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Journal articles on the topic 'African fiction – History and criticism'

Author: Grafiati

Published: 4 June 2021

Last updated: 4 March 2023

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1

Santamarina, Xiomara. "Fugitive Slave, Fugitive Novelist: The Narrative of James Williams (1838)." American Literary History 31, no. 1 (January 1, 2019): 24–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajy051.

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AbstractThis essay argues for reading a discredited slave narrative—the Narrative of James Williams (1838)—as an early black novel. Reading this narrative as a founding black novel à la Robinson Crusoe complicates the genealogy and theoretical parameters of literary criticism about early US black fiction. Such a reading revises accounts about the emergence of the third-person fictive voice inaugurated by Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown in the 1850s. It also offers a new understanding of the antislavery movement’s quest for authenticity. More importantly, reading NJW as novelistic fiction illustrates how a fugitive slave might narrativize muddied textual politics and effectively challenge the reparative vision with which we theorize the genres and politics of early African American literary texts.

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2

So, Richard Jean, and Edwin Roland. "Race and Distant Reading." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 135, no. 1 (January 2020): 59–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2020.135.1.59.

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This essay brings together two methods of cultural‐literary analysis that have yet to be fully integrated: distant reading and the critique of race and racial difference. It constructs a reflexive and critical version of distant reading—one attuned to the arguments and methods of critical race studies—while still providing data‐driven insights useful to the writing of literary history and criticism, especially to the history and criticism of postwar African American fiction, in particular James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. Because race is socially constructed, it poses unique challenges for a computational analysis of race and writing. Any version of distant reading that addresses race will require a dialectical approach. (RJS and ER)

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3

Mbewe, Ian. "Application of Political Satire in Mission to Kala and Devil on The Cross." Journal of Law and Social Sciences 5, no. 1 (August 15, 2022): 69–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.53974/unza.jlss.5.1.793.

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The study attempted to demonstrate how political satire is applied in a pre-independence African fiction Mission to Kala and a post- independence African fiction Devil on the Cross. Satire, mild or bitter, has a history of being used to expose the negative socio-economic and political realities perpetrated by both the sympathisers of colonialism and later the agents of neo-colonialism in the post-independence phase. The study employed the Marxist literary theory and Literary Onomastics through stylistic analysis and demonstrated how satire exposed the evils and how a ‘training camp’ in the colonial era was transformed into a ‘jungle’ in post-independent Africa. Character types in both periods exhibited parasitic traits such as greed, selfishness, narrow appetites and sadistic violence leading to exploitation and oppression. This historical transition was delineated on the basis of the colonised African elite and subordinates as the direct off-shoot of the African bourgeoisie groups, which created a symbolic connection between the two periods of time in the African context. The findings indicated that both texts maintained the Marxist outlook, employed ironic juxtaposition to satirise capitalism, each satirist employed a different style and Beti had the colonised African elite and subordinates as his targets of satire as opposed to Ngugi’s comprador politicians, comprador and national bourgeoisie. The masses were not spared of criticism.

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4

Wanzo, Rebecca. "The Unspeakable Speculative, Spoken." American Literary History 31, no. 3 (2019): 564–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajz028.

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Abstract Exploring various absences—what is or should not be represented in addition to the unspeakable in terms of racial representations—is the through line of three recent books about race and speculative fictions. Mark C. Jerng’s Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction (2018) argues racial worldmaking has been at the center of speculative fictions in the US. In Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination (2017), Kristen Lillvis takes one of the primary thematic concerns of black speculative fictions—the posthuman—and rereads some of the most canonical works in the black feminist literary canon through that lens. Lillvis addresses a traditional problem in the turn to discussions of the posthuman and nonhuman, namely, what does it mean to rethink black people’s humanity when they have traditionally been categorized as nonhuman? Sami Schalk’s Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (2018) speaks to the absence of a framework of disability in African American literature and cultural criticism. In addressing absence—or, perhaps silence—Schalk offers the most paradigm-shifting challenge to what is speakable and unspeakable: the problem of linking blackness with disability and how to reframe our treatment of these categories.

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5

Jenkins, E. R. "English South African children’s literature and the environment." Literator 25, no. 3 (July 31, 2004): 107–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/lit.v25i3.266.

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Historical studies of nature conservation and literary criticism of fiction concerned with the natural environment provide some pointers for the study of South African children’s literature in English. This kind of literature, in turn, has a contribution to make to studies of South African social history and literature. There are English-language stories, poems and picture books for children which reflect human interaction with nature in South Africa since early in the nineteenth century: from hunting, through domestication of the wilds, the development of scientific agriculture, and the changing roles of nature reserves, to modern ecological concern for the entire environment. Until late in the twentieth century the literature usually endorsed the assumption held by whites that they had exclusive ownership of the land and wildlife. In recent years English-language children’s writers and translators of indigenous folktales for children have begun to explore traditional beliefs about and practices in conservation.

