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Journal articles on the topic 'Contemporary African Poetry'
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Kočan Šalamon, Kristina. "Translating Culture: Contemporary African American Poetry." ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries 12, no. 2 (December 29, 2015): 211–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/elope.12.2.211-224.
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The paper interrogates cultural specifics of contemporary African American poetry and exhibits translation problems when translating this poetic work. African American writers have always included much of their cultural heritage in their writing and this is immediately noticed by a translator. The cultural elements, such as African American cuisine, attire and style in general, as well as spiritual and religious practices, often play a significant role for African American poets who are proclaiming their identity. Moreover, the paper presents the translation problems that emerge when attempting to transfer such a specific, even exotic, source culture into a target culture, like Slovene. The goal is to show to what extent contemporary African American poetry can successfully be translated into the Slovene language and to highlight the parts that inevitably remain lost in the translation process.
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D’Abdon, R. "RESISTANCE POETRY IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA: AN ANALYSIS OF THE POETIC WORKS AND CULTURAL ACTIVISM OF VANONI BILA." Southern African Journal for Folklore Studies 24, no. 1 (September 30, 2016): 98–121. http://dx.doi.org/10.25159/1016-8427/1675.
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The article explores selected works of Vonani Bila, one of the most influential wordsmiths of post-apartheid South Africa. It outlines the difference between “protest poetry” and “resistance poetry”, and contextualises the contemporary expression(s) of the latter within today’s South Africa’s poetry scene. Focusing on Bila’s “politically engaged” poems and cultural activism, this article maintains that resistance poetry has re-invented itself in the post-94 cultural scenario, and still represents a valid tool in the hands of poets to creatively expose and criticize the enduring contradictions of South African society
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Arifin, Zamri, and Emad Hamza M. Arrabea. "QADIYAH AL-ISTI'BAD FI SYI'R MUHAMMAD AL-FAYTURI." Arabi : Journal of Arabic Studies 2, no. 1 (August 6, 2017): 113. http://dx.doi.org/10.24865/ajas.v2i1.10.
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The issue of slavery is one of the most important issues that have plagued mankind, both ancient and modern. The contemporary Arab poet Muhammad Miftah al-Fittouri was the first Arab poet to address this issue and to discuss the issues of African and Zenism in a qualitative and quantitative manner. Therefore, this study is aimed at presenting the efforts of the scholars of this issue in the poetry of this poet. The study revealed the intersections of the poetry with the components and manifestations of the issue of (slavery) and the different poetic stages, as demonstrated by the poet's poetic. The research concluded that the literary and monetary field lacked a systematic study of this issue, revealing its motives and artistic manifestations, and the various aspects of it emerge according to a modern scientific method.
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Fernandes, Lilly. "A Survey of Contemporary African American Poetry, Drama, & Fiction." International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature 2, no. 3 (May 1, 2013): 134–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.2n.3p.134.
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Thorpe, Michael, and Don Burness. "Echoes of the Sunbird: An Anthology of Contemporary African Poetry." World Literature Today 67, no. 4 (1993): 873. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/40149768.
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Kočan, Kristina. "Problems in Translating Musical Elements in African American Poetry after 1950." ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries 6, no. 1-2 (June 15, 2009): 45–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/elope.6.1-2.45-60.
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In most cases, African American poetry eschews traditional literary norms. Contemporary African American poets tend to ignore grammatical rules, use unusual typography on many occasions, include much of their cultural heritage in their poetry, and interweave musical elements into literary genres. The influence of such musical genres as jazz, blues, soul, and gospel, together with the dilemmas that occur for the translator, will be shown to great extent, since music, like black speech, is a major part of African American culture and literature. The translator will have to maintain the specific African American rhythm, blues adaptations and the improvisational language under the jazz impact. The paper presents the problems in translating post-1950 African American poetry into Slovene, and asks to what extent can one successfully transfer the musical elements within this poetry for the target culture? Inevitably, it will identify a share of elements that are lost in translation.
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Yakovenko, Iryna. "Women’s voices of protest: Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni’s poetry." Vìsnik Marìupolʹsʹkogo deržavnogo unìversitetu. Serìâ: Fìlologìâ 13, no. 23 (2020): 130–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.34079/2226-3055-2020-13-23-130-139.
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The paper explores contemporary African American women’s protest poetry in the light of the liberation movements of the mid-20th century – Black Power, Black Arts Movement, Second Wave Feminism. The research focuses on political, social, cultural and aesthetic aspects of the Black women’s resistance poetry, its spirited dialogue with the feminist struggle, and undertakes its critical interpretation using the methodological tools of Cultural Studies. The poetics and style of protest poetry by Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni, whose literary works have received little scholarly attention literary studies in Ukraine, are analyzed. Protest poetry is defined as politically and socially engaged verse which is oppositional, contestatory and resistant in its subject matter, as well as in the form of (re)presentation. Focusing on political and societal issues, such as slavery, racism, segregation, gender inequality, African American protest poetry is characterized by discourse of resistance and confrontation, disruption of standard English grammar, as well as conventional spelling and syntax. It is argued that militant poems of Sonia Sanchez are marked by the imitations of black speech rhythms and musical patterns of jazz and blues. Similarly, Nikki Giovanni relies on the oral tradition of African American people while creating poetry which was oriented towards performance. The linguistic content of Sanchez and Giovanni’s verses is lowercase lettering for notions associated with “white america”, obscenities targeted at societal racist practices, and erratic capitalization, nonstandard spacing, onomatopoeic syllables, use of vernacular as markers of Black culture. The works of African American women writers, which are under analysis in the essay, constitute creative poetic responses to traumatic history of African American people. Protest poetry of Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni explicitly express the rhetoric of Black nationalism and comply with the aesthetic principles of the Black Arts movement. They are perceived as consciousness-raising texts by their creators and the audiences they are addressed to. It is argued that although protest and resistance poetry is time- and context-bound, it can transcend the boundaries of historical contexts and act as timeless texts.
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THORSSON, COURTNEY. "Foodways in Contemporary African American Poetry: Harryette Mullen and Evie Shockley." Contemporary Literature 57, no. 2 (2016): 184–215. http://dx.doi.org/10.3368/cl.57.2.184.
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Martin, Herbert Woodward, and Alan Spears. "Fast Talk, Full Volume: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry." African American Review 31, no. 2 (1997): 360. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3042493.
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Gqola, Pumla Dineo. "Whirling worlds? Women's poetry, feminist imagination and contemporary South African publics." Scrutiny2 16, no. 2 (September 2011): 5–11. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/18125441.2011.631823.
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Byrne, Deirdre. "NEW MYTHS, NEW SCRIPTS: REVISIONIST MYTHOPOESIS IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTH AFRICAN WOMEN’S POETRY." Gender Questions 2, no. 1 (September 21, 2016): 52–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.25159/2412-8457/1564.
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Considerable theoretical and critical work has been done on the way British and American women poets re-vision (Rich 1976) male-centred myth. Some South African women poets have also used similar strategies. My article identifies a gap in the academy’s reading of a significant, but somewhat neglected, body of poetry and begins to address this lack of scholarship. I argue that South African women poets use their art to re-vision some of the central constructs of patriarchal mythology, including the association of women with the body and the irrational, and men with the mind and logic. These poems function on two levels: They demonstrate that the constructs they subvert are artificial; and they create new and empowering narratives for women in order to contribute to the reimagining of gender relations.
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MacArthur, Marit J. "Monotony, the Churches of Poetry Reading, and Sound Studies." Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 131, no. 1 (January 2016): 38–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2016.131.1.38.
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Engaging with and amending the terms of debates about poetry performance, I locate the origins of the default, neutral style of contemporary academic poetry readings in secular performance and religious ritual, exploring the influence of the beat poets, the black arts movement, and the African American church. Line graphs of intonation patterns demonstrate what I call monotonous incantation, a version of the neutral style that is characterized by three qualities: (1) the repetition of a falling cadence within a narrow range of pitch; (2) a flattened affect that suppresses idiosyncratic expression of subject matter in favor of a restrained, earnest tone; and (3) the subordination of conventional intonation patterns dictated by syntax, and of the poetic effects of line length and line breaks, to the prevailing cadence and slow, steady pace. This style is popularly known as “poet voice.” Recordings of four contemporary poets—Natasha Trethewey, Louise Glück, Michael Ryan, and Juliana Spahr—demonstrate this style, which contrasts with more expressive, idiosyncratic readings by poets as distinct as Frank Bidart and Kenneth Goldsmith.
