Transculturalism, Otherness, Exile, and Identity in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

Matatu ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 386-399
Author(s):  
Augustine Uka Nwanyanwu
Keyword(s):  
African Literature ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Century ◽  
Global Cities ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
National Cultures ◽  
Accurate Representation ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
African Writers

Abstract Today African literature exhibits and incorporates the decentred realities of African writers themselves as they negotiate and engage with multifarious forms of diaspora experience, dislocation, otherness, displacement, identity, and exile. National cultures in the twenty-first century have undergone significant decentralization. New African writing is now generated in and outside Africa by writers who themselves are products of transcultural forms and must now interrogate existence in global cities, transnational cultures, and the challenges of immigrants in these cities. Very few novels explore the theme of otherness and identity with as much insight as Adichie’s Americanah. The novel brings together opposing cultural forms, at once transcending and celebrating the local, and exploring spaces for the self where identity and otherness can be viewed and clarified. This article endeavours to show how African emigrants seek to affirm, manipulate, and define identity, reclaiming a space for self where migrant culture is marginalized. Adichie’s exemplary focus on transcultural engagement in Americanah provides an accurate representation of present-day African literary production in its dialectical dance between national and international particularities.

scholarly journals When Earth Matters: Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 448-455
Author(s):  
Gerd Bayer
Keyword(s):  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Conflict ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Agricultural Revolution ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Cultural Forms ◽  
Twenty First Century

Abstract This essay discusses Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather from an ecocritical perspective, asking how her late 1960s’ novel already anticipated some of the politics of early twenty-first-century environmental thinking in the postcolonial sphere. The alliance of various marginalized characters who, one way or another, violate against existing hegemonic structures replaces the ideological and cultural conflict over territory, which derived directly from the colonialist past, with an agricultural revolution that aims to empower those who most closely resemble the subaltern classes variously theorized in postcolonial theory. This re-turn to the physical or even Real, to the materiality of the earth, opens up an alternative to the cultural essentialism that, from its beginning, created numerous stumbling stones on the path towards decolonization. Through its turn towards farming and the land and away from cultural forms of hegemony, the novel emphasizes the materiality of reality.

scholarly journals Literary production in Niger: The case of the novel

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aïssata S. Kindo Patengouh
Keyword(s):  
Collective Identity ◽  
Fundamental Problem ◽  
African Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Rural Space ◽  
Cultural Milieu ◽  
Nature Literature

Literature, like all art, is in part geographically and historically determined. Despite its imaginary nature, literature maintains close ties with its context of emergence. African literature is in part an illustration of determinisms of this type and owes a great deal to colonial trauma. Nevertheless, it also draws on autochthonous myths – both old and new – on the colonial heritage, and on new mentalities generated by decolonisation and other factors. However, certain political and ideological choices visible in literary texts underline national specificities. My intention, as a citizen of Niger, is to contribute to bringing Nigérien literature, and the Nigérien novel, in particular, into the limelight. In fact, this production is only just emerging, as the first novel dates back to 1959. This paper focuses on the fundamental problem of the relation between the novel produced in Niger and the Nigérien society, and by extension, the relation between Nigérien literature and the society from which it is emerging. Based on a thematic study, in the spirit of socio-criticism, an attempt will be made to place a selected corpus of eleven novels, published between 1977 and 1993, in their context of emergence. The geographical (spatial and climatic) milieu is omnipresent and dominant in these works; focus on a traditional socio-cultural milieu is recurrent and is still of current importance, while the modern socio-cultural milieu is determinant but not quite as dominant as rural space. These are some of the basic elements composing the backdrop of Nigérien novelistic creation. They suggest aspects of a collective identity. Nonetheless these are not, in themselves, sufficient grounds on which to identify a specific literary production.

An Intellectual History of African Literary Studies?

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 296-306
Author(s):  
Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
African Literature ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
Global Age ◽  
Global Condition ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century

AbstractTwenty-first-century African literary production has generated a number of conundrums for scholars invested in African literary studies as one recognizable field of study. Some of these conundrums drive Tejumola Olaniyan’s declaration of a post-global condition in African literary studies in “African Literature in the Post-Global Age.” Understanding that essay demands a detour through an intellectual history of African literary studies from about 1990 to 2010.

Le roman des détritus

Matatu ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 241-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrice Nganang
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
African Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Future ◽  
African Writers ◽  
The Village ◽  
The City

For the last ten years, new and very exciting writers have been emerging in the landscape of African literature. Their books are redefining the boundaries of the novel, opening it up to the tumult of the present and to the new potentialities of the future. This essay looks at one particular type of fiction that can lay claim to a more important status among the novels published by African writers in the course of the decade – the novel of detritus. This is a particular form of novel that opens itself to the marvels of the city, as opposed to the village, and at the same time addresses the rampant destruction which, in the form of numerous civil wars, has established itself as an indisputable paradigm of contemporary Africa.

The Representation of Women in Kenneth Bhengu’s Novel Ukadebona: Iqhawe leNkosi

Imbizo ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mlungisi Phakathi
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
African Literature ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The Novel ◽  
African Society ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
South African Literature ◽  
Biographical Account ◽  
African Writers ◽  
The One

This article analyses the representation of women in the novel Ukadebona: Iqhawe leNkosi (Kadebona: The King’s Hero) by Kenneth Bhengu. The novel was written in 1958 at the height of apartheid and is set in an African society in the post-Impi yaseSandlwana era (post-Battle of Isandlwana era). The story is a biographical account by the protagonist, Kadebona, of his heroics and how fate thrust him into situations of both danger and opportunity. In analysing the novel both discourse analysis and thematic analysis are used.  This article argues that women’s representation in the novel is ambivalent in that the author highlights both positive and negative characteristics of women. On the one hand, the author holds stereotypes about women such as those of other African writers, for example that they are weak, too sensitive, vulnerable and helpless. On the other hand, the author also represents women as deserving of love, as steadfast and as beings who must be protected from violence. The implication of these findings is that in Ukadebona: Iqhawe leNkosi women are not represented as equal to men. This differs from the current discourse of rights which advocates the equality of women and men. Also, the analysis is important because it highlights the literary work of Kenneth Bhengu whose literary contributions are largely unrecognised in South African literature.