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6

Kambon, Ọbádélé Bakari, and Lwanga Songsore. "Fiction vs. Evidence: A Critical Review of Ataa Ayi Kwei Armah’s Wat Nt Shemsw and the Eurasian Rhetorical Ethic." African and Asian Studies 20, no. 1-2 (April 27, 2021): 124–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15692108-12341486.

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Abstract At the 2018 Outstanding African Thinkers Conference on Nna Chinweizu, attendees – the first author included – took a pledge that “In all branches of our lives, we must be capable of criticizing and of accepting criticism. But criticism, proof of the willingness of others to help us or of our willingness to help others, must be complemented by self-criticism – proof of our own willingness to help ourselves to improve our thoughts and our actions. This is a sacred principle and it is my sacred duty to apply and defend it at all costs” (Chinweizu 2018). In response to that call to action, this article represents an effort to restore MꜢꜤt ‘Maat.’ Ataa Ayi Kwei Armah’s Wat Nt Shemsw: The Way of Companions epitomizes undeclared fiction masquerading as an accurate reflection of the mythology of classical Kmt ‘Land of Black People.’ By cross-checking Ataa Armah’s undeclared fiction with actual historical, iconographical, and archaeological data, we are able to debunk his numerous misrepresentations. We find that the best way to approach Kmt ‘Land of Black People’ is through direct engagement with actual evidence rather than through the distortions of fiction writers turned Egyptologists. Further, we will address the personality cult, or what we term “Ataa Armah’s Manor Shemsw model,” which embodies the rhetorical ethic whereby all egalitarians are equal, but some egalitarians are more equal than others (Orwell, Baker, and Woodhouse 1996).

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7

Togola, Adama. "Du polar d’Afrique francophone et des stratégies pour contourner la marge instituée." International Journal of Francophone Studies 24, no. 3 (December 1, 2021): 207–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ijfs_00038_1.

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This study attempts to reassess the critical discourse on the Francophone African detective fiction in order to show how the dynamics of genres and discourse in the crime novel participates in a reflection on writing and the boundaries between so-called popular literature and the so-called ‘literate’. It is about analysing the workaround strategies implemented by writers to lift the crime novel from the sidelines in which it has long been placed. Born in the nineteenth century with modernity, the African detective fiction is today one of the axes of development of African literature. It competes, by its dynamism and its originality, with the canonical novel. The resumption of thematic recurrences (immigration, social and political criticism) shows that it contributes to a broad representation of social semiosis. It now claims a discursive space of which the dominant field is obliged to recognize the relevance.

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8

Commissiong, Anand Bertrand. "Where Is the Love? Race, Self-Exile, and a Kind of Reconciliation." Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 21, no. 1 (March 1, 2021): 27–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/diaspora.21.1.2020-06-18.

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Cultivating solidarity or love for community for those systematically abused by the state and its civic community is a longstanding challenge. While the latter should primarily shoulder responsibility for (re)building trust, this article focuses on the abused self-exile’s agency and possible reasons for return. To understand possible motivations for (re)engagement, this article explores the African American expatriate experience rendered in fiction and criticism. It focuses specifically on William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face and its portrait of the potentialities of Black love as a vehicle of social resurrection and the exercise of political power.

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9

Budick, Emily Miller. "Some Thoughts on the Mutual Displacements/Appropriations/Accommodations of Culture in Several Fictions by Toni Morrison, Cynthia Ozick, and Grace Paley." Prospects 20 (October 1995): 387–404. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0361233300006128.

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InPlaying in the Dark, Toni Morrison sets out to chart a new “geography” in literary criticism, to provide a “map” for locating what she calls the “Africanist” presence in the American literary tradition. The assumption of Americanist critics, she argues, has been that “traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the fourhundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then, African Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence — which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture — has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture's literature.” For Morrison, recording the Africanist presence produces nothing less than an absolute revision of our notion of what constitutes the American literary tradition.

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10

Appiah, Anthony. "Structuralist Criticism and African Fiction: An Analytic Critique." African American Review 50, no. 4 (2017): 657–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/afa.2017.0115.

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11

Roberts, R. "American Science Fiction and Contemporary Criticism." American Literary History 22, no. 1 (November 20, 2009): 207–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajp048.