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Emezue, Gloria M. T. "Stylizing Contemporary Post-colonial African Poetry: The Rhetoric of Boasts and Curses." Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 158 (December 2014): 100–106. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.12.047.
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Wanjala, Alex Nelungo. "(East) African postcolonial ecocriticism: Revisiting Okot p’ Bitek’s Song of Prisoner." Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 58, no. 1 (May 25, 2021): 139–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/tl.v58i1.8301.
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This article celebrates Okot p’Bitek’s contribution to East African literature in general and the song school of East Africa in particular, by revisiting one of his less-known works, Song of Prisoner on the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. I subject the text to a close reading in order to demonstrate how p’Bitek uses imagery that is drawn from East Africa’s natural environment in a way that evokes issues that are an assault on the prevailing social and political order in East Africa at the time, in a nuanced manner. With the benefit of hindsight, the paper establishes that p’Bitek’s attempt to preserve his natural environment (that of East Africa) through writing it into his poetry, was a precursor for texts that would later be examined within the framework of the contemporary critical theory of postcolonial ecocriticism, and that using the text, one can narrow the scope further in a manner that takes into account the specificities of (East) African environmental literature. In so doing, the paper establishes that p’Bitek indeed highlights social realities through his poetry, in order to launch his attack on the existing neo-colonial capitalistic order prevailing at the historical moment of his writing, thus confirming that he displays a social vision that strives for decolonisation without the exploitative aftermath encapsulating modernity. The paper thus demonstrates how this poem is still relevant as a study to the student of East African literature reading it in the 21st century.
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Riach, Graham K. "“Concrete fragments”: An interview with Henrietta Rose-Innes." Journal of Commonwealth Literature 55, no. 1 (June 4, 2018): 111–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0021989418777021.
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South Africa has a long and rich tradition of short story writing, stretching from the early oral-style tale (MacKenzie, 1999), through the writing of the “fabulous fifties” (Driver, 2012; R. Gaylard, 2008), to the most recent post-apartheid texts. In this interview, Henrietta Rose-Innes describes her practice as a short story writer, noting how it differs from that of writing novels or poetry. For Rose-Innes, the short story offers a way to capture her view of the world; that is, in sudden, intense moments, rather than in wholly narrative terms. Combining a number of short stories into a collection, Rose-Innes suggests, can offer some perspective on the plurality of contemporary South African life. Over the course of the interview, she discusses her exploration of conventional gender categories, her unconscious use of Gothic tropes, and the possibilities for political writing in contemporary South Africa. Throughout, there is a concern for how her works negotiate questions of space and place, particularly in the context of South African writing.
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Sole, Kelwyn. "Bird Hearts Taking Wing: Trends in Contemporary South African Poetry Written in English." World Literature Today 70, no. 1 (1996): 25. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/40151848.
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Raji–Oyelade, Aderemi. "Representational Exposures: The Album of Nigerian Women's Poetry (1985–2006)." Matatu 33, no. 1 (June 1, 2006): 293–316. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18757421-033001035.
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In this essay, I argue that the provision of a calendar of Nigerian women's poetry is a necessary discursive means of foregrounding and symbolising the displaced and subalternized arm of the literary tradition. I note that the visibility of the female writer in much of contemporary Nigerian (and African) writing can best be contextually determined in the province of poetry since this is the genre where women's performance (as authors) is most suspect, or deferred. Therefore, in producing an album of the female authorial presence over two decades, I draw attention to the dominant tropes of "women's poetry" as a distinct but integral part of a literary canon which requires re-definition.
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Situma, J., F. Atoh, and J. Ndohvu. "Mapping out the Identity of African Arts and Aesthetics." Thought and Practice 7, no. 1 (August 8, 2016): 77–102. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/tp.v7i1.5.
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This article utilizes the hermeneutic theory of Paul Ricoeur and its concepts of text, historicity, distance, narrative and metaphor to map out the salient features of African arts and aesthetics. It also uses the Ricoeurian concept of metaphor to demarcate the boundary between art and popular art. The focus of this mapping out is literature, visual arts, music and art criticism. The identity of African literature bears imprints of various indigenous and foreign languages, and pertinent to Ricoeur, the deployment of metaphor. Thematic concerns are patently African by virtue of the historicity of the discourses that feature in the novels, poems and plays. On the other hand, art criticism in contemporary Africa manifests a lack of responsibility, and its practitioners would enhance their capacity by drawing from Ricoeur’s philosophy of interpretive responsibility. Although discourse is significantly valuable in mapping out identity in the African novel, its applicability to the identity of painting, poetry and music is slightly constrained. Furthermore, Ricoeur’s concept of textual autonomy is of least value in dealing with the identity features of symbolic painting and symbolic arts. Key WordsAfrican arts, Ricoeur, Criticism and Responsibility, Metaphor, Historicity
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Snyman, Elisabeth. "Véronique Tadjo: Is there hope beyond the divisions in contemporary Africa?" Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 55, no. 1 (March 19, 2018): 18–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2309-9070/tvl.v.55i1.1646.
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This article proposes a reading of three texts The Blind Kingdom (1990), Queen Pokou. Concerto for a sacrifice (2004) and Far from my Father (2010) written by the Ivorian author Véronique Tadjo, in order to examine the author's representation of, and reflexion on separation and division, be it within a nation, amongst groups, or in the heart of a family. In Tadjo's novelistic universe, such divisions often require the intervention of a female protagonist, whose own existence is deeply influenced by tensions and frictions between two opposing camps. I shall argue that the agency of these protagonists is never futile and may even point to a way to go beyond the original divisions. Tadjo's representation of division in these three texts goes beyond generic boundaries to open up a rich variety of perspectives on the problems she deals with. I shall demonstrate how the author draws on various genres such as poetry, the African folktale, the novel, as well as autofiction in order to engage the reader in a profound reflexion on the current state and future of the African continent.
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Akingbe, Niyi. "MYTHOLOGIZING YORUBA ORATURE: LOBOTO MIZING SWIVELLED PULSES OF LAUGHTER IN NIYI OSUNDARE’S WAITING LAUGHTERS AND REMI RAJI’S A HARVEST OF LAUGHTERS." Imbizo 6, no. 2 (June 21, 2017): 22–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.25159/2078-9785/2803.
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Every literary work emerges from the particular alternatives of its time. This is ostensibly reflected in the attempted innovative renderings of these alternatives in the poetry of contemporary Nigerian poets of Yoruba extraction. Discernible in the poetry of Niyi Osundare and Remi Raji is the shaping and ordering of the linguistic appurtenances of the Yoruba orature, which themselves are sublimely rooted in the proverbial, chants, anecdotes, songs and praises derived from the Yoruba oral poetry of Ijala, Orin Agbe, Ese Ifa, Rara, folklore as well as from other elements of oral performance. This engagement with the Yoruba oral tradition significantly permeates the poetics of Niyi Osundare’s Waiting laughters and Remi Raji’s A Harvest of Laughters. In these anthologies, both Osundare and Raji traverse the cliffs and valleys of the contemporary Nigerian milieu to distil the social changes rendered in the Yoruba proverbial, as well as its chants and verbal formulae, all of which mutate from momentary happiness into an enduring anomie grounded in seasonal variations in agricultural production, ruinous political turmoil, suspense and a harvest of unresolved, mysterious deaths. The article is primarily concerned with how the African oral tradition has been harnessed by Osundare and Raji to construct an avalanche of damning, peculiarly Nigerian, socio-political upheavals (which are essentially delineated by the signification of laughter/s) and display these in relation to the country’s variegated ecology.
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Marais, R. "Vrouwees: perspektiewe in die meer onlangse Afrikaanse poësie en prosa." Literator 9, no. 3 (May 7, 1988): 29–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/lit.v9i3.853.
