Generation Of African Writers Research Articles

A Fictional Depiction of the Peculiarities of the African Female Gender Experiences in the Diaspora

The issue of Africans in the Diaspora stretches historically to the time when Africa began having contact with the outside world, particularly the Arabs, Chinese, Turks, and others. Beginning with the 16th to the 18th C, the contacts heightened during the Trans- Atlantic Slave Trade. Thereafter, Africans have found themselves in the Diaspora for many reasons. This has elicited a myriad of reactions to their experiences in the Diaspora. Therefore, the study sought to investigate the fictional depiction of African immigrant experiences in the Diaspora. It was guided by two objectives namely: to establish the fictional depiction of the peculiarities of the African female experiences in the Diaspora, and to investigate the narrative styles adopted to convey these experiences. The focus was on four novels: Americanah (2013), Minaret (2005), We Need New Names (2013), and The Seasons of Thomas Tebo (1986). The study was library-based research. Its significance is in the fact that it gives a snapshot of the two sides of migration- positive and negative. The results revealed that the African female gender faces indescribable discrimination, undergoes the pain of assimilation into the foreign culture, has to work two jobs in order to sustain life in the Diaspora, is always haunted by the fear of aging and having nothing to show for it, plus several other challenges. The diasporic spaces also catalyse character changes in these migrants. As a result, they adopt confusing mannerisms, fail to wish away homesickness, become two-faced hypocrites, are subdued, submissive and in extreme cases – go through a mental breakdown. It was discovered that migrant fiction is narrated through humour, flashback, irony, detailed description, suspense and other stylistic techniques. The study concluded that migration is now a contemporary and central theme in much of African fiction, especially by a new generation of African writers

“Chinua Achebe’s Beautiful Soul”

This essay revisits Chinua Achebe’s exemplary satire of African disillusionment,No Longer at Ease(1960). Published the year of Nigeria’s official independence from Britain, the novel describes how Obi Okonkwo, a civil servant and colonial subject, tries but fails at the threshold of independence to navigate a Nigerian modernity overrun with cultures of bribery, nepotism, and tribalism. Torn between the moral and financial demands of his rural, traditionalist kin and those of the colony’s urban elite, Obi succumbs to corruption, voicing his downfall and Nigeria’s botched independence through a sardonic self-acquittal. A frustrated idealist betrayed by the high promises of anticolonialism, Obi mirrors a lost generation of African writers and intellectuals, figures the novel satirizes for their self-absolving cynicism.

Didacticism and the Third Generation of African Writers: Chukwuma Ibezute’s <i>The Temporal Gods</i> and Goddess in the Cathedral

This article argues that African literature is a didactic literature. It points out that even though African literature has borrowed so much from European literary culture, especially in the areas of form and language; didacticism is not one of those concepts that African literature inherited from the European literary culture. By didacticism, it is implied that African literature is aimed at correcting, informing and educating its readers. These functions of didacticism are inherent in African oral traditional storytelling and are carried over to the written literature. It is further argued in the article that of the three generations that now make up African literature, the third generation of African writers are accused of not making their stories didactic and that only a selected few of them remain true to making their stories didactic. Among these few writers is Chukwuma Ibezute. Using Chukwuma Ibezute's two novels, The Temporal Gods (1998) and Goddess in the Cathedral (2003) the didactic nature of African literature as contained in the works of a writer of the third generation is demonstrated. In The Temporal Gods the reality of the consequences of greed and envy are revealed. It is further argued through the novel that the afflictions of evil spirits on their victims are temporal. In Goddess in the Cathedral we are presented with another educating story of the activities of evil spirits and their agents. Through the novel, we are warned against some pastors who are agents of evil spirits but who claim to be working for the almighty God. Using examples from the two novels, ways on how to know a pastor who is working for God and the one who is working for evil spirits are further revealed.

