Tag: African Literature
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Review: Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday
Set in the world of violent conflict arising from divisive attempts by sectarian splinter groups to define and put into practice a fundamentalist form of Islam, Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday (Grove Press) can feel all too familiar at times. It echoes the news of kidnapped schoolgirls and the profiles of young men who leave their homes…
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Isidore Okpewho’s Myth in Africa (1983)
Some more Okpewho for you today…no introduction needed… Myth in Africa Isidore Okpewho London: Cambridge, 1983 Preface: Here, Okpewho takes the opportunity to drive in the point that he concentrated on in the previous work The Epic in Africa (1979), which is that the practices of oral literature are not solely related to religious ritual.…
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Isidore Okpewho’s The Epic in Africa (1979)
After a fair bit of study during my undergrad and MA (the latter with Harold Scheub who has recently retired), I had almost entirely forgotten the fascinating body of work dedicated to African oral literature. Oral? Literature? Did I hear you right? Yes. Yes you did. Because despite not being written down, this rich body of tales,…
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the local is not the national; the national is not the local
I’ve been reading quite a smart book lately that engages a question running through African literary theory, which could essentially be summed up as “How useful is the nation as the principle structuring concept of the African imaginary?” The nation was the most important structuring concept during the period of independence from colonial powers and…
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keita, the canon, and what the hell does “interdisciplinary” mean anyway?
[Disclaimer: this post is not “finished” in any sense. I wanted to publish it, because I think that it deals with some of the underlying threads we should consider as the battle between the legitimacy of the humanities and the bottom lines of the administration continues to wage throughout the country. But I really, really,…
Indirect Libre 