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This article investigates the views on woman and womanhood that are expressed in the poetry and prose of several contemporary women writers in Afrikaans. The study is conducted against the background of certain tendencies in feminist movements in Europe, Britain and the United States of America as well as views pronounced in the writings (both literary and feminist) of a number of feminist writers in Europe, Britain and the USA. For the purposes of this investigation a short exposition is given of what feminism entails, as well as of a number of the different views and approaches which it accommodates. Subsequently different views on womanhood as expressed in the creative writings of a number of women writers who have written extensively on this topic are discussed at the hand of their poetry and prose. Specific attention is paid to the South African woman’s views on men, marriage, her own sexuality and motherhood as revealed in the writings of these women.
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Gorczyńska, Małgorzata. "W Zatoce Syreny: Lawinia i Strefa komfortu Tomasza Różyckiego." Poznańskie Studia Polonistyczne. Seria Literacka, no. 38 (October 15, 2020): 13–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.14746/pspsl.2020.38.2.
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An expression used in the title of my paper refers to several places in contemporary and ancient Italy: the Gulf of Naples, the shores of Lampedusa and Sicily, and the mouth of the Tiber River. These places form the background of the tragedy of African and Middle East refugees shown in poems by Tomasz Różycki: Lawinia (Lavinia) from the collection Litery (Letter by Letter, 2016) and Strefa komfortu (Comfort Zone) from the newest poetry book Kapitan X (Captain X, 2020). My detailed analysis of the two texts is an attempt to describe their formal and semantic complexity, especially their unique tone that mixes sharp irony with tender compassion.
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Duarte, Miguel De Ávila. "A obra de…: cânone, apropriação, diáspora e a questão do nome na Odisseia vácuo, de Renato Negrão / The Work By...: Canon, Appropriation, Diaspora and the Question of Naming in Renato Negrão’s Odisseia Vácuo." O Eixo e a Roda: Revista de Literatura Brasileira 30, no. 2 (June 30, 2021): 26. http://dx.doi.org/10.17851/2358-9787.30.2.26-53.
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Resumo: Tomando como ponto de partida o poema-livro Odisseia Vácuo do performer, artista plástico e poeta contemporâneo Renato Negrão, o presente artigo pretende discutir questões relativas ao cânone artístico-literário, as possíveis relações entre a apropriação como procedimento de escrita e de criação e a apropriação cultural no contexto da diáspora africana e, por fim, como tais questões interferem nos próprios atos de nomeação. Para tanto, são construídos uma série de diálogos: com a epopeia fundadora de Homero; com o modernismo antropofágico; com a literatura de apropriação contemporânea estadunidense; com as propostas de Wölfflin e Valéry de histórias da arte e da literatura “sem nomes”; com o enredamento do primitivismo vanguardista e da invenção da colagem no primeiro cubismo; com a crítica contemporânea da apropriação cultural. Palavras-chave: escrita de apropriação; apropriação cultural; poesia brasileira contemporânea.Abstract: Taking as a starting point the poem-book Odisseia Vácuo (Vacuum Odissey), by the performer, visual artist and contemporary poet Renato Negrão, this article intends to discuss questions related to the literary-artistic canon, the possible relations between appropriation as writing and creation process and cultural appropriation in the context of African diaspora, and lastly, the way in which those questions interfere in the very acts of naming. For this purpose, I build dialogues with Homer’s founding epic, with Brazilian anthropophagic modernism, with American contemporary appropriative literature, also with Wölfflin’s and Valéry’s proposals of “nameless” art and literary histories and with the intertwining of avant-gardist primitivism and collage creation in early Cubism, as well as the contemporary criticism of cultural appropriation.Keywords: appropriative writing; cultural appropriation; Brazilian contemporary poetry.
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Esamagu, Ochuko. "Towards Environmental Justice: An Ecopoetical Reading of Ikiriko and Otto’s Poetry." International Journal of Language and Literary Studies 2, no. 4 (December 26, 2020): 243–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.36892/ijlls.v2i4.449.
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Ecology is a study that transcends disciplinary boundaries. It has roots in the sciences but enjoys a number of representations in the humanities, specifically through literature. Several African writers have in their imaginative works, portrayed the devastating condition of the environment in a 21st century technological-driven world and also proposed solutions to this malady. In fact, environmental degradation has become a global issue, hence, the pressing need for a lasting panacea. Attempts at literary ecocriticism in Nigerian literature have largely focused on prose fictional works and the poetry collections of older and second generation poets like Tanure Ojaide. Consequently, little research has been carried out on the representation of environmental degradation in the poetry of more contemporary poets like Ibiwari Ikiriko and Albert Otto. This paper therefore, is a critical, close reading of Ikiriko and Otto’s poetry engagement with environmental degradation. The paper adopts the notion of ecopoetry from the ecocritical theory, which accounts for poetry foregrounding questions of ethics in relation to the environment. It acts as a reminder to humans of their responsibility towards the earth and challenges the existing status-quo that has the environment and the common people at the mercy of the ruling class. In this paper, Ikiriko’s Oily Tears of the Delta and Otto’s Letter from the Earth are subjected to literary and critical analysis to examine their preoccupation with the destructive onslaught on nature, and the traumatic experiences of the marginalised. Amidst the environmental depredation, the poets express hope and revolutionary fervour towards the rejuvenation of their society.
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Gabriel, Mr Bazimaziki. "Contemporary human manners as reflected in East African Poetry: A tri- model characters in Okot p’ Bitek’s Song of Lawino." International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences 3, no. 1 (2018): 41–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.22161/ijels.3.1.8.
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Pereira, Edimilson de Almeida, and Steven F. White. "Reinventing a Sacred Past in Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Poetry : Five African-Brazilian Poets from Livro de Falas [Book of Voices]." Callaloo 20, no. 1 (1997): 83–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cal.1997.0031.
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Zabus, Chantal. "Informed Consent: Ezenwa–Ohaeto between Past and Future Uses of Pidgin." Matatu 33, no. 1 (June 1, 2006): 115–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18757421-033001025.
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The essay shows how Ezenwa–Ohaeto's poetry in pidgin, particularly in his collection (1988), emblematizes a linguistic interface between, on the one hand, the pseudo-pidgin of Onitsha Market pamphleteers of the 1950s and 1960s (including in its gendered guise as in Cyprian Ekwensi) and, on the other, its quasicreolized form in contemporary news and television and radio dramas as well as a potential first language. While locating Nigerian Pidgin or EnPi in the wider context of the emergence of pidgins on the West African Coast, the essay also draws on examples from Joyce Cary, Frank Aig–Imoukhuede, Ogali A. Ogali, Ola Rotimi, Wole Soyinka, and Tunde Fatunde among others. It is not by default but out of choice and with their 'informed consent' that EnPi writers such as Ezenwa–Ohaeto contributed to the unfinished plot of the pidgin–creole continuum.
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Diegner, Lutz. "Metatextualities in the Kenyan Swahili novel: A case study reading of Kyallo Wamitila’s Dharau ya Ini." Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 58, no. 1 (May 21, 2021): 127–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/tl.v58i1.9151.
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Contemporary Swahili novels transgress the boundaries of the novel text itself. They employ metatextualities of different categories in order to fulfil a variety of functions. In this essay, I explore metatextualities in the Kenyan Swahili novel, and provide a case study reading of one of the novels by the prolific and award-winning writer Kyallo Wadi Wamitila. My reading of Wamitila’s novel Dharau ya Ini (Contempt of the Liver, 2007) concentrates on metanarration and metareference. I analyse how narration, especially point of view, is used and how it is discussed and reflected upon by the text and in the text itself (metanarration). Another focus will be put on instances of metareference, especially on references to oral literature and to the literary genres of drama and poetry, as part of a work of prose. These analyses are done by a close reading informed by current research on metatextualities, and, in one of the examples, by phonostylistics. A general purpose of this study is to show how Swahili novel writing as African language writing participates in global discourses on, and practices in, literature and the arts. In a perspective of East(ern) African literature, it argues that Swahili literature and literary studies provide stimuli to literary theory and practice otherwise still dominated by its Anglophone counterpart in the region, and beyond. As regards Swahili literature, it reflects the crucial impact of Kenyan writing since about the turn of the millennium, in a sphere hitherto dominated by writers from Tanzania. The study is part of a research project I am undertaking in analysing metatextualities in contemporary Swahili novels by both Tanzanian and Kenyan writers.
