

The erosion of traditional moral standards is a predominant concern in representations of post-independence Africa. Characters frequently act in abhorrent ways as a way of expressing this worry. In The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Anyi Kwei Armah condemns the public's role in economic destruction and moral decay because almost everyone directly or indirectly aids corruption. Therefore, this study investigates moral decay, degradation, corruption, and filth in all spheres of postcolonial African society. The aim is to condemn the actions of postcolonial leaders who abuse the powers given to them in order to pursue their pecuniary interests. This study adopts postcolonial theory in its examination of our chosen text. It focuses on the literature of cultures that developed in response to British colonial dominance. The study concludes that there is a high prevalence of bribery, corruption, decay, and filth in African society, which has hampered development.

Postcolonial Disgust or Regenerative Vision?: The Values and Significance of “The Man” in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born has been condemned for its severe criticism of newly independent Ghana, its disdain for its leaders and officials, and for the absence of hope displayed for a future in which the individual and the nation might triumph over societal corruption. This article analyzes Armah's controversial novel through the caustic response of its main character, The Man, to contemporary national ethics and to the possibilities he himself embodies for genuine change and regeneration. The conflict in The Man's alienated consciousness is rooted not only in the expediencies of the newly postcolonial Ghana he fastidiously observes, but also in his loyalty to the traditional Ghanaian values he inherits, remembers, and practices, thus indicating the possibility of hope and change for both character and nation.

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

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

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.

Corpus Assisted Approach To Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

Armah’s The Beautyful Ones are not yet Born is a novel known for its extensive portrayal of the ills and anomalies in the Ghanaian society right after independence. The majority of studies on the novel have overwhelmingly concluded that corruption is the preoccupation of the text. This view appears skewed in many respects. This paper argues that the corpus assisted approach can contribute methodologies to support objective investigation of the subject matters of the text. This study, adopting the corpus-assisted approach in a mix of numerical data and qualitative description of Armah’s The Beautyful Ones are not yet Born, used frequencies of the occurrence of pejorative terms in the text to determine the dominant subject matters in the novel. The approach reveals that “rot” and “decay” are the most dominant motifs used, followed by “filth”, “corruption”, and “bribery”. It suggests that clusters, i.e., recurrence of words, characters’ association with the words, and context of use serve as textual cues in thematic exploration. The approach aids in revealing that the real intent of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is that the total breakdown of the society rests on seemingly insignificant characters. The paper has implications for methodological approaches to thematic analysis of literary texts, particularly, the novel.

Futuring Africa: Immature Men and the Utility of Hope in Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

The purpose of this paper is to provide a re-reading of Armah as a writer of decadence and frustration. I argue that such readings remain prejudiced since scholars rarely identify the philosophy of Kant as a particularly useful resource which will aid one to understand the full complexity of Armah’s vision for postcolonial Ghana. Drawing on Kant’s age of enlightenment, this paper redeems Armah’s debut of pejorism by locating the novel’s diagnostic function within the complex paradigms of maturity and immaturity. Thus, this paper examines the ambiguities of Armah’s characterization and how it strengthens the utopian sensibilities embedded in the text. The paper concludes that Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born remains therapeutic for the advent of the new nation.

Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born in the History of African Literature: A Critical Analysis of a Landmark Novel

This study shows the central position held by Ayi Kwei Aramh’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born in the African literary world. It tries to prove that the publishing of this work was a landmark in the early post-colonial context of African literature. Through a series of breaks from still prevailing colonial and neocolonial literary discourses, it has initiated an innovative aesthetics which has left a tremendous legacy which is being continued by subsequent generations.

Network Novel: Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo’s Wizard of the Crow and Dialogues in African Literature

ABSTRACT This essay reads Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo’s Wizard of the Crow (2006) as an intervention in the ongoing dialogues in African literature. Through the paradigms of ‘reciprocality’, ‘extensibility’ and ‘reconfigurability’, the essay gauges the impacts of dialoguing on the readings of African letters by focusing on ways in which Ngũgĩ reincarnates old concerns of two exemplars of West African literature; Kojo Laing’s Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars (1992) and Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968). The article draws on theoretical insights formulated on literary networks to conceptualise the attraction between Armah and Ngũgĩ on one hand and between Laing and Ngũgĩ on the other, with a view to discerning how Ngũgĩ’s network novel interrogates and intensifies thematic concerns of the preceding novels. Emphasised throughout the essay is how Ngũgĩ reworks Armah’s faecal metaphor and Laing’s body transformations in a bid to reflect on the significance of literary networks as both celebrated and productive enterprise that not only circulates interpretations but also regenerates readings of ‘network novels’.