Сенгор: утопічно-філософські фрейми біографії

The article considers the main biographical moments of Leopold Sedar Senghor (1906 – 2001), Senegalese poet, thinker and statesman, the president of Senegal (1960 – 1980), the most influential writer of the West-African literary region, the renewer of poetic form verset. The heritage of the poet is traced within a postcolonial literary practice; therefore, the writer was formed on the border of two cultures – colonial Christian and ethnic Senegalese, which first of all has defined world-view themes and hybrid rhythmic character of his texts. Our study analyses the poems from the collections marked by the main themes of his life: “Twilight Songs” (1945), “Black Victims” (1948), “Ethiopiques” (1956), “Letters of Raining Season” (1972), “Major Elegies” (1979). The formation of Senegalese written literature occurred on the base of the French language, which became a unifying factor for the multilingual Senegalese culture. It is also stressed that Senghor’s Negritude conception became a culturological paradigm for the whole generation of African writers of the XX century, having generated thereby one more feature of the Senegalese literature. The basic principle of the Negritude proclaimed by Senghor was the return to African sources, and consequently, traditional African values became source of inspiration of the African artists. Thus, Senegal, due to Senghor, became a cultural centre of the postcolonial West Africa.

Reimaginations of "America" and Cultural Identity in the Expatriate Drama of Koffi Kwahulé

The first of two main points I would like reader to take away from this essay is that, at least since 1960s, (USA) has become an important, consequential trope in world drama, one deserves lot more attention than scholarship has paid it. My recently published American Unculture in French Drama, for instance, covers great number of post-1960 plays about written by French continental dramatists, plays which assume an all-American perspective and focus on American people and places. (1) It examines in particular French fascination with what I call, after Jean Baudrillard and Regis Debray, unculture of postmodern type of homo americanus, representing an (anti-)intellectual mind-set, an exceptionalist self-image, and materialistic lifestyle are globally prominent but concentrated in United States--which brings me to second point I would like to make. The trope of tells somewhat different story when it issues from different selection of world's francophone population, one with dissimilar geopolitical history and contrasting and turbulent cultural reality. A working comparison between continental French plays about America and ways in which today's generation of postcolonial francophone dramatists responds to in their writing shows latter shift their attention from any reality of American unculture and toward an idealized notion of America as model for their own perspective on globalizing humanity. Koffi Kwahule stands out for his dramaturgical fascination with subject of America, and this essay will cover two of his plays draw heavily on this subject. In culinary lingo recipe for my discussion of Kwahule America plays would read as follows: take one West African expatriate dramatist (a product, in part, of both specific artistic framework and humanistic vitality of Ivorian source culture), one prominent Western European culture (the intellectual and artistic infrastructures being equally enriched by France's sociopolitical freedoms and problematized by its history of colonial and postcolonial abuses and its remnant racism), and one mediated/media-assisted idea of super-hegemonic global culture: America. Bring them all together and you're likely to produce planetary stew of world-totality kind, as Edouard Glissant might envision it. What does Edouard Glissant mean when he expresses future of humanity in terms of world-totality? In culinary terms, once again, he's talking not so much about (subtle yet predictable) cosmopolitan dining experience as about much less predictable and more randomly constituted creole potluck, which Glissant believes will be dietary (read cultural) staple of global village yet to come. Something of an outspoken visionary in field of world culture-making, Glissant warns Westerners that, in move toward world-totality they must get used to idea of sacrificing their unique root identity for relational or rhizomatic identity: that is, root digs down but also extends its branches laterally toward other roots. (2) World-totality, Glissant believes, will depend on our progress toward transnational creolization, involving contact, conflict, attraction, harmony, repulsion, dissemblance, resemblance between cultures of world, resulting in what he calls a chaos-world[,] not because it is world in disorder, but because it is an unpredictable world. (3) Today's generation of African writers, I believe, see themselves to some extent as both reconnaissance outriders and progenitors on humanity's journey toward reconciliation with this chaos-world They act, as character from one of Koffi Kwahule's plays puts it, as the elder sons of world. (4) Setting aside ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversities among African nations, francophone Africa is well placed historically and culturally to spearhead move toward global village. …

Cooper, Brenda. – A New Generation of African Writers

La derniere decennie a vu l’apparition d’une nouvelle generation de romanciers africains, jeunes auteurs qui ont en commun d’etre nes apres les independances, dans les annees 1960 et 1970, d’ecrire en langue anglaise, et de vivre et d’ecrire dans des capitales europeennes telles que Londres ou Amsterdam. Tandis que la generation de leurs predecesseurs, membres de ce qu’on peut desormais designer comme le canon de la litterature postcoloniale, composait des fables modernes interrogeant les tra...