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12

Forsdick, C. "Postcolonial Criticism: History, Theory, and the Work of Fiction." Comparative Literature 58, no. 3 (January 1, 2006): 263–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/-58-3-263.

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13

Syrotinski, Michael. "Postcolonial Criticism: History, Theory and the Work of Fiction." French Studies 60, no. 3 (July 1, 2006): 418–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/fs/knl067.

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14

Zimra, Clarisse. "Postcolonial Criticism: History, Theory and the Work of Fiction (review)." MFS Modern Fiction Studies 50, no. 3 (2004): 798–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2004.0093.

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15

Van Dongen, Richard. "Non-fiction, History, and Literary Criticism in the Fifth Grade." Children's Literature Association Quarterly 12, no. 4 (1987): 189–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/chq.0.0343.

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16

Green, Alison. "‘A Supreme Fiction’: Michael Fried and Art Criticism." Journal of Visual Culture 16, no. 1 (April 2017): 89–102. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1470412917700931.

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One of the striking aspects of the trenchant legacy of Michael Fried’s ‘Art and Objecthood’ is its status as a piece of art criticism. Widely perceived as difficult and personal, philosophical and explicatory, doxa or sermon, the essay stands out. To explore its singularity, this article compares Fried’s conception of the period criticism of 18th-century French painting in his book Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980) and the method of criticism enacted in ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967) which he saw as connected. The author pursues this and other crossings between Fried’s art historical writings and art criticism, tracking it to an extended endnote in Fried’s Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (2002). ‘Art and Objecthood’ is a key essay in this story aimed at Fried’s thinking about criticism, its history, theory and practice. Doing this matters because it puts the critic in a particular relation to art and to Fried’s idea of an ‘ontologically prior relationship between painting and the beholder’.

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17

MacKenzie, Robin. "Approaches to Teaching Proust's Fiction and Criticism." French Studies 59, no. 4 (October 1, 2005): 567–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/fs/kni242.

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18

Reynolds, Rachel R., and Stephanie Newell. "Readings in African Popular Fiction." International Journal of African Historical Studies 35, no. 2/3 (2002): 560. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3097672.

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19

Dworkin, Ira. "Radwa Ashour, African American Criticism, and the Production of Modern Arabic Literature." Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 5, no. 1 (January 2018): 1–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/pli.2017.44.

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In 1973, at the suggestion of her mentor Shirley Graham Du Bois, the Egyptian scholar, activist, teacher, and novelist Radwa Ashour enrolled at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, to study African American literature and culture. Ashour’s 1975 dissertation “The Search for a Black Poetics: A Study of Afro-American Critical Writings,” along with her 1983 autobiography,Al-Rihla: Ayyam taliba misriyya fi amrika[The Journey: An Egyptian Woman Student’s Memoirs in America], specifically engage with debates that emerged at the First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in September 1956 between African Americans and others from the African diaspora (most notably Aimé Césaire) regarding the applicability of the “colonial thesis” to the United States. This article argues that Ashour’s early engagement with African American cultural politics are formative of her fiction, particularly her 1991 novel,Siraaj: An Arab Tale,which examines overlapping questions of slavery, empire, and colonialism in the Arab world.

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20

Killam, G. D., and Neil Lazarus. "Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction." Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines 28, no. 2 (1994): 330. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/485742.

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21

O’Malley, Maria. "Taking the Domestic View in Hawthorne’s Fiction." New England Quarterly 88, no. 4 (December 2015): 657–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/tneq_a_00494.

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Shifting the emphasis within feminist criticism from the act of speech to the act of hearing, this article argues that, in The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and Blithedale Romance, Nathaniel Hawthorne reveals how the public sphere depends on the voices of dispossessed women even as it attempts to silence them.

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22

Cazenave, Odile, and Donald R. Wehrs. "African Feminist Fiction and Indigenous Values." International Journal of African Historical Studies 34, no. 2 (2001): 490. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3097539.

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23

Leman, Peter. "Law and Transnational Utopias in East African Fiction." Interventions 16, no. 6 (July 11, 2014): 818–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369801x.2014.936957.

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24

Hyslop, Jonathan. "South African Social History and the New Non‐Fiction." Safundi 13, no. 1-2 (January 2012): 59–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2011.642590.

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25

Anasiudu, Okwudiri. "Mobility Trope: Travelling as a Signature of the Afropolitan Female Quest for Existential Subjectivity in Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street." Journal of Gender and Power 14, no. 2 (December 1, 2020): 123–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/jgp-2020-0017.