African Literature: A Tool for Societal Regeneration

Contemporary societies across the world are faced with the burden of prevalent and diverse societal wrongdoings which have possible future implications that are alarming and worrisome if not controlled. Therefore, the need for societal regeneration for a better future becomes imperative, and this change can be achieved by various means. This study argues that African Literature can be considered a tool through which the desired change can be achieved. Thus, this study aims to demonstrate how African Literature fulfils the criteria of being a tool for societal regeneration by examining the paradigms and moral positions in matters that affect the society using a textual and interpretative analysis of selected literary works (Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments and The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Achebe’s A Man of the People). This study is premised on the fact that African Literature provides an opportunity for a connection with indigenous roots that made the traditional society a relatively non-perverted one while the simultaneous all-round forward progress of the contemporary is not jeopardised. Considering the potential in literature to achieve social change, a reading culture must be revitalised and encouraged, especially among millennials who are victims and promoters of these menaces, as it provides a mechanism for corrective psychology and orientation.

POST-INDEPENDENCE WEST AFRICAN NARRATIVES, THEMATIC CONCERNS AND HUMAN IN/DIGNITY PARADIGMS

The post-independence West Africa is characterized with urban development, expansion of economy, love and quest for progress, desire for success and self-fulfilment, etc. Most literary writers satirize and attack neo-colonialism because most African rulers of the post-colonial era terrorize their fellow Africans. The thematic preoccupations of most works of this era are the portrayal of injustice, social ills and tensions created by the neo-colonialists. Most of the writers demand for fairness in leadership. Literature mirrors the social, political, economic and even religious ills in the society. It cautions the society especially the ruling class for failing to live upto expectation and abandoning their proclaimed objectives and ideals. The discoveries are that most West African societies are confronted with security challenges, poverty, lack of just and strong institutions that focus on the welfare of the masses, all of which are attributed to the insensitivity of the leaders. This makes the achievement of Goal sixteen of Sustainable Development Goals very difficult. The theoretical framework for this paper is Gender Theory and the selected works for the exploration of human in/dignity paradigms are Chinua Achebe's Anthills of Savannah, A Man of the People, Festus Iyayi's Violence, and Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. This paper recommends selfless leadership and historical reflections as ways forward.

“The self and the world against which it had to live”: Neocolonialism and the resistant subject in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

ABSTRACTArmah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born has been read in terms of its political criticism of the native elite in Nkrumah’s post-independence Ghana, and for its treatment of individual consciousness – but these elements have been treated largely in isolation from each other. This article argues that the novel establishes a nuanced interdependency between subjectivity and the material everyday of neocolonialism, grounding its exploration of the psychic strain of such conditions on its exposé of Ghana’s neocolonial economy. Defining subjectivity in Fanonian terms, it argues that the multi-temporality of Beautyful Ones, and its treatment of its protagonist’s interiority, illustrate how the self and its socio-economic conditions are mutually constitutive, explanatory and effectual. The neocolonial circumstances that Armah’s protagonist navigates each day equip him with the consciousness to historicize his psychic malaise. In this way, the novel gestures towards what a resistant subject, responsive to such corrupt conditions, might be.

British Popular Culture in Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

This article considers the first novel of the Ghanaian author Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968, Oxford: Heinemann) in terms of the novel’s references to British popular culture. Particular reference is made to the British comic strip Garth, and theory about comic strips and popular culture is explored through reference to the work of Raymond Williams, John Fiske, George Orwell, and John Chapman. The work of the American scholar Lisa Yaszek is also considered. The comic strip Garth is shown to be representative of a coloniser’s culture, and the strip is seen as inaccessible to one of the characters in the novel. The possibility of moving beyond residual culture and transitioning to a different culture is considered. Matters of class are embedded in the argument; several of the theorists considered addressed the idea of reading from a class-based perspective.