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Ngeh, Dr Andrew T. "Power and Marginality in the Poetry of Nol Alembong and Emmanuel Fru Doh." World Journal of Social Science Research 3, no. 4 (September 23, 2016): 463. http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/wjssr.v3n4p463.
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<p><em>The political history of Anglophones in Cameroon in determining their evolution and growth as a people and community has been bedeviled by intrigues, fraud, manipulations, betrayals, double standards, abuse of power and the marginalization of Anglophones. Given the numerical disadvantage of the Anglophones who constitute only one fifth of Cameroon’s population, the Francophones who are in the majority use the political power they possess to oppress, subjugate and repress the Anglophones. The fundamental question that is raised in this article is: for what reason is power acquired in contemporary African politics? Against this backdrop, the poetic orientation of Anglophone Cameroonian poets sprouts from the close scrutiny and consideration of the past and present socio-political, historical, cultural and economic landscape.</em></p><p><em>Guided by the new historicist critical theory and the socialist realism of the Lukacsian and Leninist-Marxist paradigm in analyzing and evaluating Nol Alembong’s Forest Echoes (2012) and Emmanuel Fru Doh’s Not Yet Damascus (2007)</em><em>,</em><em> this paper argues that the poetic works of Alembong and Doh are a response to the social isolation, economic exploitation and political marginalisation of Anglophones in Cameroon. The paper proposes and recommends the culture of dialogue in order to express a response to life and create a harmonious society where peace is maintained and sustained and tension is defused</em><em>.</em></p>
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Standing, Sue. "BOOK REVIEW: Bodunde, Charles. ORAL TRADITIONS AND AESTHETIC TRANSFER: CREATIVITY AND SOCIAL VISION IN CONTEMPORARY BLACK POETRY. Bayreuth African Studies, 58. Bayreuth: Bayreuth University, 2001." Africa Today 49, no. 3 (September 2002): 127–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.2979/aft.2002.49.3.127.
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Raji, Wumi. "Oral Traditions and Aesthetic Transfer: Creativity and Social Vision in Contemporary Black Poetry, and: African Languages Literature in the Political Context of the 1990s (review)." Research in African Literatures 33, no. 3 (2002): 231–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ral.2002.0089.
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Kaplan, Jeff. "Dancing with the Dragon: Orality and (body) language(s) in a live performance of Beowulf." Nordic Theatre Studies 28, no. 2 (February 21, 2017): 36. http://dx.doi.org/10.7146/nts.v28i2.25534.
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This paper theorizes on the function of language and embodiment in northern European storytelling through a self-reflex analysis of the author’s experience performing Beowulf in its original dialect, as a solo, while dancing. Beowulf is Min Nama involved memorizing approximately 80 minutes of the medieval Beowulf epic in its original West Anglo-Saxon dialect (lines 2200—2766, Beowulf’s encounter with the dragon). Grappling with bardic verse for recitation in experimental live performance uncovered new facets in ancient performance texts. Working with the Beowulf poem for stage revealed the mnemonic quality of alliteration, the pervasive use of rhythmic patterns to signal shifts in ideas (a strategy similar to West African dance), and perhaps “deep rhythms” present in medieval northern Europe. As impetus for choreography, the verse contains rhythmic information, corresponding to musical/dance concepts such as pick-ups, counterpoint, and syncopation. Beowulf is Min Nama also required a theory of dialect for Old English, which the author based on modern Swedish, medieval Frisian, and modern Frisian — especially the voices of Frisian poets Tsjêbbe Hettinga and Albertina Soepboer. The project thus provides an entrée into the nexus between ancient and modern storytelling, and concludes that contemporary Frisian poetry represents a direct inheritor to ancient solo performance forms.
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Kahl, J. H. "A narratological perspective on Douglas Livingstone’s A littoral zone (1991)." Literator 31, no. 3 (July 25, 2010): 181–200. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/lit.v31i3.64.
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This article explores aspects of the contemporary South African poet Douglas Livingstone’s “A littoral zone” (1991) from a narratological point of view, leaning largely on Peter Hühn’s narratological concept of the event and Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ “hypothesis of poetry as segmentivity” as formulated by Brian McHale (2009:18). A discussion of two juxtaposed poems from the said volume explores how the poems’ respective anecdotes and events are segmented, then arranged and sequenced into specific narratives to highlight the speaker’s conviction of the necessity of a biological and spiritual connection with the natural environment. In the larger context of the volume there are numerous other narrative lines (in the form of poems about specific experiences the poet had) that are juxtaposed in a similar fashion. Collectively these juxtaposed narrative lines then constitute on the level of the volume as a whole the autobiographical narrative of the poet’s development as self-ironic individual. The various anecdotes also contribute to the formation and development of the theme of symbiosis, a theme that has a direct bearing on how the poet sees the gap between humankind’s current and supposed connection with nature. The main event of the volume is to be found in the reader’s mind: the realisation that bridging this gap is absolutely necessary and that it starts with the individual.
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Reed, B. M. "Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre: Bodies, Voices, Words; Ugly Feelings; A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry; Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation." American Literature 79, no. 1 (March 1, 2007): 216–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2006-091.
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Sotunsa, Mobolanle Ebunoluwa. "Exploiting Resources of Yorùbá Drum Poetry for Contemporary Global Relevance." Matatu 40, no. 1 (December 1, 2012): 401–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18757421-040001026.
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Yorùbá drum poetry has to date enjoyed an indigenous monopoly. However, its attributes as a unique cultural asset of Africans need to be further exploited for greater relevance to the sophistication and demands of the contemporary age. This essay contends that the resources of Yorùbá drum poetry are currently grossly under-utilized; it further asserts that for any art to thrive it must remain dynamic. Suggestions are therefore made concerning various current uses to which the valued resources of Yorùbá drum poetry can be put in order to achieve global relevance. Highlighted here are various means by which the mass media, the advertising and music industries, the government, NGOs, and international organizations can benefit from a more aggressive exploitation of the resources of drum poetry.
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Arenberg, Meg. "The Digital Ukumbi: New Terrains in Swahili Identity and Poetic Dialogue." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 131, no. 5 (October 2016): 1344–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2016.131.5.1344.
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In this essay I address the remediation of the centuries-old East African practice of poetic dialogue in the twenty-first-century digital social network of Facebook. Focusing on an online duel between two young poets from Mombasa, I demonstrate how East Africa's new media are transforming traditional poetic conventions in Swahili. Even sites that endeavor to preserve authentic literary Swahili have become in practice controversial crossroads of language, culture, and identity. By bringing voices of Swahili cultural authority, which draw from the East, into sustained contact with voices of the contemporary urban youth culture, which draws from the West, these new media are ultimately opening new terrains for literary production and debate.
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Bakel, M. A., H. Esen-Baur, Leen Boer, Bronislaw Malinowski, A. P. Borsboom, Betty Meehan, H. J. M. Claessen, et al. "Book Reviews." Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia 141, no. 1 (1985): 149–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/22134379-90003405.
