Jane Wilkinson, Talking with African Writers: interviews with African poets, playwrights and novelists. London: James Currey, 1992, 225 pp., £9.95, ISBN 0 85255 529 6 paperback.

Africa ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-264
Author(s):  
Obi Maduakor
Keyword(s):  
African Writers

scholarly journals The fate of African mask in the works of French-speaking writers in West and Central Africa

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 202-209
Author(s):  
Nina D. Lyakhovskaya
Keyword(s):  
Central Africa ◽  
Francophone Literature ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Ancestor Cult ◽  
The Future ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
History Of ◽  
West And Central Africa ◽  
African Writers ◽  
The 1960S

The article examines the attitude of contemporary African writers to the traditional zoomorphic and anthropomorphic masks. In the 1960s–70s, for the supporters of the theory of negritude, the sacred mask embodied the spirit of ancestors and an inextricable connection with tradition. In a transitional era (the 1990s – the early 21st century), the process of desacralisation of the mask has been observed and such works appear in which the idea of the death of tradition is carried out. The article consistently examines the history of the emergence and strengthening of interest in the image of the African mask as the most striking symbol of African traditions on the part of cultural, art and scientific workers and the reflection of this symbol in the works of representatives of Francophone literature in West and Central Africa in different periods of time. The article concludes about the transformation of the views of the studied writers on the future of African traditions from an enthusiastic and romantic (as, for example, in the lyrics of Léopold Sédar Senghor or Samuel-Martin Eno Belinga) attitude to the images of the African past and tradition – masks, ancestor cult – to despair and bitterness from the awareness of the desacralisation of traditional objects and images and the profanation of tradition under the pressure of the realities of the present day (drama by Koffi Kwahulé). The attitude of African writers to the image of the mask, which is directly related to the themes of preserving traditions and the search of their identity by African literary heroes, is gradually changing, demonstrating the pessimistic view of Francophone African writers on the future of African traditions.

scholarly journals Hybridity and the Shape of the New African Woman

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-361
Author(s):  
Regie Panadero Amamio
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
African Literature ◽  
African Woman ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Gender Oppression ◽  
Dark Continent ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
African Writers ◽  
The Many

Hybridity is argued as an intricate combination of attraction and repulsion that describes the relationship between the colonizers and the colonized. This combination creates a challenge to and disruption of the monolithic power exercised by the colonizers of Africa who (mis)represented the land as a Dark Continent. Such monolithic power underpins the portrayal of the colonizers’ patriarchal tradition within which women characters in creative works by Africans are commonly situated. The inclusion of women as part of the many subjects of power strengthens the discourse on hybridity in African literature. To question power is to see men and women both apart and together as ambivalence that defines the idea of hybridity in the African literary tradition. In this paper, the employment of deconstruction in the  analysis of women characters in five selected stories by African writers reveals a new consciousness in African literature using the Dark Continent metaphor as a mirror of  the female aesthetics. In this sense, the use of women’s bodies in the short stories does not only point to the issue of gender oppression but also to a power that is disrupting and slowly dismantling the long-entrenched patriarchal stance forcing the male characters to question their current worldview and position. Overall, this paper has established that contemporary African literature on women recognizes the hybridized identity and shape of the new woman, consequently proving that the so-called Dark Continent is nothing but a myth.

Writing against innocence: Entangled temporality, black subjectivity, andDrumwriters revisited

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-293
Author(s):  
Xiaoran Hu
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Political Protest ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
Resistance Movements ◽  
Protest Literature ◽  
Radical Critique ◽  
Black Subjectivity ◽  
African Writers ◽  
The Relationship

This article examines the representation of time in narratives of childhood experience in Es’kia Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue (1959) and Bloke Modisane’s Blame Me on History (1963). These two autobiographies are among the most widely-known works by the group of South African writers who have been loosely associated with Drum magazine in the 1950s. Originating from the early years of the anti-apartheid struggle and resonating widely with the heightened anticolonial resistance movements across the continent, writings by the so-called Drum writers, many of whom later went into exile, have often been viewed and criticized as “protest literature”, as literary works whose aesthetic merits are somehow compromised by the overt political purposes they appear to serve. This article seeks to revise such a reading by revisiting the politics of the stylistic innovations in these autobiographical narratives. Themes and motifs directly derived from the rhetoric of political protest, as I argue, in fact problematize a developmental logic governing the biographical transition from childhood to adulthood and contribute to a radical critique of linear temporality and teleological historiography. While writing from polemical positions and from inside the historical juncture of political resistance, these writers’ narrative reflections on and re-orderings of the relationship between the past and the present also partake of the process of refashioning modern black subjectivity, a significant move of literary intervention that still has profound resonance in our postcolonial, post-apartheid, and post-revolutionary present.

Negritude: Some Dissident Voices

1974 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 23-25
Author(s):  
Barbara Ischinger
Keyword(s):  
African Literature ◽  
Wole Soyinka ◽  
Ousmane Sembene ◽  
Ferdinand Oyono ◽  
Literary Evolution ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Ezekiel Mphahlele ◽  
African Writers

Only eight years ago Janheinz Jahn stated in Neo-African Literature that the critics of nigritude were all writing in English—not in French. Jahn was referring to writers like Ezekiel Mphahlele, Gerald Moore and Wole Soyinka, whose criticism he regarded as “based on an inadequate translation.” 2 The most important movement in the literary evolution in French-speaking Africa had, according to Jahn, only been criticized out of ignorance and misunderstanding. Today, criticism of Negritude has become a major issue in those French-speaking countries which were among its strongest supporters originally. It should be mentioned, however, that certain French African writers—among them Ferdinand Oyono and Ousmane Sembene—have opposed Negritude since the 1950s.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document