Academic literature on the topic 'Nigerian fiction (English)'

The use of the English language for literary creation has been the bane of Nigerian literature. Nigeria has a very complex linguistic system; as a result, its citizens communicate either in their indigenous languages or in English, depending on the situation in which they find themselves. The use of English in Nigerian literature in general and prose fiction in particular is influenced by both linguistic and extralinguistic factors. In their attempt to offer solutions to the problems of language in literary expression, Nigerian novelists adapt English to varying linguistic and socio-cultural contexts. This has resulted in experimentation and the employment of various creative-stylistic strategies and devices in prose fiction. Our focus in this essay is on the conditioning influences of situational variables on the language and styles of Nigerian novelists, with Chimamanda Adichie and Chinua Achebe as a case study. We shall examine and explicate how situational variables influence and impose constraints on the language and styles of novelists, and how they adapt English, which is in contact with the various indigenous languages, to the varying local Nigerian situations and experiences.

This article discusses the use of literature as a popular tool for teaching basic language skills such as reading, writing, listening and speaking and other language areas such as vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation in English as a Second Language classroom. It uses the literary method in its analysis of the Nigerian situation. The reasons and criteria for selecting literary texts are discussed. Also the benefits of different genres of literature such as poetry, short fiction, drama and novel to language teaching are taken into account. The paper recognized that all genres should be carefully selected and used in the teaching of English Language skills and language skills should not be taught in isolation.

Science fiction in the last decades has often empowered machines and provided humans with enhanced characteristics through the use of technology (the limits of artificial intelligence and transhumanism are frequent themes in recent narratives), but animal empowerment has also been present through the concept of uplifting, understood as the augmentation of animal intelligence through technology. Uplifting implies providing animals with the capacity to speak and reason like humans. However, it could be argued that such implementation fails to acknowledge animal cognition in favour of anthropomorphized schemes of thought. Humankind’s lack of recognition of different animal types of communication has been portrayed in fiction and often implies the adaptation of the animal Other to human needs and expectations, creating a post-animal that communicates its needs to the reader through borrowed words. The main objective of this article is to analyze the use of uplifting as a strategy to give voice to animals in two science fiction novels written in English, both published in the twenty-first century: Lagoon (2014) by Nigerian-American Nnedi Okorafor and Bête (2014) by British author Adam Roberts. This article examines, from ecocritical and human-animal studies (HAS) perspectives, the differencesand similarities in the exploration of the theme in both novels, which are often related to humankind’s willingness or refusal to regard the Other as equal.