Overcoming the Gleam of Empire and the Excremental State in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

The process of decolonization had most of the time been tumultuous for all African states as they tried to rise from the debris of European empires. Mass uprisings, enigmatic leaders, grand narratives of a hopeful future have shaped their individual paths to autonomy. But all those paths have ended up misdirecting the people. The promises made by revolutionary leaders, fighting in the liberation wars, fell too short in providing a new start for the citizens of the postcolonial states. One reason for this failure has been a misconstrued idea of nation and nationalism. Ayi Kwei Armah in his 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born sheds light on the pitfalls of nationalism. In the novel, the Ghana of great promises, the nation that fought against the Empire for its independence – a fight against inequality, indignity, and injustice – faces the same hypocrisy and corruption, prevalent during the regime of the colonizers. The author narrates the predicament of an unnamed protagonist who deals with the atmosphere of mistrust and betrayal around him. His conflicted state of mind, mistrust of social morality, and deep-rooted anger in witnessing a decadent nation on its way to becoming a materialistic wasteland, are significant issues in the novel. The appeal of what the narrator calls “the gleam” on one hand and a conscious effort to steer clear of the path of vice on the other is shown in the narrator’s stream of consciousness. This paper aims to look at the postcolonial state Ghana immersed in the degraded morality of its people. The nation and the individual both face the same hopelessness but in Armah’s novel a glimpse of hope can be found. The narrator called for a better Ghanaian society that would reject blind imitations of materialistic Europe.

The fulfillment of the biblical statement “vanity of vanities! all is vanity” through the portrayal of two characters in Armah’s the beautyful ones are not yet born

After the five basic needs, Man usually seeks power. This quest takes diverse forms namely financial, material, political and social to name just a few. Once it is got, the use may raise problems or difficulties that nobody mainly the holder has ever thought of. Here, it depends on how it is used. Power can be used properly by serving one’s fellows. Whether used properly or not, Man’s power ends on this earth. In this vein, in order to build a good reputation and or personality of oneself on this earth and after death, one has to use one’s power in a good way. This research paper aims at bringing human beings to be aware of the fact that they must account for all their deeds one day or the other, and consequently must think several times before acting or even uttering a single word. If this is known, they must be as modest and honest as possible no matter their power and/or the fields where they operate in order to contribute to the promotion of their community and as such the development of their country. The study has highlighted the failure of Koomson who has misused his power in The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Armah on the one hand and the rehabilitation of the man who has always been modest and honest on the other and each of them rewarded accordingly. Otherwise, it has proved that men have always accounted and will always account for their deeds and therefore ripe their fruits accordingly. It has also shown that Armah has been both a novelist and a teacher through the evolution of both characters under study. In order to efficiently explore the topic, I have used the theories of characterization and qualitative.

Discourse of Denunciation: A Critical Reading of Chinua Achebe’s Man of The People

Achebe’s narrative text, A Man of The People (1966), is a political satire in which he exposes the intricacies of democratic politics in a Nigerian setting. At the heart of this narrative is a clear denunciation of a bastardized political system in a perverse socio-cultural and economic environment similar to what pertains in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), Ahmadou Kourouma’s The Suns of Independence (1970) and Amu Djoleto’s Money Galore (1975), among many others. Despite the fact that A Man of The people was published in 1966, its central theme, that is politics, corruption and underdevelopment in Africa, is still relevant to contemporary socio-cultural, economic and political context in Africa. No doubt the novel is classified among African classics in literary studies, as it is one of the narrative texts studied in universities across Africa and beyond. This study seeks to critically examine the nature of linguistic tools and stylistic detours that define the satiric outlooks of this narrative text of Achebe as a denunciative discourse and its impact on the effective transmission of the message of socio-cultural and attitudinal transformation for sustainable socio-economic and political development. Considering the nature of literature as a social discourse (Fowler 1981), the study will be posited in the theoretical framework of critical discourse analysis CDA (van Dijk, 1993b). Critical discourse analysis is a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequalities are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context (van Dijk, 2001).

The Pathological Constitution of Colonized Subjectivity in Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born: Kohut and Fanon in Dialogue

The following theoretical review attempts to provide a distinctly psychoanalytic reading of Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968). Integrating a Fanonian conception of intersubjective recognition with Kohut’s work on narcissism and self-object relations, it is argued that the enduring nature of psychopathology in colonized peoples is readily sustained by denigrating ties to hegemonic colonial selfobjects- the symbolic “gleam” identified so lucidly by Armah in his novel. It is suggested that positing the existence of selfobjects which are actively harmful, instead of necessarily compensatory and/or curative, enhances the dialectical strength of Kohutian self-psychology in previously colonized nations. Such an extension also places self-psychology in explicit dialogue with Fanon’s sociogenic diagnosis of psychopathology; providing one potential interpretative lens through which to explore what processes of decolonization might intimate regarding the psychic reality of the colonizer/colonized dyad.