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- M.A. van Bakel, H. Esen-Baur, Untersuchungen über den vogelmann-kult auf der Osterinsel, 1983, Franz Steiner Verlag GmbH, 399 pp. - Leen Boer, Bronislaw Malinowski, Malinowski in Mexico. The economics of a Mexican market system, edited and with an introduction by Susan Drucker-Brown, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982 (International Library of Anthropology)., Julio de la Fuente (eds.) - A.P. Borsboom, Betty Meehan, Shell bed to shell midden, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 1982. - H.J.M. Claessen, Peter Geschiere, Village communities and the state. Changing relations among the Maka of Southeastern Cameroon since the colonial conquest. Monographs of the African Studies Centre, Leiden. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. 1982. 512 pp. Appendices, index, bibliography, etc. - H.J.M. Claessen, Jukka Siikala, Cult and conflict in tropical Polynesia; A study of traditional religion, Christianity and Nativistic movements, Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1982, 308 pp. Maps, figs., bibliography. - H.J.M. Claessen, Alain Testart, Les Chasseurs-Cueilleurs ou l’Origine des Inégalités, Mémoires de la Sociéte d’Ethnographie 26, Paris 1982. 254 pp., maps, bibliography and figures. - Walter Dostal, Frederik Barth, Sohar - Culture and society in an Omani town. Baltimore - London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983, 264 pp., ill. - Benno Galjart, G.J. Kruyer, Bevrijdingswetenschap. Een partijdige visie op de Derde Wereld [Emancipatory Science. A partisan view of the Third World], Meppel: Boom, 1983. - Sjaak van der Geest, Christine Okali, Cocoa and kinship in Ghana: The matrilineal Akan of Ghana. London: Kegan Paul International (in association with the International African Institute), 1983. 179 pp., tables, index. - Serge Genest, Claude Tardits, Contribution de la recherche ethnologique à l’histoire des civilisations du Cameroun / The contribution of enthnological research to the history of Cameroun cultures. Paris, CNRS, 1981, two tomes, 597 pp. - Silvia W. de Groot, Sally Price, Co-wives and calabashes, Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 1984, 224 p., ill. - N.O. Kielstra, Gene R. Garthwaite, Khans and Shahs. A documentary analysis of the Bakhtiary in Iran, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983. 213 pp. - G.L. Koster, Jeff Opland, Xhosa oral poetry. Aspects of a black South African tradition, Cambridge Studies in oral and literate culture 7, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge , London, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne, Sydney, 1983, XII + 303 pp. - Adam Kuper, Hans Medick, Interest and emotion: Essays on the study of family and kinship, Cambridge University Press, 1984., David Warren Sabean (eds.) - C.A. van Peursen, Peter Kloos, Antropologie als wetenschap. Coutinho, Muidenberg 1984 (204 p.). - Jerome Rousseau, Jeannine Koubi, Rambu solo’: “la fumée descend”. Le culte des morts chez les Toradja du Sud. Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1982. 530 pages, 3 maps, 73 pictures. - H.C.G. Schoenaker, Miklós Szalay, Ethnologie und Geschichte: zur Grundlegung einer ethnologischen geschichtsschreibung; mit beispielen aus der Geschichte der Khoi-San in Südafrika. Dietrich Reimer Verlag, Berlin 1983, 292 S. - F.J.M. Selier, Ghaus Ansari, Town-talk, the dynamics of urban anthropology, 170 pp., Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1983., Peter J.M. Nas (eds.) - A.A. Trouwborst, Serge Tcherkézoff, Le Roi Nyamwezi, la droite et la gauche. Revision comparative des classifications dualistes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Paris:Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1983, 154 pp. - Pieter van der Velde, H. Boekraad, Te Elfder Ure 32: Verwantschap en produktiewijze, Jaargang 26 nummer 3 (maart 1983)., G. van den Brink, R. Raatgever (eds.) - E.Ch.L. van der Vliet, Sally Humphreys, The family, women and death. Comparative studies. London, Boston etc.: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983 (International Library of Anthropology). xiv + 210 pp. - W.F. Wertheim, T. Svensson, Indonesia and Malaysia. Scandinavian Studies in Contemporary Society. Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies: Studies on Asian Topics no. 5. London and Malmö: Curzon Press, 1983, 282 pp., P. Sørensen (eds.) - H.O. Willems, Detlef Franke, Altägyptische verwandtschaftsbezeichnungen im Mittleren Reich, Hamburg, Verlag Born GmbH, 1983.
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Hamessley, Lydia. "Within Sight: Three-Dimensional Perspectives on Women and Banjos in the Late Nineteenth Century." 19th-Century Music 31, no. 2 (November 1, 2007): 131–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ncm.2007.31.2.131.
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During the last decades of the nineteenth century, women figured prominently in a marketing campaign by banjo manufacturers who sought to make the banjo a respectable instrument for ladies. Their overarching aim was to "elevate" the banjo's status from its African-American and minstrel-show associations, thereby making the instrument acceptable in white bourgeois society. At the same time, stereoview cards, three-dimensional photographs produced by the millions, were a popular parlor entertainment featuring a variety of contemporary images, including women playing the banjo. Yet, instead of depicting a genteel lady in the parlor playing her beribboned banjo, the stereoviews presented humorous and sometimes risque scenes of banjo-playing women. Further, virtually no stereoviews exist that show the banjo played by a lady in a parlor setting. Through a study of stereoscopic depictions of women in a variety of scenes, I place these unexpected images of women's music-making in a context that explains their significance. In particular I examine the way stereoviews provide insights about the tensions regarding the position and status of women in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American culture as revealed in the figure of the New Woman. Typical of constructions of this threatening figure, stereographic images picture the New Woman wearing bloomers, riding bicycles, attending college, smoking, neglecting her wifely duties and children, and even indulging in lesbian eroticism. Yet, stereoviews are distinctive in that they also show the New Woman playing the banjo, and I argue that the link between the banjo and the New Woman had a decisive and negative impact on the effectiveness of the banjo elevation project. Through an examination of these three-dimensional views, and drawing on late-nineteenth-century writing and poetry about the banjo, I show how the banjo in the hands of the New Woman became a cautionary cultural icon for middle- and upper-class women, subverting the respectable image of the parlor banjo and the bourgeois women who played it. I place this new evidence in the context of Karen Linn's paradigm describing the banjo elevation project as one that sought to shift the banjo from the realm of sentimental values to official values. The figure of the New Woman does not fit within Linn's dichotomy; rather, she falls outside both sets of values. Often viewed as a third sex herself, in a sense mirroring the gender tensions surrounding the banjo, the New Woman helped to shift the banjo into a third realm, that of revolutionary and perhaps even decadent values. This study enhances what we know about the way musical instruments have been used to reconfigure attitudes toward gender roles in the popular imagination and furthers our understanding of the complex role women have played in the history of the banjo. Moreover, this evidence demonstrates how gender and sexuality can affect the reception of music, and musical instruments, through powerful iconographic images.
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KITLV, Redactie. "Book Reviews." New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 68, no. 3-4 (January 1, 1994): 317–407. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/13822373-90002657.
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-Peter Hulme, Stephen Greenblatt, New World Encounters. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. xviii + 344 pp.-Nigel Rigby, Alan Riach ,The radical imagination: Lectures and talks by Wilson Harris. Liège: Department of English, University of Liège, xx + 126 pp., Mark Williams (eds)-Jonathan White, Rei Terada, Derek Walcott's poetry: American Mimicry. Boston: North-eastern University Press, 1992. ix + 260 pp.-Ray A. Kea, John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic world, 1400-1680. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. xxxviii + 309 pp.-B.W. Higman, Barbara L. Solow, Slavery and the rise of the Atlantic system. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. viii + 355 pp.-Sidney W. Mintz, Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave acculturation and resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 412 pp.-Karen Fog Olwig, Corinna Raddatz, Afrika in Amerika. Hamburg: Hamburgisches Museum für Völkerkunde, 1992. 264 pp.-Lee Haring, William Bascom, African folktales in the new world. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. xxv + 243 pp.-Frank Jan van Dijk, Dale A. Bisnauth, History of religions in the Caribbean. Kingston: Kingston Publishers, 1989. 225 pp.-Gloria Wekker, Philomena Essed, Everyday racism: Reports from women of two cultures. Alameda CA: Hunter House, 1990. xiii + 288 pp.''Understanding everyday racism: An interdisciplinary theory. Newbury Park CA: Sage, 1991. x + 322 pp.-Deborah S. Rubin, Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White women, racism, and history. London: Verso, 1992. xviii + 263 pp.-Michael Hanchard, Peter Wade, Blackness and race mixture: The dynamics of racial identity in Colombia. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993. xv + 415 pp.-Rosalie Schwartz, Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Slaves, sugar, & colonial society: Travel accounts of Cuba, 1801-1899. Wilmington DE: SR Books, 1992. xxvi + 259 pp.-Susan Eckstein, Sandor Halebsky ,Cuba in transition: Crisis and transformation. With Carolee Bengelsdorf, Richard L. Harris, Jean Stubbs & Andrew Zimbalist. Boulder CO: Westview, 1992. xi + 244 pp., John M. Kirk (eds)-Michiel Baud, Andrés L. Mateo, Mito y cultura en la era de Trujillo. Santo Domingo: Librería La Trinitario/Instituto del Libro, 1993. 