Other Libraries: On German Studies and African Literature in the World

2021 ◽  
Vol 94 (3) ◽  
pp. 382-384
Author(s):  
Tsitsi Jaji
Keyword(s):  
African Literature ◽  
German Studies ◽  
The World

What Rough Beast: Neo-African Literature and the Force of Social Change

1978 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 53-59
Author(s):  
William Cook
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
William Butler Yeats ◽  
African Literature ◽  
New Age ◽  
Chinua Achebe ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
The World ◽  
Things Fall Apart ◽  
Second Coming

The Second ComingTurning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 5The ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;Surely the Second Coming is at hand. 10The Second Comingl Hardly are those words outWhen a vast image out of Spiritus MundiTroubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desertA shape with lion body and the head of a man,A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, 15Is moving its slow thighs, while all about itReel shadows of the indignant desert birds.The darkness drops again; but I knowThat twenty centuries of stony sleepWere vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, 20And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?William Butler YeatsChinua Achebe in 1959 turned to the above poem by Yeats, with its prophecy of the approach of a new age, for the title to his first novel. Ezekiel Mphalhlele in the same year chose lines seven and eight of the same powm as the epigraph to his autobiographical Down Second Avenue. This convergence upon one of the most foreboding images in modern poetry is not an accident. Both writers saw their own experiences of loss of order and future debilitation confirmed within the lines of Yeat’s apocalyptic poem. Viewed within the context of Yeats’ theory of 2000-year gyres, this vision becomes even more ominous.

scholarly journals Editor's welcome, PORTAL, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 2004

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Allatson
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
International Studies ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
German Studies ◽  
Editorial Committee ◽  
The World

Since the highly successful inauguration of PORTAL in January 2004, we have received many kind expressions of support from international studies practitioners in a range of fields, and from such places as Canada, Italy, Mexico, Nigeria, New Zealand, Spain, Trinidad, the U.K., and the U.S.A. Particularly gratifying have been the endorsements of the journal and its publishing aims by people involved in their own electronic publishing enterprises. For their generous responses to PORTAL, the Editorial Committee would like to express its collective appreciation to the following people: Professor Jean-Marie Volet, of the University of Western Australia, and the guiding editor of the ground-breaking e-journal Mots Pluriels (www.arts.uwa.edu.au/MotsPluriels); and Francis Leo Collins, member of the Editorial Committee for the Graduate Journal of Asia Pacific Studies (GJAPS), based in Auckland, New Zealand. PORTAL's readers may be interested in the current call for papers from GJAPS (www.arts.auckland.ac.nz/gjaps), for a special issue on "Imagining the Asia-Pacific" (deadline October 31, 2004). This issue of PORTAL contains essays that cover wide terrain: the Chilean diasporic community in Australia; the world of German intellectuals; contemporary Mexican socio-political movements; rural-urban migration in China; and transnational advocacy networks and election monitoring in the Philippines, Chile, Nicaragua and Mexico. In the cultural section of this issue, we are delighted to present a short story from the noted German Studies scholar Anthony Stephens, and the first half of a beautiful, deeply poetic and haunting novel entitled Son, from the London-based writer and art-critic Jennifer Higgie. The novel’s second and final part will appear in PORTAL vol. 2, no. 1, in January 2005. On a different note, we would like to express our support for the inaugural Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, to be held in Ubud, Bali, from October 11 to 17, 2004. The Festival, which is attracting interest from writers across the world, maintains a website at: http://www.ubudwritersfestival.com/ Finally, I would like to remind readers that the next issue of PORTAL (vol. 2, no. 1, January 2005) will be a special issue devoted to "Exile and Social Transformation." I would also like to encourage international studies practitioners and cultural producers working anywhere in the world to submit material for future issues. Paul Allatson, Chair, PORTAL Editorial Committee

African Cultural Festivals and World Literature

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-257
Author(s):  
Claire Ducournau
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
African Literature ◽  
Critical Inquiry ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Cultural Festivals ◽  
The World ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
Bear Witness

Abstract In an era where cultural festivals multiply, so-called African festivals have spread in Africa, but also outside of the continent, in major cities as well as in little-known villages, for example in provincial France. What are some of their implications and effects in the case of francophone African literature? These events privilege a continental representation of literature, which often reveals itself as problematic when confronted with the complex geographies of the texts and authors represented at these festivals. Using cross-disciplinary methodology, this critical inquiry reads different reallocations of this persistent African matrix through a typology and contemporary examples (Kossi Efoui’s writings, the “Étonnants Voyageurs” and “Plein sud” festivals). As an object of study, festivals bear witness to the necessity of expanding the toolbox of the (world) literary scholar by making use of documentary sources and adopting ethnographic approaches. It reveals a structural tension between an African map and various concrete territories, where local issues matter often more than this continental category, and can affect the form and content of literature itself.