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Abstract The mobility trope is a key aesthetic feature in Afropolitan fiction and it crystalizes as the act of travelling which has become an important subject-matter in postnationalist African fictions by women such as Chimamanda Adichie, Noviolet Bulawayo or Chika Unigwe as a way of intervention on the debate of the Afropolitan female quest for existential subjectivity in 21st century African fiction. This is against the backdrop of negative essentialism and the exertions of patriarchy evident in the representation of African women’s in 20th century African fiction. Drawing from the foregoing, this paper interrogates Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street (Hence OBSS) to demonstrate how the writer deploys mobility trope which manifest as travelling as a signature of the Afropolitan female quest for existential subjectivity. I argue in this paper that, though existing studies on OBSS portray Efe, Sisi, Ama and Joyce as exported commodities in neoliberal sex market, their relocation however opens up a new vista to understanding their motivation and quest for new subjectivity, empowered fluid agency, individual autonomy and translation into Afropolitans. This is within Achille Mbembe’s phenomenological criticism of Afropolitanism and a methology that is based on qualitative content analysis of the text—OBSS. On the long run, the identity which travelling confers on the female characters is fluid, as they represent an African being in a globalized world and a strong sense of cultural mobility.

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26

Burger, Willie. "Historiese korrektheid en historiese fiksie: ’n respons." Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 52, no. 2 (February 17, 2015): 78. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/tvl.v52i2.6.

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Historical correctness and historical fiction: a responseIn this article the relationship between history and fiction is examined in response to the historian, Fransjohan Pretorius’s criticism of recent Afrikaans fiction about the Anglo-Boer War in Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 52.2 (2015). The intricate relationship between history and fiction is examined by pointing, on the one hand to the problematic of the relationship between history and the past and on the one hand, to the difference between fiction and history. The function of aesthetic illusion, verisimilitude and conceptions of reference is investigated theoretically before turning to the specific novels that Pretorius discusses. The article shows that historical fiction cannot be restricted to novelized versions of accepted history, but that historical fiction also reminds the reader that the past is always culturally mediated and that the primary aim of novels is not to represent the past but to examine aspects of human existence. A comparison between fiction and history can therefore not be used as a norm to assess novels.

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27

Olufayo, Ezekiel Gbenga. "Cannibalistic and Pornographic Images of Lagos City in Toni Kan’s The Carnivorous City." International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences 7, no. 3 (2022): 152–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.22161/ijels.73.21.

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The city is a spatial phenomenon that conditions the production of African city literature and reveals African urban life, experience, relations and problems in the aftermath of colonialism. Sociopolitical, economic and cultural issues have been of more interest to extrinsic critics of African city fiction than exploring the aesthetics that make city a universal subject in African literature. Studies on The Carnivorous City are qualitative towards the novelist’s penchant for city-life, acculturation, human struggle, greed, love, corruption and other post-independent issues in Africa, yet, Kan’s city fiction, like every literary text, has its form. This study, therefore, attempts to fill this gap by interrogating city as form in The Carnivorous City.The study examines the novel as an autonomous work of art and it adopts New Criticism, with a particular reference to “closing reading” and “reconciliation of the opposites” as analytic principles.The study describes the city as the subject of African city literature and portrays its pornographic and cannibalistic tendencies. It also reveals The Carnivorous City is rich towards the use of formal elements in the conceptualization of Lagos City in text, and indicates further that the novel is a city fiction rich in language, animal imagery and sensual dictions that portray Lagos as the universal subject in text.The study recommends a close reading of African city fictions as this approach enriches the artfulness of the sub-genre and sharpens the meaning of the urban literary texts beyond what extrinsic reading offers.

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28

Zhang, Zhehui. "A Post-Colonial Approach to The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary." English Language and Literature Studies 10, no. 2 (April 16, 2020): 53. http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ells.v10n2p53.

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The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary is a science fiction by Chinese American science fiction writer Ken Liu (1976-). Based on the theory of Post-Colonial Criticism, this paper makes a concrete analysis of the text from the perspectives of three eminent contemporary theorists, aiming at the readers’ better understanding of the work, and eliminating ethnocentrism, racism, unilateralism and hegemony; keeping history in mind and justifying the names of innocent humans who have been persecuted; safeguarding world peace, and building a community with a shared future for mankind.

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29

Mari, Lorenzo. "Old and New Names. Afropolitanism, Failed-State Fiction and World Literature." New Global Studies 13, no. 1 (April 24, 2019): 102–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ngs-2019-0004.