224 pp.-Edgardo Meléndez, Andrés Serbin, Medio ambiente, seguridad y cooperacíon regional en el Caribe. Caracas: Editorial Nueva Sociedad, 1992. 147 pp.-Dean W. Collinwood, Michael Craton ,Islanders in the stream: A history of the Bahamian people. Volume One: From Aboriginal times to the end of slavery. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. xxxiii + 455 pp., Gail Saunders (eds)-Gary Brana-Shute, Alan A. Block, Masters of paradise: Organized crime and the internal revenue service in the Bahamas. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991. vii + 319 pp.-Michaeline Crichlow, Patrick Bryan, The Jamaican people 1880-1902. London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1991. xiv + 300 pp.-Faye V Harrison, Lisa Douglass, The power of sentiment: Love, hierarchy, and the Jamaican family elite. Boulder CO: Westview, 1992. xviii + 298 pp.-Frank Jan van Dijk, Bob Marley, Songs of freedom: From 'Judge Not' to 'Redemption Song.' Kingston: Tuff Gong/Bob Marley Foundation / London : Island Records, 1992 (limited edition). 63 pp. + 4 compact discs.-Riva Berleant-Schiller, Veront M. Satchell, From plots to plantations: Land transactions in Jamaica, 1866-1900. Mona: University of the West Indies, 1990. xiii + 197 pp.-Hymie Rubenstein, Christine Barrow, Family, land and development in St. Lucia. Cave Hill, Barbados: Institute for social and economic studies (ISER), University of the West Indies, 1992. xii + 83 pp.-Bonham C. Richardson, Selwyn Ryan, Social and occupational stratification in contemporary Trinidad and Tobago. St. Augustine, Trinidad: ISER, 1991. xiv + 474 pp.-Bill Maurer, Roland Littlewood, Pathology and identity: The work of Mother Earth in Trinidad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. xxii + 322 pp.-Robert Fatton, Jr., Brian Weinstein ,Haiti: The failure of politics. New York: Praeger, 1992. ix + 203 pp., Aaron Segal (eds)-Uli Locher, Michel S. Laguerre, The military and society in Haiti. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993. x + 223 pp.-Paul E. Brodwin, Leslie G. Desmangles, The faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. xiii + 218 pp.-Marian Goslinga, Enid Brown, Bibliographical guide to Caribbean mass communication. John A. Lent (comp.). Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. xi + 301 pp.''Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles: An annotated English-language bibliography. Metuchen NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992. xi + 276 pp.-Jay B. Haviser, F.R. Effert, J.P.B. de Josselin de Jong, curator and archaeologist: A study of his early career (1910-1935). Leiden: Centre of Non-Western studies, University of Leiden, 1992. v + 119 pp.-Hans van Amersfoort, Anil Ramdas, De papegaai, de stier en de klimmende bougainvillea. Essays. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1992.-Ineke van Wetering, Deonarayan, Curse of the Devtas. Paramaribo: J.J. Buitenweg, 1992. v + 103 pp.-Ineke van Wetering, G. Mungra, Hindoestaanse gezinnen in Nederland. Leiden: Centrum voor Onderzoek Maatschappelijke Tegenstellingen, Rijksuniversiteit Leiden, 1990. 313 pp.-J.M.R. Schrils, Alex Reinders, Politieke geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Antillen en Aruba 1950-1993. Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1993. 430 pp.-Gert Oostindie, G.J. Cijntje ,Stemmen OK, maar op wie? Delft: Eburon, 1991. 150 pp., A. Nicatia, F. Quirindongo (eds)-Genevieve Escure, Donald Winford, Predication in Caribbean English Creoles. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1993, viii + 419 pp.-Jean D'Costa, Lise Winer, Trinidad and Tobago. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1993. xi + 369 pp. (plus cassette)
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Babana-Hampton, Safoi. "The Postcolonial Arabic Novel." American Journal of Islam and Society 21, no. 1 (January 1, 2004): 107–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v21i1.1818.
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Muhsin Jassim Al-Musawi’s book offers a fresh contribution not only tostudies in Arabic literature but also to postcolonial critique, cultural criticism,comparative literature, and cross-cultural studies. Its interest lies inthe fact that it introduces a relatively less explored territory in postcolonialthought and cultural criticism: namely, Arabic literature. Theattention of many western and non-western scholars in the field has long been directed toward Anglophone literature from South Asia, Japan,Africa, and Canada, and then to Francophone literature from North Africaand the Antilles.In the context of the Arab world, the author also situates the importanceof his study in how The Thousand and One Nights, a work whosefate and reception he sees as emblematic of the fate of fiction writing inthe Arab world, was received. Just like the novel genre in general, thiswork only received scholarly interest rather recently, after centuries ofneglect and disdain by conservatist Arab scholars and elite culture.Central to postcolonial critique, whose sources and precedents can betraced to the practices and discourses of those writers associated with variousintellectual traditions (e.g., poststructuralism, deconstruction, Marxism,feminism, cultural studies) and which has affinities with the literary movementknown as postmodernism, is the experience of colonization as amoment of cultural self-consciousness and self-dividedness. This momentgenerates contradictory and ambivalent identity patterns and subject positionsresulting from the encounter with the Other (culture), and emphasizesthe constructedness of identity. Al-Musawi transposes these key postcolonialmotifs and insights to the realm of Arabic literature in order to revealimportant dimensions of the contemporary Arabic novel.Scholarly research on Arabic literature (both within and outside theArab world) often privileged poetry as an object of study, given its historicallyprominent place in elite culture and the Arab world’s literary canon.The subject choice of the book is of particular interest, because it targetsthe Arabic novel as an emerging literary genre, and, by the same token,because of its use of postcolonial analytical concepts to account for thisrelatively new literary genre’s place in contemporary Arab culture andsociety ...
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Peterson, Dale E. "Justifying the Margin: The Construction of “Soul” in Russian and African-American Texts." Slavic Review 51, no. 4 (1992): 749–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2500135.
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The scholarly world has little noted nor long remembered the interesting fact that the emancipation proclamation of a culturally separate African-American literature was accompanied by a generous acknowledgment of Russian precedent. In 1925 Alain Locke issued the first manifesto of the modern Black Arts movement, The New Negro. There could not have been a clearer call for the free expression of a suppressed native voice: “we have lately had an art that was stiltedly selfconscious, and racially rhetorical rather than racially expressive. Our poets have now stopped speaking for the Negro—they speak as Negroes.“ Even so, this liberating word of the Harlem Renaissance was uttered with a sideward glance at the prior success of nineteenth century Russia's soulful literature and music. Locke himself cited the testimony of his brilliant contemporary, the author of Cane, a poetic distillation of the pungent essence of slavery's culture of oppression: “for vital originality of substance, the young Negro writers dig deep into the racy peasant undersoil of the race life.
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Claassen, J.-M. "'Living in a place called exile': The universals of the alienation caused by isolation." Literator 24, no. 3 (August 1, 2003): 85–112. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/lit.v24i3.302.
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Although various aspects of Ovid’s emotional reactions to exile have been researched, there has so far been no extended practical study that places the emotional content of his works into a new political context. In this respect Ovid’s voicing of his experiences can serve to illuminate the experiences of latter-day exiles. This article attempts to establish, by literary means, a picture of the alienation attendant upon exile and its sublimation. For this purpose the poetry of Ovid, as well as that of certain modern authors, is used as illustration. There are many parallels between the Rome of the turn of our era and the South Africa of previous decades: exile was a political weapon in both. Themes reflecting alienation in Ovid’s poems are universal, and still valid in situations of exile today. Ovid’s portrayal of his own exiled persona is used to draw a psychological profile of the experiences of alienation during such exile. This profile may be termed the “universals of alienation”, which is applied to the exile or imprisonment of the victims of contemporary political upheaval. The extent to which the verbalisation of such alienation serves to heal such a wounded soul is explored.
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Etherton, Michael. "The Field Day Theatre Company and the New Irish Drama." New Theatre Quarterly 3, no. 9 (February 1987): 64–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00008514.
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In the previous article, the author exempted one company's work from her strictures on the present state of Ulster playwriting. That company was Field Day, based in the town whose very choice of name distinguishes Catholic from Protestant, Derry or Londonderry. Here, Michael Etherton outlines the aims of the company, which extend far beyond the theatrical, and also describes and assesses three plays which, although not all originating from Field Day, seem to him to reflect the distinctive ‘poetic and political view’ which he believes the company has nurtured. Most notable, be believes, is its attempt to reveal and replace the arid rhetoric to which beliefs and argument on both ‘sides’ have been reduced. Michael Etherton, presently teaching at King Alfred's College, Winchester, has previously published widely in the field of African theatre, on which he wrote in TQ10 of our original series, and he is preparing a volume on contemporary Irish drama for the Macmillan Modern Dramatists series.