With Nigerian novelist Amos Tutuola as primary subject, this paper at[1]tempts to understand the construction of sociocultural identities in Nigeria in the wake of independence. Despite the international success of his literary publications, Tutuola was denied access to the most intimate discourses on the development of African literature by his Nigerian elite contemporaries, who emerged from University College, Ibadan, in the 1950s and early 1960s. Having completed only a few years of colonial schooling, Tutuola was differentiated from his elite literary contemporaries in terms of education. Yet if education represented a rather concrete, institutionalized divide between the elite and the everyday Nigerian, this paper will suggest that the resulting epistemological difference served as a more fluid, ideological divide. Both Western epistemology, rooted in Western academic spaces, and African epistemology, preserved from African traditions like proverbs and storytelling, informed the elite and Tutuola’s worldviews. The varying degrees to which one epistemology was privileged over the other reinforced the boundary between Tutuola and the elite. Furthermore, educational experiences and sociocultural identities informed the ways in which independent Nigeria was envisioned by both Tutuola and the elite writers. While the elites’ discourse on independence reflected their proximity to Nigeria’s political elite, Tutuola positioned himself as a distinctly Yoruba writer in the new Nigeria. He envisioned a state in which traditional knowledge remained central to the African identity. Ultimately, his life and work attest to the endurance of indigenous epistemology through years of European colonialism and into independence. 148 Mackenzie Finley During a lecture series at the University of Palermo, Italy, Nigerian novelist Amos Tutuola presented himself, his work, and his Yoruba heritage to an audience of Italian students and professors of English and Anglophone literatures. During his first lecture, the Yoruba elder asked his audience, “Why are we people afraid to go to the burial ground at night?” An audience member ventured a guess: “Perhaps we are afraid to know what we cannot know.” Tutuola replied, “But, you remember, we Africans believe that death is not the end of life. We know that when one dies, that is not the end of his life [. . .] So why are all people afraid to go to the burial ground at night? They’re afraid to meet the ghosts from the dead” (emphasis in original).1 Amos Tutuola (1920–1997) was recognized globally for his perpetuation of Yoruba folklore tradition via novels and short stories written in unconventional English. His works, especially The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954), were translated into numerous European languages, including Italian. Given the chance to speak directly with an Italian audience at Palermo, Tutuola elaborated on the elements of Yoruba culture that saturated his fiction. His lectures reflected the same sense of purpose that drove his writing. Tutuola explained, “As much as I could [in my novels], I tried my best to bring out for the people to see the secrets of my tribe—I mean, the Yoruba people—and of Nigerian people, and African people as a whole. I’m trying my best to bring out our traditional things for the people to know a little about us, about our beliefs, our character, and so on.”2 Tutuola’s didactics during the lecture at Palermo reflect his distinct intellectual and cultural commitment to a Yoruba cosmology, one that was not so much learned in his short years of schooling in the colonial education system as it was absorbed from his life of engagement with Yoruba oral tradition. With Tutuola as primary subject, this paper attempts to understand the construction of sociocultural identities in Nigeria in the wake of independence. The educated elite writers, such as Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe, who emerged from University College, Ibadan, during the same time period, will serve as a point of comparison. On October 1, 1960, when Nigeria gained independence from Britain, Tutuola occupied an unusual place relative to the university-educated elite, the semi-literate “average man,” the international 1 Alassandra di Maio, Tutuola at the University: The Italian Voice of a Yoruba Ancestor, with an Interview with the Author and an Afterword by Claudio Gorlier (Rome: Bulzoni, 2000), 38. The lecture’s transcriber utilized graphic devices (italicized and bolded words, brackets denoting pauses and movements) to preserve the dynamic oral experience of the lecture. However, so that the dialogue reads more easily in the context of this paper, I have removed the graphic devices but maintained what the transcriber presented as Tutuola’s emphasized words, simply italicizing what was originally in bold. 2 Di Maio, Tutuola at the University, 148. Constructing Identities 149 stage of literary criticism, and the emerging field of African literature. This position helped shape his sense of identity. Despite the success of his literary publications, Tutuola was not allowed to participate in the most intimate dis[1]courses on the development of African literature by his elite contemporaries. In addition to his lack of access to higher education, Tutuola was differentiated from his elite literary contemporaries on epistemological grounds. If education represented a rather concrete, institutionalized divide between the elite and the everyday Nigerian, an epistemological difference served as a more fluid, ideological divide. Both Western epistemology, rooted in Western academic spaces, and African epistemology, preserved from African traditions like proverbs and storytelling, informed the elite and Tutuola’s worldviews. The varying degrees to which one epistemology was privileged over the other reinforced the boundary between the elite and Tutuola. This paper draws largely on correspondence, conference reports, and the personal papers of Tutuola and his elite contemporaries housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as on interviews transcribed by the Transcription Centre in London, the periodical Africa Report (1960–1970), and Robert M. Wren and Claudio Gorlier, concentrating on primary sources produced during the years immediately prior to and shortly after Nigerian independence in 1960. Tutuola’s ideas generally did not fit into the sociocultural objectives of his elite counterparts. Though they would come in contact with one another via the world of English-language literature, Tutuola usually remained absent from or relegated to the margins of elite discussions on African creative writing. Accordingly, the historical record has less to say about his intellectual ruminations than about those of his elite contemporaries. Nonetheless, his hand-written drafts, interviews, and correspondences with European agents offer a glimpse at the epistemology and sense of identity of an “average” Nigerian in the aftermath of colonialism and independence.

In 1950, Turing proposed to answer the question “can machines think” by staging an “imitation game” where a hidden computer attempts to mislead a human interrogator into believing it is human. While the cybercrime of bots defrauding people by posing as Nigerian princes and lascivious e-girls indicates humans have been losing the Turing test for some time, this paper focuses on “deepfakes,” artificial neural nets generating realistic audio-visual simulations of public figures, as a variation on the imitation game. Deepfakes blur the lines between fact and fiction, making it possible for the mere fiction of a nuclear apocalypse to make itself real. Seeing oneself becoming another, doing and saying strange things as if demonically possessed, triggers a disillusionment of our sense of self as human cloning and sinister doppelgängers become a reality that’s open-source and free. Along with electronic club music, illicit drugs, movies like Ex Machina and the coming sex robots, the primarily pornographic deepfakes are how the aliens invade by hijacking human drives in the pursuit of a machinic desire. Contrary to the popular impression that deepfakes exemplify the post-truth phenomenon of fake news, they mark an anarchic, massively distributed anti-fascist resistance network capable of sabotaging centralized, authoritarian institutions’ hegemonic narratives. That the only realistic “solutions” for detecting deepfakes have been to build better machines capable of exposing them ultimately suggests that human judgment is soon to be discarded into the dustbin of history. From now on, only a machine can win the Turing test against another machine. Author(s): Vincent Le Title (English): The Deepfakes to Come: A Turing Cop’s Nightmare Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 17, No. 2-3 (Winter 2020) Publisher: Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities - Skopje Page Range: 8-18 Page Count: 11 Citation (English): Vincent Le, “The Deepfakes to Come: A Turing Cop’s Nightmare,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 17, No. 2-3 (Winter 2020): 8-18. Author Biography Vincent Le, Monash University Vincent Le is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Monash University. He has taught philosophy at Deakin University and The Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy. He has published in Hypatia, Cosmos and History, Art + Australia, Šum, Horror Studies and Colloquy, among other journals. His recent work focuses on the reckless propagation of the will to critique.