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AbstractSince its establishment more than a decade ago, the cultural and political debate on Afropolitanism has been characterized by several different positions. In particular, the Afropolitan opposition to any kind of essentialism (Eze 2014) has been counterweighed by the necessity of a connection to “knowable African communities, nations and traditions” (Gikandi 2011, 9). This debate has been reproducing a typical oscillation of postcolonial theory and criticism between the celebration of hybridity (Bhabha 1994) and the interpretation of postcolonial texts as “national allegories” (Jameson 1986). At the same time, Afropolitanism appears to be related to a more recent phenomenon, which has been defined as “national failure” in political analysis (Zartman 1995; Rotberg 2004) and “failed-state fiction” in literary criticism (Marx 2008). The latter sheds a different light on Afropolitanism, by showing its advantages and its limits both on a national and transnational level. In view of this, Afropolitan literature – including the paradigmatic works by Helon Habila (2002, 2007, 2010) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2006, 2013) here analyzed – appears to be based on the persistence of “old names,” or categories, in an uneven but fruitful coexistence with the “new” ones (Eze 2016).

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30

Kopf, Martina. "Encountering development in East African fiction." Journal of Commonwealth Literature 54, no. 3 (May 25, 2017): 334–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0021989417707801.

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In this article I address how East African writers have responded to and conceptualized the encounter with development in works of fiction. The article combines two lines of enquiry: first, a historical perspective on “development” as a history of changing and conflicting meanings and practices in planning and controlling social and economic change, and, second, a narrative studies perspective on fiction as a source of knowledge in social and political research. The article presents an analysis of two novels and a short story from Uganda and Kenya: Akiki Nyabongo’s The Story of an African Chief (1935), Meja Mwangi’s Going Down River Road (1976), and Binyavanga Wainaina’s Discovering Home (2003). The texts are from three different historical periods from the colonial past to the present. Bringing them into dialogue with institutional discourses relevant to their respective periods, I argue that these works of fiction open up a unique understanding of key issues and problems in development thinking and planning. Furthermore, my analysis sheds a different light on critical debates that perceive the “development encounter” as a story of the “West versus the rest”. Instead, this essay links recent trends in writing to more entangled histories of development.

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31

Ge, Liangyan. "The Mythic Stone inHonglou mengand an Intertext of Ming-Qing Fiction Criticism." Journal of Asian Studies 61, no. 1 (February 2002): 57–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2700189.

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Until very recently, much of the literary scholarship on the eighteenth-century Chinese novelHonglou meng(The Story of the StoneorDream of the Red Chamber) was centered on what was seen as the autobiographical nature of the work. Critics of the novel, especially those in China, tended to focus their attention on the life of the author, Cao Xueqin (d. 1763), believing the interpretation of the novel to be—to a large extent—hinged on a successful reconstruction of Cao Xueqin's familial relationships, especially with those members of the Cao clan such as Red Inkstone (Zhiyanzhai) who were the original audience of his manuscript. Yet, any literary work—even a truly autobiographical one—arises from its tradition. Its meaning will be better understood and its aesthetic values better appreciated when we consider it in relation to other works in that tradition. For our interpretation ofHonglou meng, what is more pertinent is therefore not the author's personal ties tohisrelatives but the ties of the novel toits“relatives,” works that formed the literary context for its creation.

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32

Khokholkova, Nadezhda. "Postcolonial Approach in African Studies: Approval and Criticism." ISTORIYA 13, no. 3 (113) (2022): 0. http://dx.doi.org/10.18254/s207987840020689-6.

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Postcolonialism as a phenomenon that exists in the global, chronological and methodological dimensions, has a complex impact on sociocultural reality and academic life. The article is devoted to the problem of interaction between postcolonial discourse and the field of African studies. The author focuses on the historical dynamics and the degree of integration of Africa and researchers of African descent into the processes of building postcolonial theories and methodologies. Particular emphasis is placed on the ongoing discussions among the academic elite about the adequacy of applying the postcolonial approach to studies of Africa.

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33

Chapman, Michael. "Schreiner’s Karoo, Blackburn’s Joburg: Revisioning the Colonial Novel; or, From the Story of a Colony to a ‘South African’ Story." English in Africa 47, no. 2 (February 10, 2021): 19–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/eia.v47i2.2.

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Schreiner criticism over the last two decades or so has shown greater interest in her ideas than in her literary imagination. Without setting up ‘silos’ of approach – thought and imagination, after all, are inextricably bound – I revisit the power of the literary imagination in the works of both Olive Schreiner and Douglas Blackburn against a context of contemporaneous ‘colonial fiction’: that is, against a context that accentuates, in contrast, the substance and seriousness of the two novelists on whom I focus. Can these two novelists be seen to chart a shift from the story of a colony to a ‘South African’ story? We may conclude, in any case, that between them Schreiner and Blackburn revisioned the colonial novel Keywords: Schreiner, Blackburn, colonial South Africa, fiction, imagination/ideas, then/now

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34

Łobodziec, Agnieszka. "Intersections of African-American Womanist Literary Approaches and Paradigms of Ethical Literary Criticism." Interlitteraria 22, no. 2 (January 16, 2018): 297. http://dx.doi.org/10.12697/il.2017.22.2.8.