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Mustafa, Hameed Abdullah, and Sherzad Shafi'h Barzani. "The African-American Poets' Struggle for the Rights of People: A Study in Claude McKay's Selected Poems." Twejer 3, no. 3 (December 2020): 821–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.31918/twejer.2033.22.
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This study scrutinizes selected protest poems written by the prominent black poet of the Harlem Renaissance Claude McKay (1889-1948). McKay is considered as a key literary figure of the Negro movement who played a significant role in struggling for and awakening his own people to demand their rights. His major aspiration was to end all forms of prejudice and oppression against blacks portrayed in his poems during the most effective movement in African American literary history comprising the times between 1920 to almost the mid-1930s. McKay established himself as a powerful literary voice for social justice during the Harlem Renaissance constantly struggling for people's identity and rights against the widespread prejudice, segregation, and racism against blacks in America and worldwide along with his pride in his black race and culture. These central issues had different impacts on the Harlem Renaissance and on the lives and works of those who participated in that movement; depicting how both race and racism could define the African American experience in the early twentieth century, as well. McKay, skillfully combined traditional forms and political protest in many of his sonnets. He took the old poetic genre and made it new and relevant to his own project by examining within its bounds unconventional and contemporary subjects. Along with his poetic diction and imagery, he juxtaposes contrasting images to show the hypocritic nature of America, showing his inevitable faith in the country. McKay's enthusiasm for and belief in the authority of intellectuals was strengthened by his understanding of America's deep-rooted racism. He closes many of his sonnets with gloomy observations of blacks' sufferings. The clear conclusion of his struggle was the fact that negro writers succeeded in showcasing the sufferings of people, incited blacks to demand their legal rights, and proved they are capable of everything and as genius as whites. Keywords: McKay, Struggles, Racism, identity, prejudice, rights.
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Cardoso, Marília Rothier. "Narrativas de vários sertões." O Eixo e a Roda: Revista de Literatura Brasileira 28, no. 1 (March 21, 2019): 307–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.17851/2358-9787.28.1.307-328.
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Resumo: O objetivo deste artigo é estudar as narrativas de Guimarães Rosa como construção de uma linguagem poética que abre novas perspectivas ao pensamento, distanciando-se dos parâmetros da racionalidade ocidental. Como estratégia analítica, desenvolve-se um paralelo entre a estória rosiana do menino Miguilim e o relato autobiográfico do africanista Amadou Hampâté Bâ, com atenção para os capítulos referentes a seus tempos de criança. Nas duas narrativas, observa-se a conjugação de aspectos sobreviventes de culturas orais arcaicas com a peculiaridade do ponto de vista infantil para o delineamento de modos alternativos de conhecer o mundo. Destaca-se a proximidade entre tais modos de conhecimento e a cunhagem peculiar de conceitos empregados por antropólogos e filósofos contemporâneos que se desviam da epistemologia hegemônica. Para ampliar o campo de debate, consideram-se, ainda, brevemente, os diários e memórias de Carolina Maria de Jesus, escritora descendente de africanos, semialfabetizada mas prolífica e potente. Nesse percurso, procura-se destacar a dimensão investigativo-crítica da forma narrativa.Palavras-chave: narrativa; modos de existência; perspectivas de conhecimento; linguagem verbal; marcas não verbais de enunciação.Abstract: We aim to study Guimarães Rosa’s narratives as a construction of a poetic language that opens new perspectives to thinking, placing itself away from the parameters of Western rationality. As an analytical strategy, a parallel is traced between the boy Miguilim Rosian story and the Africanist Amadou Hampâté Bâ autobiographical account, with attention to the chapters that refer to his childhood. In both narratives, it is possible to observe the combination of archaic oral cultures surviving aspects with the infantile point of view peculiarity o for the designing of alternative ways of knowing the world. We emphasize the proximity between such ways of knowledge and the peculiar concepts coinage employed by contemporary anthropologists and philosophers that deviate from hegemonic epistemology. To broaden the field of debate, we also consider briefly the diaries and memoirs of Carolina Maria de Jesus, an African-descendant writer, semi-literate but prolific and powerful. Consequently, the research-critical dimension of the narrative form is highlighted.Keywords: narrative; modes of existence; knowledge perspectives; verbal language; non-verbal marks of enunciation.
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Brewer, Elizabeth, and Michael Monahan. "Introduction." Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad 20, no. 1 (March 15, 2011): xiii—xvi. http://dx.doi.org/10.36366/frontiers.v20i1.285.
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Cities have been magnets for a wide diversity of talent and have captured the human imagination as centers of intellectual and cultural achievement since humans began to live together. To learn from the city means to engage with its assets and riches, but also with its pressing problems, contradictions, and paradoxes. It also means to reflect upon urban settings as places where civilizations often meet and define themselves, and where populations and infrastructure change over time, sometimes slowly, but in other cases, rapidly.
Precisely because they are multi-layered, multi-dimensional, complex and challenging, cities offer rich opportunities for study abroad students to learn, no matter their disciplinary interests. The environmental issues and public health concerns manifested in cities, for example, offer many opportunities for disciplinary and interdisciplinary inquiry in the sciences, social sciences, as well as in the humanities, if to a lesser degree. The social fabric of cities, as well as their social inequities and other problems, can appeal to students in the social sciences, while the many varieties of cultural expression, both “high” and “low”, found it cities invite both exploration and creation. Cities’ many layers of history, their locations in particular geographical locales, their changing infrastructure and transitions in population, all can teach students to ask about how places (urban and non-urban) came to be what they are today, and how they might be in the future. Investigations of the city also allow students to think about who they are in relationship to others, what their relationship is to places, and which roles they will play in determining the future of the cities and other places they will call home in the future. In short, the cities where students study abroad can serve as laboratories for learning, rather than simply temporary residences or arenas for taking pleasure. The contributors to this volume are doing just this kind of work: asking how and why cities are appropriate venues for study abroad, and experimenting with ways to allow cities to become arenas for learning.
The role of cities as sites for learning is not, of course, new. It was in Classical Athens (480–336 BCC), for example, that Western conceptions of philosophy, history, drama, and education emerged. Without the city, it would be hard to imagine the intellectual development and the enduring educational legacy of Socrates (e.g.dialectical reasoning, learning through persistent questioning and analysis, intellectual self-discipline, autonomous thinking, self-examination, self-criticism, high standards of moral conduct, intellectual honesty, and life-long learning). Cities in the Middle Ages (400–1400) hosted universities, where learning was considered sacred, not merely practical. Thus, Timbuktu became a vibrant center of learning, with libraries that rivaled anything in Christian Europe and the highest literacy rate in Africa. A quantum leap in cultural evolution, commercial vitality, technical innovation and new consciousness of humans at the center of the action took place over a two hundred year period beginning around 1450. This would have been unthinkable without great Renaissance cities such as Florence and Venice. Indeed, for the nature of learning, arguably the farthest-reaching long-term consequence of the Renaissance was the development of the scientific method, a truly intellectual and conceptual revolution that made human beings think differently about the world and themselves. Similarly, many of the great intellectual and practical breakthroughs of the Scientific Revolution (1500–1700) are nearly unthinkable without the city. Emerging from the intellectual cauldron of the city were, among others, the great minds of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Newton, Descartes, Galileo, and Bacon. The goal of education, if we follow Bacon, is knowledge in the service of improving the human condition. This continues to this day to be a goal of many study abroad students. Finally, the intellectual achievements that characterize the Enlightenment (1700–1800): secularism, cosmopolitanism, skepticism, security for the individual through the rule of law, personal freedom and autonomy, deep respect for human dignity, and intellectual and scientific inquiry are based in the interactions with others that are essential components of urban life.
The articles in this volume offer their own contemporary examples of study abroad and the city, considered through an impressive range of approaches.The articles provide a balance between different theoretical and pedagogical approaches to the topic.