African Literature: A Tool for Societal Regeneration

Imbizo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Funmilola Kemi Megbowon ◽  
Chijioke Uwah
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
African Literature ◽  
Traditional Society ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
Interpretative Analysis ◽  
Reading Culture

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.

scholarly journals Globalization, mondialisation and the immonde in Contemporary Francophone African Literature

Paragraph ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 254-272
Author(s):  
Michael Syrotinski
Keyword(s):  
African Literature ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Generic Point ◽  
The World ◽  
Theoretical Frame ◽  
Postcolonial Africa ◽  
Epistemological Break ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Point Of Reference

Taking as its theoretical frame of reference Jean-Luc Nancy's distinction between globalization and mondialisation, this article explores the relationship between contemporary Africa, the ‘world’ and the ‘literary’. The discussion centres on a number of present-day African novelists, and looks in particular at a controversial recent text by the Cameroonian writer and critic, Patrice Nganang, who is inspired by the work of the well-known theorist of postcolonial Africa, Achille Mbembe. For both writers ‘Africa’, as a generic point of reference, is seen in terms of a certain genealogy of Africanist thinking, from colonial times through to the contemporary postcolonial era, and the article reflects on what a radical challenge to this genealogy might entail. Using a more phenomenologically oriented reading of monde (world) and immonde (abject, literally un-world), this rupture could be conceived in terms of the kind of ‘epistemological break’ that thinkers like Althusser and Foucault introduced into common usage and theoretical currency in contemporary French thought back in the 1960s.

scholarly journals The Ethics of African Studies in the Age of Oga Politics: A Response to Tejumola Olaniyan’s “African Literature in the Post-Global Age”

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 286-295
Author(s):  
Laura T. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
African Literature ◽  
Global South ◽  
African Studies ◽  
Clash Of Civilizations ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Boko Haram ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Global Age ◽  
The World ◽  
Ways Of Being

AbstractIn response to Olaniyan’s article “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense,” this paper suggests that Olaniyan’s conception of the “planetary” provides a metaphor for imagining a politics of responsibility in the post-global and anti-globalization age. The urgency for planetary thinking is framed within the current ascendancy of big man or “oga” politics represented by the rise of neoliberal populism around the world and in Huntingtonian “clash of civilizations” logic espoused by both elite nativists such as Donald Trump and grassroots ethnonationalists such as Boko Haram. The paper suggests that African studies continues to play a crucial and increasingly urgent role in amplifying, translating, and supporting various African ways of being and knowing that have long served as critiques of the disenfranchisement of those in global south.

African psychology: from acquiescence to dissent

2020 ◽  
pp. 008124632095678
Author(s):  
Augustine Nwoye
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
African Literature ◽  
African Philosophy ◽  
African History ◽  
African Music ◽  
African Art ◽  
African Religion ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World

Over the past 5 or 6 years, it has consistently been argued that African psychology should be recognised as an emerging tradition and a counter-canonical and insurgent postcolonial discipline fitting to be classified in the same category as other postcolonial disciplines in African humanities such as African literature, African philosophy, African religion, African anthropology, African history, African archaeology, African music, and African art. This article is an attempt to expatiate on this thesis. It aims to demonstrate that continental African psychology is a legitimate, autonomous, and self-determinative postcolonial discipline endowed with its own definable epistemological, philosophical, and methodological traditions to psychological scholarship. The basic idea of the article is consistent with the view credited to Guba and Lincoln that social science scholarship ‘needs emancipation from hearing only the voices of Western Europe, emancipation from generations of silence, and emancipation from seeing the world in one color’ (p. 212), and in the context of this article, in one psychology.

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