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Although black American womanist literary perspectives and ethical literary criticism theory emerged from different socio-cultural contexts, a number of intersections between the two can be discerned. One of the objectives of this paper is to analyze the reasons for which some Chinese scholars and African-American women literary theoreticians are skeptical of mainstream Western literary criticism schools, which they view as insufficient for exploring works of literature derived from fusions of non-Western and Western cultural contexts. Secondly, the paper elucidates the particular value systems exhibited by fictional characters portrayed by the African-American women writers under survey. At this juncture, the means by which the writers challenge value systems based upon Western essentialist racial conceptualizations will be given primary attention. Also, the historical context of the development of womanist ethics and literary practice, particularly the manifestation of original social ethics in response to historical oppression, will be focused upon. Lastly, the didactic function of womanist literature will be considered because, more often than not, black American woman writers have endeavored to produce fiction that serves as guideposts towards conflict resolutions, involving, to a great extent, revaluation of mainstream values.

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35

Price, Sally. "Patchwork history : tracing artworlds in the African diaspora." New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 75, no. 1-2 (January 1, 2001): 5–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/13822373-90002556.

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Essay on interpretations of visual art in societies of the African diaspora. Author relates this to recent shifts in anthropology and art history/criticism toward an increasing combining of art and anthropology and integration of art with social and cultural developments, and the impact of these shifts on Afro-American studies. To exemplify this, she focuses on clothing (among Maroons in the Guianas), quilts, and gallery art. She emphasizes the role of developments in America in these fabrics, apart from just the African origins.

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Propst, Lisa. "Reconciliation and the “self-in-community” in post-transitional South African fiction." Journal of Commonwealth Literature 52, no. 1 (July 26, 2016): 84–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0021989415592944.

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Since the end of apartheid and South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, efforts at reconciliation have been dramatic, most notably in the form of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), as well as deeply incomplete. In response, a great deal of post-transitional South African literature and criticism has taken up the question of how to effect reconciliation, particularly outside institutional forums like the TRC. A prominent strand of South African literary studies insists that reconciliation rests on a form of ethical responsibility in which the individual is displaced from him- or herself in order to enact hospitality toward others. This view draws on a Levinasian conception of ethics whereby responsibility entails radical vulnerability with no assurance of reciprocation. Yet a growing corpus of fiction complicates this vision of reconciliation, recognizing that for many South Africans, the violations of apartheid gave rise to what Annie Coombes refers to as a “dissolution of [the] self”, and any effort at building a more inclusive society must redress that dissolution. This article argues that Jo-Anne Richards’ My Brother’s Book (2008) and Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit (2001) present reconciliation as a product of two opposing endeavours. On the one hand, it involves the willingness to give up a sense of self in taking on responsibilities for others. On the other hand, it requires reclaiming a sense of self by asserting one’s right to make affiliative choices and actively construct new spaces of belonging.

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Panova, Olga. "Phillis Wheatley in American Literary History and African American Literary Criticism." Literature of the Americas, no. 4 (2018): 8–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2018-4-8-40.

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Drozdova, Daria N. "Francis Bacon, Between Myth and History." Epistemology & Philosophy of Science 58, no. 3 (2021): 6–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/eps202158339.

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Over the last 400 years, attitudes toward Francis Bacon's philosophy have changed considerably: the 17-century interest and the 18-century enthusiasm have been replaced by the 20-century criticism and reevaluation. However, both the praise and the rejection of the Lord Chancellor’s philosophical ideas often originate from the isolation and absolutization of particular features of his philosophy that can sometimes be in opposition to each other. These partial readings are justified by the fact that the reference to Bacon’s methodological and epistemological legacy has a symbolic meaning and is part of what is called “image of science” in Y. Elkana’s terminology. The way in which references to Bacon are used at different times and in different contexts is, in fact, a functional myth or theoretical fiction (I. Kasavin) in which the “historical Bacon” is fading away and what emerges is important and meaningful to those who declare themselves his followers or who lash out at him with criticism.

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Fasselt, Rebecca, Corinne Sandwith, and Khulukazi Soldati-Kahimbaara. "The short story in South Africa post-2000: Critical reflections on a genre in transition." Journal of Commonwealth Literature 55, no. 1 (September 5, 2018): 4–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0021989418778080.