Theoretical perspectives on the cities are central to a number of discussions in the volume. Lance Kenny, in “First City, Anti-City: Cain, Heterotopia, and Study Abroad,” argues that the time has come to underpin the practice of study abroad with theoretical perspectives. As an example, he suggests that the work of theorists such as Foucault (heterotopias) and Virilio (the anti-city) can provide study abroad students with the analytical tools to “know” the city. Rodriguez and Rink use Walter Benjamin’s notion of the flâneur to incorporate technology as a way for students to engage with the city. Benjamin’s writing on the flâneur is also introduced to students studying abroad in Athens by Augeri et al., who also draw on Dubord’s derive and psychogeography to provide students with frameworks for understanding urban realities and their reactions to them. Augeri et al. turn to de Certeau’s work on walking as rhetorical practice, while Patrick McGuire and James Spates demonstrate how the urban sociologist Jane Jacobs’ work helps students understand cities as shaped by culture and the residents who live in them.
To discuss the impacts of globalization on cities, Gristwood and Woolf draw on theoretical writings about the city (Raban), fiction and poetry (Kurieshi, Brecht, Eliot, Ackroyd, Zephaniah), writers writing about writing (Sandhu and Upstone, for example), perspectives from geography (Halbert and Rutherford, Massey, Wills et al.) and sociology (Castells, Jacobs, Sassen), and government statistics. Milla Cozart Riggio, Lisa Sapolis, and Xianming Chen also look at how globalization is transforming cities and discuss how their home city, Hartford, is used as the starting point for students’ engagement with cities and globalization.
Other articles focus on pedagogical approaches to assisting American students abroad engage with their study abroad cities. Scott Blair points out that American students frequently have never learned to read a map, and delineates how mapping can be employed as a tool for analysis, as well as for fostering intercultural learning and tolerance for diversity and.engaged experiential learning. Mieka Ritsema, Barbara Knecht, and Kenneth Kruckemeyer also point to mapping as a useful tool for engaging students with cities encountered during study abroad. Thomas Ricks offers strategies for understanding Jerusalem’s multi-layered history through its contemporary reality. Evidence for the power of experiential learning in study abroad cities is offered by Thomas Wagenknecht. Wagenknecht’s interviews with educators in Germany, however, find that experiential learning has not yet earned the status of “academic” learning, and calls for more evidence about its outcomes.
Finally, two articles discuss the impact of engaging home-campus faculty themselves as learners in cities abroad. Anne Ellen Geller, discussing a faculty writing institute, shows how engagement with daily life in contemporary Rome helps faculty understand and value the study abroad experience. Elizabeth Brewer discusses Beloit College’s faculty members’ experimentation with mapping, walking, and ethnographic research methods, including participant-observation.
It has been humbling and enriching to read the rich work being undertaken on the city and study abroad and to work with the authors who contributed to this volume. It is hoped that the examples and discussions offered in this volume not only will be productive in themselves for readers, but also will generate new discussion, ideas, and practices.
Elizabeth Brewer
Beloit College
Michael Monahan
Macalester College
Brethren Colleges Abroad
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Odueme, Edoama Frances. "Orality, Memory and the new African Diaspora Poetry: Examining Tanure Ojaide's Poetics." Afrika Focus 32, no. 1 (September 5, 2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.21825/af.v32i1.11789.
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The influence of traditional oral poetic forms on modern African poetry has been significant. Fascinated by oral forms which their respective communities relied on (to inform, teach, and correct erring members) before the advent of literacy, modern African writers borrow from these oral traditions and blend them with the features of the written Western literary forms. This appropriation of the oral poetic techniques by modern African poets continues today, as is clearly evident in the writings of many contemporary African poets, whose scripted works are seen to have drawn much in terms of content and form from the African oral poetic tradition. Following in this trend, the new African diaspora poets have also maintained the practice of skillfully blending the rich African verbal art and the modern (written) poetic forms to articulate the experiences of their African homeland as well as those of the diaspora, in order to construct and project their identities and visions of a new life in their lived world. In order to explore how through recourse to memory, “new African diasporas” (African-descended people who migrated out of Africa, during the postcolonial era and who live and practice their art outside the African homeland) utilize African oral art techniques in their writings, this essay analyses the poetry of Tanure Ojaide.
KEYWORDS: ORALITY, ORAL TRADITION, MEMORY, NEW AFRICAN DIASPORA
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Newfield, Denise, and Deirdre Byrne. "Towards Decolonising Poetry in Education: The ZAPP Project." Education as Change 24 (December 23, 2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.25159/1947-9417/7723.
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This article concerns ZAPP (the South African Poetry Project), which is a community of poets, scholars (including the authors), teachers and students, established in 2013 to promote, in educational systems, the work of contemporary South African poets. For the past three years (2017–2019), we have attempted through outreach and research to contribute to decolonising South African education by paying attention to indigenous poetic traditions and practices. Our research has focused on content, pedagogy and institutional practice. The article outlines and attempts to assess three interrelated components of ZAPP’s research into the decolonisation of poetry and education: our research into the transformation of teaching and learning in EFAL (English First Additional Language) poetry classrooms, our ongoing research into what constitutes indigenous South African poetry today, and our research into institutional practices concerning the production and dissemination of knowledge about poetry. We draw on various conceptual frameworks to explore ZAPP’s research, namely, South African poetry scholarship, decolonial theory, theories of indigeneity, theories of multimodality, posthumanism and new materialisms. The article shows both the achievements and challenges of our research efforts in the three areas of content, pedagogy and institutional practice. Its final claim is that these three areas are crucial sites of intervention in attempts at decolonising poetry in existing disciplines in research and education.
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Sarangi, Jaydeep. "‘a night where june and moon rhyme’." Writers in Conversation 7, no. 2 (August 2, 2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.22356/wic.v7i2.77.
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Dr Raphael d’Abdon is a writer, scholar, spoken word poet, editor and translator. In 2007 he complied, translated and edited I nostri semi/Peo tsa rona, an anthology of contemporary South African poetry. In 2011 he translated into Italian (with Lorenzo Mari) Bless Me Father, the autobiography of South African poet Mario d’Offizi. In 2013, he compiled and edited the collection Marikana: A Moment in Time. He is the author of three collections of poems, sunnyside nightwalk (Johannesburg: Geko, 2013), salt water (Johannesburg: Poetree Publishing, 2016) and the bitter herb (East London: The Poets Printery, 2018), and he has read his poetry in South Africa, Nigeria, Somaliland, Italy, Sweden and the USA. His poems are published in journals, magazines and anthologies in South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Malawi, Singapore, Palestine, India, Italy, Canada, USA and UK, he is South Africa’s representative of AHN (Africa Haiku Network), and he is a member of ZAPP (The South African Poetry Project) and IPP (International Poetry Project), two joint-projects of the University of Cambridge, UNISA and the University of the Witwatersrand, whose chief aims are to promote poetry in schools in South Africa, UK and beyond, and to instill knowledge, understanding and a love of poetry in young learners.This interview is conducted through e mails in the months of April-May 2020 when Corona virus ravished the world. We saw light through the wings of poesy. We reached out each other through questions and answers about poetry, life and the immediate.
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Proitsaki, Maria. "Poetry as a Strategy for Teaching English." JAAAS: Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies 1, no. 1 (August 31, 2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.47060/jaaas.v1i1.68.
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This article explores ways to introduce and integrate poetry in English classes in the context of second-language education. My aim is to spark interest in contemporary poetry while addressing general perceptions by both teachers and students that poetry is difficult to engage in. I thus argue for an approach that centers on "easier" poems and involves aspects of contemporary popular culture to introduce poetry, help students appreciate it, and eventually engage in creative writing of their own. Furthermore, I suggest ways in which poetry can be integrated in English courses at large, via the inclusion of strings of poems, within their broader cultural contexts, and by linking them to different, more popular cultural forms of expression, such as songs, films, and cartoons. I exemplify this approach by focusing on two poems by African American poet Nikki Giovanni. "Knoxville, Tennessee" and "Nikki-Rosa" are autobiographical poems which offer first-person accounts of the poet's African American cultural background. However, my intertextual approach interconnects these poems with other poems and cultural texts from different parts of the English-speaking world. Ultimately, I suggest that poetry, due to its brevity and open-endedness, can enhance the study of the English language and Anglophone cultures in a variety of ways beyond the close study of verse in terms of aesthetics.