Welcome to the White Man’s World By Chief Isaac O. Delano Author of Soul of Nigeria, An African Look at Marriage, One Church for Nigeria, Notes and Comments from Nigeria, The Singing Minister of Nigeria, Ìran Ọrun, Ìtàn Ogun Àdùb ̀ í, and Ìwé Atúmọ Yorùbá ̀ (Yoruba – Yoruba Dictionary) London: Tomas Nelson Ltd., 1953 Foreword I appreciate the kind of love with which you, my readers, embraced my previous books, whether those I wrote in the English language or in Yoruba. For the record, one important thing I would like to say right here is that all names, be it of towns or of people, that are used in this book are totally fictional. We had no one in mind when this story was being written. The story is purely fictional but based on our various experiences in the Yoruba society. Isaac O. Delano Bajiki Ake, Abeokuta London, 1953 Dedication Tis book is dedicated to Ẹgbẹ́Ọmọ Odùduwà (Te Society of Sons and Daughters of Oduduwa), which is frantically engaged in working relentlessly towards the progress of the Yoruba society.

There is an apparent paucity of literary works written by women in English from the northern vis-à-vis southern part of Nigeria in the corpus of the country’s literature. Adopting a mixed-method approach, this paper surveys availability or dearth of female writers in the northern region by focusing on the three north-eastern states of Borno, Yobe, and Gombe states. Quantitative and qualitative approaches, through questionnaires and interviews, and Consensus Workshop, through Focus Group Discussions (FGD), are administered to gather the data for the discussion. The paper found a dearth of women writers in the northeast region and concludes that readership, publication opportunities, level of education, and social choices of the medium of expression are among the factors responsible for the dearth. The paper also found a recurrent motif of love, family, and marriage as the thematic and stylistic complexities of the available female work of fiction that follow theSoyayya trend. Possible amenable measures, which include organizing competitions and book projects, are proffered as recommendations.

The object of this article is the English-language multicultural prose of the late XX – early XXI centuries. The subject is the situation of clash of cultures. The research material is based on individual short stories by the contemporary US-Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie published in the book “The Thing Around Your Neck” (2009). The goal of this article lies in determination and analysis of the peculiarities of artistic expression and functionality of the situation of clash of cultures in the writer’s short stories. The relevance is substantiated by the following factors: 1) clash of cultures is typical for the relationships in modern multipolar world during the globalization era, thus it is relevant in literary works of the authors of the XX–XXI centuries;  2) literary studies currently indicate heightened interest in covering various aspects of fictional multicultural prose; 3) Adichie is a remarkable figure in the modern literary process. The short stories by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie are unique in their reference to signal trends in the development of the English-language literature, and thus are a relevant in the context of studying the designated topic. Unlike the works of multicultural writers of the second half of the XX century, which have repeatedly been the object of scientific research, the multicultural prose of the late XX – early XXI centuries is poorly studied. The scientific novelty is defined by the fact that the analysis of short stories from the collection “The Thing Around Your Neck” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which is not translated into the Russian language, is carried out for the first time within the Russian literally studies. The conclusion is made that the situation of clash of cultures in Adichie’s stories becomes the factor that induces mental crisis in the minds of the characters. There is no constructive dialogue of cultures, and their clash leads the characters to either the loss or substitution of identity.