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This editorial offers critical reflections on short story writing in South Africa post-2000. Against the background of critical scholarship on the short story form and thematic trends of short story anthologies since the late 1980s, we argue that short story criticism on apartheid as well as contemporary South African short story writing has consistently emphasized the genre’s disposition to capture the fragmented realities of socio-political transitions in the country. Critics have frequently observed a shift from the overtly politicized short story of the 1970s and 1980s to a return to a more literary and modernist aesthetics in the present. In this special issue, we intend to complicate this reading by mapping out other trajectories the short story has taken in recent years, which point toward the emergence of more popular subgenres such as speculative fiction, crime fiction, and erotic fiction. Short stories also increasingly examine and challenge conventional sexuality and/or gender-based norms.

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Martirosian, G. E. "AFRICANFUTURISM IN CONTEMPORARY NIGERIAN LITERATURE: THE CASE OF ‘PET’ BY AKWAEKE EMEZI." Bulletin of Udmurt University. Series History and Philology 32, no. 5 (October 14, 2022): 1104–9. http://dx.doi.org/10.35634/2412-9534-2022-32-5-1104-1109.

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This article is devoted to the literary analysis of Akwaeke Emezi’s ‘Pet’, the novel, as an Africanfuturist artifact of the contemporary literature of the Nigerian diaspora in the United States. Africanfuturism is considered in both political and methodogical opposition to Afrofuturism, and is understood as a critical artistic method that, within the framework of Black science fiction, recounts an alternative version of the future of African people. The scientific article describes the features of the implementation of science fiction subgenres in the literature of Nigerians, residents of Nigeria, and representatives of the Nigerian diaspora, and also substantiates their differences from traditional (European) fantasy narratives. By the case of ‘Pet’ by A. Emezi, which at many artistic levels goes against both the Nigerian and pan-European canons of science fiction, the markers of Africanfuturist criticism of the culture, the correlation between the magical (mythogical) and futurological as the main difference between Africanfuturism and Afrofuturism are shown.

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LAROUI, FOUAD. "Misunderstandings — Working Euro-African Life into Fiction." Matatu 36, no. 1 (2009): 405–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789042028166_027.

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Gagiano, Annie. "Incarceration and Torture in Eastern African Fiction." Matatu 50, no. 1 (June 14, 2018): 128–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18757421-05001003.

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AbstractThis article assesses representations of imprisonment without trial and inmates’ torture in three novels depicting severely repressive, murderous regimes—Malawi’s under Hastings Banda, Ethiopia’s under the Derg, and Kenya’s under colonial and successive post-colonial rulers. In The Detainee (Kayira 1974), the narrative of a naïve, apolitical villager’s unjust detention highlights unrestrained power abuse through minions and gradually uncovers atrocities. Under the Lion’s Gaze (Mengiste 2010) depicts several visceral, appalling scenes of torture as a technique of intimidation. Dust (Owuor 2014) has fewer, but harrowingly intense scenes of pain infliction on prisoners as a political tool to silence opposition. All three texts establish their importance as archival evaluations of under-reported regimes, African literary artworks, and morally responsible evocations of undeserved suffering, communicating effectively with both local and international readerships.

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Collinge, James T. "‘With envious eyes’: Rabbit-poaching and class conflict in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau." Literature & History 26, no. 1 (May 2017): 39–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0306197317695082.

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Allusions to rabbits and poaching recur throughout H. G. Wells's work. In spite of the frequency with which they appear, these motifs remain overlooked within scholarly criticism. This article, by analysing Wells's representations of rabbit-poaching, first considers how nineteenth-century histories of industrialisation and game-crime shape his science fiction. It then explores the contradictory nature of these representations, which both demonise and sympathise with the figure of the rabbit-poacher, providing further insight into the class confusion that recent criticism perceives to characterise Wells's writing in this period.

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Maritz, P. J. "History reconstruction: Third century parallels to 20th century South African Church 'History Origen Adamantinus." Verbum et Ecclesia 18, no. 2 (July 4, 1997): 291–304. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/ve.v18i2.564.

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History reconstruction: Third century parallels to 20th century South African Church History - Origen Adamantinus. In this paper a possible third century contribution to Church History reconstruction is considered. This is employed as an example for South African church historians who are dedicated to history interpretation, whether it be from the perspective of: acceptance on face value; justification; verification; criticism or renunciation of twentieth century historical events and the WG)'S in which they have influenced the prophetic task of the church in South Africa. To this end, a parallel is drawn between third century Origen and a few South African church figures from the twentieth century, which will highlight the church's continuing prophetic ministry.

