scholarly journals Gender and the politics of war historiography in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra

2021 ◽  
pp. 002198942110318
Author(s):  
Sarah Jilani
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Narrative Approach ◽  
Gendered Politics ◽  
History Of ◽  
War Experiences ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Nigerian Civil War ◽  
Gendered Expectations ◽  
Female Perspective

Buchi Emecheta’s novel about the Nigerian Civil War, Destination Biafra (1982), challenges war historiography in ways that scholarship designating it a “female perspective” on the conflict can sometimes overlook. This article focuses on how Emecheta deploys a dual narrative approach that weaves an omniscient narrator with diverse Nigerian women’s points of view in order to position their lived experiences and subjective knowledges as collectively amounting to the definitive history of the Civil War. This draws the reader’s attention to the gendered effects of the civil war as the lens whereby which all facets of the war can be understood - even and especially its macro causes in neocolonialism and petrocapitalism. By writing women who know the economic imperatives behind the conflict; exercise agency under dangerous circumstances; and employ methods of survival that safeguard others, Emecheta reveals the gendered politics of war historiography, and tests these politics by collapsing distinctions between what is habitually conceived of as the war front (and therefore to be narrated by active combatants), and everywhere else (to be narrated by witnesses, refugees, or survivors). Destination can therefore be understood as an attempt to intervene directly in historiographical method, as it rejects the designation of women’s war experiences as mere addenda and questions gendered expectations of where to look for and find historical truths.

The Spanish Civil War: New Approaches and Historiographic Perspectives

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 264-267
Author(s):  
Eduardo González Calleja
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Military History ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
Cultural Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
War Experiences ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

The bibliography on the Spanish Civil War is almost unattainable, but the matter continues to elicit such interest that it remains open to new historiographic trends. For example, the ‘classic’ military history of the conflict, cultivated prominently in recent years by Gabriel Cardona, Jorge Martínez Reverte and Anthony Beevor, does not renounce the microhistory or cultural perspective. These constitute the theoretical framework of the New Military History and its corollary the New Combat History, which combine philological, anthropological, psychological and historiographical perspectives to various degrees. In the specific field of the war experiences pioneered by George L. Mosse, the concepts of brutalisation, barbarisation and demodernisation of military operations, coined by Omer Bartov to describe the particularities of the Eastern campaign during the Second World War, are being used by Spanish historians dedicated to the study of the violence and atrocities of the civil war and post-war. Focusing on the field of political history, government management or diplomacy has been studied almost exhaustively, but this is not the case for the principal phenomenon of political violence in the 1930s in Europe, namely paramilitarisation. It is surprising that the latest studies on the issue at the European level (Robert Gerwarth, John Horne, Chris Millington and Kevin Passmore) do not include any essays on the enormous incidence of paramilitary violence in Spain before, during and after the civil war.

Metaphors for Nation and War in Chinua Achebe's Memoir

2016 ◽  
pp. 199-219
Author(s):  
Onwu Inya
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Ethnic Politics ◽  
Personal History ◽  
Conceptual Blending ◽  
Conceptual Metaphor Theory ◽  
Dysfunctional Family ◽  
Metaphor Theory ◽  
Democratic Experience ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nigerian Civil War

Chinua Achebe's memoir, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, caused quite a stir in the Nigerian polity when it was published in 2012. This chapter, therefore, examined the metaphors used by the author to construe the concepts of nation and the (Nigerian civil) war in the memoir. Theoretical insights were drawn from Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Primary metaphor theory and Conceptual blending theory to analyze the metaphors identified. Two central metaphors were used by the author to construe the concept of nation, namely, the DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY and the SCAPEGOAT metaphors. Metaphors for war included WAR AS NIGHTMARE, AS A TRIANGLE GAME, and AS A SERIES OF VIOLENT CRIMES respectively. The metaphor system highlighted in this chapter indicates that bad governance, corruption and ethnic politics were critical to the failure of Nigeria's first democratic experience (1960-1966) and the resultant civil war of 1967-1970.

scholarly journals Divergent Struggles for Identity and Safeguarding Human Values: A Postcolonial Analysis of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 60
Author(s):  
Aisha Mustapha Muhammad
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Human Values ◽  
Young Generation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nigerian Civil War

In the novel Adichie uncovers the characters’ struggles based on the loss of Identity and Human values which is basically the result of the Nigerian civil war. The characters strive to bring back what they lost due to the war. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born much later after the Nigerian civil war of 1966-1969. Chimamanda Adichie had the interest to revive history of the war; she used her imaginative talent in bringing what she hadn’t experienced. The novel Half of a Yellow Sun is a literary work which uses the theory of post-colonialism or post-colonial studies, it is a term that is used to analyze and explain the legacy of colonialism through the study of a particular book. Colonialism did not happen during the colonial era only but extended to after independence of the countries that were colonized. The novel Half of a Yellow Sun shows the effect of colonialism after independence of Nigeria. Adichie believes that by bringing back the issue of the war, the growing generation would understand more about the war. According to her in Nigeria the history taught in the primary and secondary schools is not complete, some parts were removed and nobody is allowed to talk about it. So through the novel, she tries to go through history to see what has happened, so that she can make the young generation understand history better. The book opens with a poem by Chinua Achebe about the Nigerian civil war.

A History of the Ozarks, Volume 1

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brooks Blevins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil War ◽  
North American ◽  
Regional Variation ◽  
Narrative Approach ◽  
Mississippi Valley ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Upland South ◽  
States History

A History of the Ozarks, Vol. I: The Old Ozarks is the first book-length account of life in the Ozark region of Missouri, Arkansas, and Oklahoma in the era before the Civil War. Placing the region’s story within the context of North American and United States history, The Old Ozarks follows the human story in the Middle American highlands from prehistoric times until the eve of the Civil War. Along the way it chronicles the rise and fall of the powerful Osages, the settlement of the French in the Mississippi Valley and the flood of Anglo-Americans on the frontier, the resettlement of immigrant Indians from the East, and the development of antebellum society in the diverse terrain of the Ozark uplift. Above all The Old Ozarks follows a narrative approach that focuses on the people whose activities and ambitions brought life to the region, from the Shawnee Quatawapea to Moses Austin, and in turn brings life to many long-forgotten individuals and the lifeways that they brought with them from Tennessee, Kentucky, and other parts of the Upland South. The storyline that flows throughout The Old Ozarks underscores not a region of isolated backwoodsmen but a regional variation of the American story.

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