There is hardly a country in this industrialized world today, where one can find an ethnically homogenous population. The aftermath of colonialism, the creation of refugees- often the result of ethnic conflicts- and the movement of people in search of greater economic, political or social opportunities have contributed to the worldwide mix of people. Canada and India are the countries affected by the growing diversity. However this diversity has different facets in both the countries. In the literary world Canada, Multiculturalism is the main theme of writing and in India, presentation of cultural diversity is yet at the beginning stage. This statement has to be tasted on the fictional works of Margaret Atwood from Canada and Bharati Mukherjee from India. Both the writers are very unique in their writing and have trodden the different ways of using Cultural-diversity. Culture is an integral part of a human society and its nation. Then the question arises: what is culture? The Oxford English Dictionary defines culture as a “particular form or type of intellectual development in a society generated by its distinctive customs, achievements and outlook.” At the wide canvass, culture is taken as consolidating the way of life of an entire society and includes codes of manners, dress, language, rituals, social customs and folklore of a nation. Every country has a typical and distinctive culture of its own. However, when an independent country becomes a colony, the native culture goes under a change. This is the case with the countries like Kenya, Nigeria and India. When these countries came in contact with western culture, a process of change in culture was initiated, and this journey made the traditional culture of respective countries destroyed. While Indian literature had cross cultural encounters with the English studies, Canada has been undergoing a cultural metamorphosis with the mix of second races and people from all over the world.

The body of writing collectively referred to as third generation or contemporary Nigerian literature emerged on the international literary scene from about the year 2000. This writing is marked by attempts to negotiate contemporary identities, and it engages with various developments in the Nigerian nation: Nigeria’s past and current political and socio-economic state, different kinds of cultural hybridization as well as the writers increasing transnational awareness. This study argues that contemporary Nigerian fiction obsessively returns to the period from 1985-1998 as a historical site for narrating the individual and collective Nigerian experience of the trauma of military dictatorship, which has shaped the contemporary reality of the nation. The study builds on existing critical work on contemporary Nigerian fiction, in order to highlight patterns and ideas that have hitherto been neglected in scholarly work in this field. The study seeks to address this gap in the existing critical literature by examining third-generation Nigerian writing’s representation of this era in a select corpus of work spanning from 2000-06: Okey Ndibe’s Arrows of Rain (2000), Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel (2002), Sefi Atta’s Everything Good will Come (2005), and Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2006). The four novels chosen were written in response to military rule and dictatorship in the 80s and 90s, and they all feature representations of state violence. This study finds that, despite variations in the novels aesthetic modes, violence, control, silencing, dictatorship, alienation, the trauma of everyday life and resistance recur in realist modes. Above all, the study argues that contemporary Nigerian fiction’s insistent representation of the violent past of military rule in Nigeria is a means of navigating the complex psychological and political processes involved in dealing with post-colonial trauma by employing writing as a form of resistance.

Multicultural literature is a very important tool in today's classrooms because it enables teachers and students to learn about the practices, historical background for attitudes, norms and customs of other cultures and peoples.
Ph. D.

This thesis project examines the work of three female Nigerian authors: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sefi Atta and Chika Unigwe. They are part of a growing number of young African writers who are receiving international acclaim and challenging narratives that have long defined the continent in pejorative terms. They question what it means to be female and African in a transcultural, global world but counter discourses that are both restrictive and prescriptive. Their female characters are not imaged in binary terms as either victims or villains. For all three writers, the African story has to be told in its entirety incorporating what some may argue are negative stereotypes but doing so in a manner that examines and undermines those same stereotypes. For the purposes of the thesis, I focus on their first novels: Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, Atta’s Everything Good Will Come and Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street. Chapter One examines Purple Hibiscus and argues that the novel is much more than a coming of age story or, as some critics have posited, an allegory of the postcolonial state. Chapter Two highlights Atta’s use of fairly familiar feminist theories but grounds them in the lived realities of the African city. All three authors are concerned with issues of violence and death. Unigwe’s novel, which forms the focus of Chapter Three, offers a critical perspective on how both of those themes intersect with the increasing commercialisation of global culture. Her characters are female sex workers whose lives are irrevocably altered by the murder of one of their colleagues. I conclude by arguing that the three novels offer a nuanced if not necessarily new understanding of the various social, economic and political forces that continue to shape the lives of women on the continent.