A New Generation of African Writers: Migration, Material Culture and Language by Brenda Cooper

A New Generation of African Writers: Migration, Material Culture and Language by Brenda Cooper

A new generation of African writers: migration, material culture & language

There is a new interest among publishers in New York and London in books by writers of African origin. These authors have often grown up or passed their early adult years out of Africa. The Orange Prize for Fiction was awarded in London 2007 to Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie's 'Half of a Yellow Sun', and the Caine Prize for African Writing has introduced new writers such as Leila Aboulela, Biyi Bandele and Chimamanda Adichie herself to agents and publishers. This examination of the extraordinary work which has recently appeared is therefore very timely. Migration is a central theme of much African fiction written in English. Here, Brenda Cooper tracks the journeys undertaken by a new generation of African writers, their protagonists and the solid objects that populate their fiction, to depict the material realities of their multiple worlds and languages. The book explores the uses to which the English language is put in order to understand these worlds. It demonstrates how these writers have contested the dominance of colonising metaphors. The writers' challenge is to find an English that can effectively express their many lives, languages and identities. BRENDA COOPER is Director of the Centre for African Studies and a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Cape Town. South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press (PB)

Sol Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa: Melancholy Narratives, Petitioning Selves and the Ethics of Suffering

Using Sol Plaatje as a representative figure and his Native Life in South Africa as its primary text, this article explores the political and ethical imperatives that informed the act of writing amongst the first generation of African writers in South Africa. Native Life in South Africa was written as an appeal to the British government and public to denounce the passing of the Land Act of 1913 and the book is a fascinating manifestation of the layered aims, ambiguities and paradoxes that inhere in petitioning. The article examines the petition as a genre that allows Plaatje to inscribe his imagined multiple readers of the text and their mutual obligations to each other. The act of petitioning also allows Plaatje to engage in modes of self-definition that include a critique of colonial modernity and laying claim to his status as a modern African.

Afrique sur Seine: A New Generation of African Writers in Paris; The Production of the Muslim Woman: Negotiating Text, History, and Ideology; Packaging Post/Coloniality: The Manufacture of Literature Identity in the Francophone World

Afrique sur Seine: A New Generation of African Writers in Paris; The Production of the Muslim Woman: Negotiating Text, History, and Ideology; Packaging Post/Coloniality: The Manufacture of Literature Identity in the Francophone World

Out of the Irony of Words

NIGERIAN WRITERS IN ENGLISH feel that they have been and are being read for the wrong reasons. The first generation of African writers, in the later colonial period, were anxious merely to speak to the West, to make themselves known in mitigation of the standard European stereotypes and misconceptions. To "sympathetic" observers of the African scene as to enthusiastic readers of "authentic" African literature, this generation was genuinely grateful. Now the situation has so far changed that the liberal European mentality has become suspect (of neo-colonialism, among other things) and so indeed have those earlier African writers who interpreted their own cultures to Europe under colonial conditions. Now is the time for European readers to follow suit, to become more sophisticated in their understanding of just what it is that African writers are about. One way of doing this is to consider the historical and intellectual situation in which the African writer finds himself determining the protean forms his self-consciousness will take. Since independence,'for example, among the elite, the whole business of how to go about being an African reincarnate has been a tremendously stimulating affair. It has unearthed untold treasures to the imagination and tightened the intellect as well: forcing ingenuousness into irony, it has made African literature exciting because complex.