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Keene, Thomas H. "The Use of Fiction in Teaching Modern Asian and African History." Teaching History: A Journal of Methods 12, no. 2 (May 4, 2020): 18–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.33043/th.12.2.18-25.

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Ngeh, Andrew T., and Sarah M. Nalova. "Rethinking Language and Gender in African Fiction: Towards De-gendering and Re-gendering." Social Science, Humanities and Sustainability Research 1, no. 1 (June 20, 2020): p132. http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/sshsr.v1n1p132.

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The recognition and acceptance of the social construction of gender and the coercive nature of gendered subjectivities has been at the centre of feminist discourse which challenges the subjugation of the woman. G.D. Nyamndi, therefore, in his Facing Meamba attempts to address these concerns and proffer feasible solutions. The representation of women in literature, the role of gender in both literary creation and literary criticism, as studied ingynocriticism, the connection between gender and various aspects of literary form in such genre and metre embody masculine values of heroism, war, and adventure. This androcentric stand has compromised the rights of the woman, resulting in her marginalization, alienation and exclusion from socio-cultural activities. She is maligned with a sense of inadequacy. The patriarchal centre prevails and dominates the woman who has been pushed to the margin of the society. In this regard, Nyamndi demonstrates that, the African woman still has a place within the postcolonial context even though the man is imbued with more powers than the woman. Informed by the postcolonial theory, this study argues that, gendering constitutes a grave danger to a harmonious existence between the two genders. The study revealed that, de-gendering and re-gendering can create harmony between the man and woman because the two concepts are basis for gender equality. To achieve this, language which constitutes a semiotic mould has been exploited to deploy themes like, gender inequality and cultural issues.

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Penier, Izabella. "Modernity, (Post)modernism and New Horizons of Postcolonial Studies. The Role and Direction of Caribbean Writing and Criticism in the Twenty-first Century." International Studies. Interdisciplinary Political and Cultural Journal 14, no. 1 (November 1, 2012): 23–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/v10223-012-0052-2.

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My article will take issue with some of the scholarship on current and prospective configurations of the Caribbean and, in more general terms, postcolonial literary criticism. It will give an account of the turn-of-the century debates about literary value and critical practice and analyze how contemporary fiction by Caribbean female writers responds to the socioeconomic reality that came into being with the rise of globalization and neo-liberalism. I will use David Scott’s thought provoking study-Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (1999)-to outline the history of the Caribbean literary discourse and to try to rethink the strategic goals of postcolonial criticism.

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Waligora-Davis, Nicole. "The African American Male, Writing, and Difference: A Polycentric Approach to African American Literature, Criticism, and History (review)." Biography 26, no. 4 (2003): 750–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/bio.2004.0028.

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Kumar, Fayaz Ahmad, and Colette Morrow. "Theorizing Black Power Movement in African American Literature: An Analysis of Morrison's Fiction." Global Language Review V, no. IV (December 30, 2020): 45–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.31703/glr.2020(v-iv).06.

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This paper analyzes the influence of the Black Power movement on the AfricanAmerican literary productions; especially in the fictional works of Toni Morrison. As an African-American author, Toni Morrison presents the idea of 'Africanness' in her novels. Morrison's fiction comments on the fluid bond amongst the African-American community, the Black Power and Black Aesthetics. The works of Morrison focus on various critical points in the history of African-Americans, her fiction recalls not only the memory of Africa but also contemplates the contemporary issues. Morrison situates the power politics within the framework of literature by presenting the history of the African-American cultures.

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Lähteenmäki, Ilkka. "Possible Worlds of History." Journal of the Philosophy of History 12, no. 1 (March 22, 2018): 164–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18722636-12341354.

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Abstract The theory of possible worlds has been minimally employed in the field of theory and philosophy of history, even though it has found a place as a tool in other areas of philosophy. Discussion has mostly focused on arguments concerning counterfactual history’s status as either useful or harmful. The theory of possible worlds can, however be used also to analyze historical writing. The concept of textual possible worlds offers an interesting framework to work with for analyzing a historical text’s characteristics and features. However, one of the challenges is that the literary theory’s notion of possible worlds is that they are metaphorical in nature. This in itself is not problematic but while discussing about history, which arguably deals with the real world, the terminology can become muddled. The latest attempt to combine the literary and philosophical notions of possible worlds and apply it to historiography came from Lubomír Doležel in his Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage (2010). I offer some criticism to his usage of possible worlds to separate history and fiction, and argue that when historiography is under discussion a more philosophical notion of possible worlds should be prioritized over the metaphorical interpretation of possible worlds.

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