Minorities in the Contemporary Egyptian Novel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Youssef
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Robust Analysis ◽  
Specific Approach ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Context Specific ◽  
Historical Moment

This book examines questions of identity, nationalism, and marginalization in the contemporary Egyptian novel from a postcolonial lens. Under colonial rule, the Egyptian novel invoked a sovereign nation-state by basking in its perceived unity. After independence, the novel professed disenchantment with state practices and unequal class and gender relations, without disrupting the nation’s imagined racial and ethno-religious homogeneity. This book identifies a trend in the twenty-first-century Egyptian novel that shatters this singular view, with the rise of a new consciousness that presents Egypt as fundamentally heterogeneous. Through a robust analysis of “new-consciousness” novels by authors like Idris ᶜAli, Bahaᵓ Tahir, Miral al-Tahawi, and Yusuf Zaydan, the author argues that this new consciousness does not only respond to predominant discourses of difference and practices of differentiation along the axes of race, ethno-religion, class, and gender by bringing the experiences of Nubian, Amazigh, Bedouin, Coptic, Jewish, and women minorities to the fore of Egypt’s literary imaginary, but also heralds the cacophony of voices that collectively cried for social justice from Tahrir Square in Egypt’s 2011-uprising. This study responds to the changing iconographic, semiotic, and formal features of the Egyptian novel. It fulfills the critical task of identifying an emergent novelistic genre and develops historically reflexive methodologies that interpret new-consciousness novels and their mediatory role in formalizing and articulating their historical moment. By adopting this context-specific approach to studying novelistic evolution, this book locates some of the strands that have been missing from the complex whole of Egypt’s culture and literary history.

Persuasion: Fellow Creatures

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pam Morris
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Narrative Perspective ◽  
Class Hierarchies ◽  
A Chain ◽  
Porous Boundaries

Persuasion overtly foregrounds the self as embodied: physical accidents and sickness are recurrent. Sir Walter Eliot’s belief in the time-defying bodily grace of nobility is subject to Austen’s harshest irony. The transition from vertically ordered place to horizontal space in Persuasion is more extreme than in any other of the completed novels. Anne Elliot’s movement from social exclusiveness to socially inclusive possibility allows Austen to challenge gender and class hierarchies traditionally held to be inborn. Her writerly experimentation expands the possibilities of narrative perspective to encompass the porous boundaries of the physical, the emotional and the rational that constitute any moment of consciousness. Her focalisation techniques in the text look directly towards Woolf’s stylist innovations. A chain of references to guns and shooting gathers into the novel contentious contemporary discursive networks on class relations, notions of masculinity and the nature of creaturely life.

Identifying Ethics: Dysfunction as Representation of Societal Relationship in Ian McEwans’s Sweet Tooth

Think India ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
A. Yacob ◽  
S. Veeramani
Keyword(s):  
Code Of Conduct ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Code ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
Research Article ◽  
Ian Mcewan

In the novel, Sweet Tooth, McEwan has employed an ethical code of conduct called, Dysfunction of Relationship. The analysis shows that he tries to convey something extraordinary to the readers. If it is not even the reader to understand such a typical thing, He himself represents a new ethical code of conduct. The character of the novel, Serena is almost a person who is tuned to such a distinct one. It is clear that the character of this type is purely representational. Understanding reality based on situation and ethics has been a new field of study in terms of Post- Theory. Intervening to such aspect of Interpretation, this research article establishes a new study in the writings of Ian McEwan. In the novel, Dysfunction is not on the ‘Self’ but it is on the ‘Other’. The author tries to integrate the function of the Character Serena, instead of fragmenting the self. Hence, Fragmentation makes sense only in the dysfunction of relationship.

Le premier moment de l’art dans À la recherche du temps perdu de Marcel Proust – une « leçon d’idéalisme » ?

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-40
Author(s):  
Larisa Botnari
Keyword(s):  
Essential Role ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
The Self ◽  
Philosophy Of Art ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Philosophical Interpretation ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
Lost Time ◽  
Aesthetic Thinking

Although very famous, some key moments of the novel In Search of Lost Time, such as those of the madeleine or the uneven pavement, often remain enigmatic for the reader. Our article attempts to formulate a possible philosophical interpretation of the narrator's experiences during these scenes, through a confrontation of the Proustian text with the ideas found in the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) of the German philosopher F. W. J. Schelling. We thus try to highlight the essential role of the self in Marcel Proust's aesthetic thinking, by showing that the mysterious happiness felt by the narrator, and from which the project of creating a work of art is ultimately born, is similar to the experiences of pure self-consciousness evoked and analyzed by Schellingian philosophy of art.

The Art itself is Nature

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Morton
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Broad Category

The chapter outlines different models of nature in medieval Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy in order to show how the Rose plays them against each other to articulate its own model of the complex relationship between art and nature. For the Rose there is no getting at nature except by means of art, as suggested by the self-conscious artificiality of the figure of Nature, taken from the allegories of twelfth-century Neoplatonism. Art, a broad category that encompasses all human activity, is insufficient in describing nature’s truths and is potentially sophistic in its lies. However, questions of nature are always questions of art on whose help humans depend to understand and to represent to themselves a nature that can never be fully known. Finally, the model of reproductive nature is used to legitimate the reproduction of texts and the continuation of arts that is literary production.

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