The literatures emerging from the postcolonial world bring new dimensions of linguistic heterogeneity to English literature, opening up rich possibilities for the heteroglossia and interanimation of languages celebrated by Mikhail Bakhtin. Two case studies illustrate the “breaking” and remaking of the English language in postcolonial literatures. Pidgins, oral vernaculars born in the colonial contact zone and developed outside institutional channels, compel our interest as linguistic realizations of a subaltern hybridity and as the most markedly “broken” varieties of English. Within Nigerian literature, representations of pidgin English play a variety of transgressive roles. In two specimens of Onitsha market literature, pidgin is spoken only by clownish chiefs, but in one of these, Ogali A. Ogali's 1956 Veronica My Daughter, pidgin also functions as an anti-language providing a critical perspective on the “big grammar” of standard English. In Chinua Achebe's No Longer at Ease (1960) pidgin is often associated with the seamy underside of life, while in Wole Soyinka's The Interpreters (1965) it is the vehicle for a resistant counterknowledge. Finally, in Ken Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy (1985), “rotten English,” a mixed language strongly colored by pidgin, escapes the confines of quotation marks to become the language of narration. The second case study is of the work of Salman Rushdie, arguably the paradigmatic postcolonial author—a writer positioned between East and West, between the English language and the polylingualism of South Asia, and renowned for his inventive linguistic experimentation. Chapter 7 explores his short story “The Courter,” a story of linguistic and personal dislocation and transformation in which a mispronounced word brings about a new reality. Chapter 8 is an extended exploration of the languages in Midnight's Children and the translational magic of Saleem Sinai's “All-India Radio.” Chapter 9 examines ways in which Rushdie unsettles borders, redefining the boundaries of words and bringing languages into new relationships by means of such devices as the translingual pun. The concluding chapter briefly explores the implications of this postcolonial breaking of English for the novel and for the language of English literature.

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. Johannesburg 2017
This research report uses In Dependence by Sarah Ladipo Manyika to demonstrate that African romance fiction is not necessarily escapist fantasy. It does this by focusing on the exploration of gender, racism, national and cultural identity in the post-colonial era in this novel that uses the romance template. The close textual analysis that is at the core of this reading is guided by an eclectic theoretical framework made out of several notions, the most important of which are: Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s idea of fiction as a form of language; the understanding that gender and race are socially constructed and can thus be remade or unmade; cosmopolitanism, and particularly the variety known as Afropolitanism. The research report is divided into five chapters. Chapter I, the introductory chapter, plots what the research report is about, explains how the research that led to the writing of the report was carried out, and locates the report in its appropriate intellectual contexts. Chapter II engages with the formal characteristics of In Dependence. Evidence is assembled to support the argument that in In Dependence Manyika creatively enhances the popular romance in the process forging a “fiction language” that she uses to communicate significant social and political messages in a rhetorically powerful manner. Chapter III analyzes the manner in which Manyika uses an inter-racial heterosexual relationship in the novel to explore gender and racism. The key argument pursued in the chapter is that in In Dependence Manyika challenges racialized patriarchal ideologies and envisions a cosmopolitan world in which the genders interact in a humane and fair manner. Chapter IV demonstrates that the story of an interracial romantic relationship that is used to structure the novel problematizes cultural identities and their attendant prejudices such as sexism and racism, and ultimately raises cosmopolitanism as the solution to the problem of intercultural interaction. Chapter V is the Conclusion. The arguments and conclusions of the core chapters of the research report – Chapter II, Chapter III and Chapter IV – are rehashed here. Also stated in this final chapter are the reading’s general conclusions on the novel and its contribution to the romance genre in the broader context of African literature.
MT 2018

This dissertation explores questions of African literature and international law through the lens of the Nigeria-Biafra war (1967-1970). A defining trauma of modern Nigerian history, the war produced a rich and sustained vein of writing that stretches from the late 1960s through the present day, encompassing canonical Nigerian novels as well as a number of British and diasporic texts. Drawing on both literary and legal theory, I argue that this body of work mobilizes particular literary features—including narrative, analogy, allegory, and genre—to articulate both familiar and innovative logics of sovereignty. The structure of the project is primarily conceptual and loosely chronological. The first half explores narratives of development in relation to international law’s standard of civilization, focusing on British colonial writing (Chapter 1) and postwar allegorical novels (Chapter 2). The second half attends to how narrative fiction formally registers mid-20th century developments in international law, focusing on writers' use of analogy as a mode of theorizing genocide (Chapter 3) and the role of genre fiction in imagining economic sovereignty (Chapter 4). Throughout, I show how novelists pick up and transform literary tropes first articulated in wartime journalism, propaganda, and activist pamphlets.

Abstract Literature In English is an increasingly international, even global, phenomenon. Writers all over the world, from the Pacific, Asia, Africa, and the West Indies as well as from the traditional centers in the British Isles and the United States, use English as a medium for fiction and poetry. One consequence has been that literature in English has become increasingly cross- or multicultural, as writing about a given culture is destined-because of its language, English, and its place of publication, usually London or New York-to have readers of many other cultures. This is not simply a matter of readers in the traditional centers of the English language struggling to understand work rooted in other cultural traditions; a Kenyan reader of a Nigerian or Guyanese or Indian novel is caught up in the same multicultural dynamic as an American reader of that novel.