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2022 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jianlan Wen ◽  
Yuming Piao

African literature has played a major role in changing and shaping perceptions about African people and their way of life for the longest time. Unlike western cultures that are associated with advanced forms of writing, African literature is oral in nature, meaning it has to be recited and even performed. Although Africa has an old tribal culture, African philosophy is a new and strange idea among us. Although the problem of “universality” of African philosophy actually refers to the question of whether Africa has heckling of philosophy in the Western sense, obviously, the philosophy bred by Africa’s native culture must be acknowledged. Therefore, the human–computer interaction-oriented (HCI-oriented) method is proposed to appreciate African literature and African philosophy. To begin with, a physical object of tablet-aid is designed, and a depth camera is used to track the user’s hand and tablet-aid and then map them to the virtual scene, respectively. Then, a tactile redirection method is proposed to meet the user’s requirement of tactile consistency in head-mounted display virtual reality environment. Finally, electroencephalogram (EEG) emotion recognition, based on multiscale convolution kernel convolutional neural networks, is proposed to appreciate the reflection of African philosophy in African literature. The experimental results show that the proposed method has a strong immersion and a good interactive experience in navigation, selection, and manipulation. The proposed HCI method is not only easy to use, but also improves the interaction efficiency and accuracy during appreciation. In addition, the simulation of EEG emotion recognition reveals that the accuracy of emotion classification in 33-channel is 90.63%, almost close to the accuracy of the whole channel, and the proposed algorithm outperforms three baselines with respect to classification accuracy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (58) ◽  
pp. 601-616
Author(s):  
Maria Izabel De Jesus Silva ◽  
Maria do Socorro Cordeiro de Sousa

Resumo: Esta pesquisa tem como objetivo analisar como a Literatura africana de língua portuguesa se apresenta na coleção Português Contemporâneo diálogo, reflexão e uso, ensino médio dos autores Cereja; Viena; Damien (2016), adotada pela Escola de Referência Anisio Veras, da cidade de Verdejante-PE. A pesquisa está fundamentada em estudos que abordam a Literatura africana e seu contexto de ensino em livros didáticos no ensino médio, como podemos destacar em Brasil (2008); Abdala Júnior (2006), Souza (2006), Machado (2010) Silva (2003), Sidrim (2019), Lopes (2010), Chaves (2006), Honwana (2006), Fonseca; Moreira (2017), Ferreira (1987), dentre outros. A metodologia utilizada na pesquisa foi de natureza qualitativa, do tipo documental e método dedutivo, Fachin (2006), Prodanov; Freitas (2013) e Cardano (2017). Os resultados indicam que o ensino da literatura africana na coleção analisada é pouco explorado, uma vez que no volume I quase não encontramos nenhum conteúdo; no volume II apenas uma citação por conta de uma entrevista realizada com o cantor Emicida acerca do racismo e, no volume III nos deparamos com apenas um capítulo que apresenta uma pequena discussão de textos e autores. Dessa forma, vemos que os livros didáticos não contemplam em sua totalidade os estudos voltados para as literaturas africanas. --- This research aims to analyze how Portuguese-speaking African Literature is presented in the Contemporary Portuguese collection dialogue, reflection and use, secondary education by the authors Cereja; Vienna; Damien (2016), adopted by the Anisio Veras Reference School, in the city of Verdejante-PE. The research is based on studies that address African Literature and its context of teaching in textbooks in high school, as we can highlight in Brazil (2008); Abdala Júnior (2006), Souza (2006), Machado (2010) Silva (2003), Sidrim (2019), Lopes (2010), Chaves (2006), Honwana (2006), Fonseca; Moreira (2017), Ferreira (1987), among others. The methodology used in the research was qualitative, documental and deductive method, Fachin (2006), Prodanov; Freitas (2013) and Cardano (2017). The results indicate that the teaching of African literature in the analyzed collection is little explored, since in volume I we hardly found any content; in volume II there is only a quote due to an interview carried out with the singer Emicida about racism and in volume III we are faced with only one chapter that presents a small discussion of texts and authors. In this way, we see that textbooks do not fully include studies aimed at African literatures.  


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Kọ́lá Abímbọ́lá

Are there universal principles, categories, or forms of reasoning that apply to all aspects of human experience—irrespective of culture and epoch? Numerous scholars have explored this very question from Africana perspectives: Kwasi Wiredu (1996) explored the philosophical issue of whether there are culturally defined values and concepts; Hallen and Sodipo (1986) examined the question of whether there are unique African indigenous systems of knowledge; Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1994) evaluated the role of colonialism in the language of African literature; Oyerò nkẹ ́ ́ Oyěwumi (1997) argued that “gender” is a Western cultural invention that is foreign to Yorùbá systems of sociation; and Helen Veran (2001) argued that even though science, mathematics, and logic are not culturally relative, “certainty” is nonetheless derived from cultural practices and associations. Building on these and other works, this essay argues that: (i) incommensurability of “worldviews,” “perspectives,” “paradigms,” or “conceptual schemes” springs from deeper, more fundamental cognitive categories of logic that are coded into natural languages; and that (ii) consequently, as long as African reflective reasoning is expressed solely (or predominantly) in European languages, the authenticity of the “African” in African philosophy is questionable.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Oyekan Owomoyela

African proverbs have, for good reason, attracted considerable attention from scholars, both African and non-African. One notable testimony to such attention is the international conference in South Africa from which came a monumental collection of scholarly articles now available on CD and in print. Another evidence of the interest the subject has enjoyed among African scholars is the wealth of publications they have produced in recent years, for example, Adeleke Adeeko’s monograph Proverbs, Textuality, and Nativism in African Literature; Ambrose Adikamkwu Monye’s Proverbs in African Orature: The Aniocha-Igbo Experience; Kwesi Yankah’s The Proverb in the Context of Akan Rhetoric: A Theory of Proverb Praxis; and my Yoruba Proverbs. In addition, there have been influential articles by Ayo Bamgbose, Lawrence. A. Boadi, Romanus N. Egudu, Kwame Gyekye, Yisa Yusuf, and a host of others whose omission from this rather abbreviated list is not meant as a slight. In a recent conversation, the preeminent paremiologist, Wolfgang Mieder, called my attention to the lineup of articles in the most recent issue of Proverbium [23: 2006], in which four of the five lead articles are by Nigerian scholars (Abimbola Adesoji, Bode Agbaje, George Olusola Ajibade, and Akinola Akintunde Asinyanbola) and on African proverbs, an indication, he said of the present effervescence of, and future potential for, proverb studies and publications on them on African soil. Because of these efforts we now know a good deal about proverbs as a cultural resource, their functionality and the protocols for their usage, but also their artistry-structure, wordplay, imagery, and so forth, especially after calls such as Isidore Okpewho’s (1992) that scholars pay due attention to the aesthetic dimensions of traditional oral forms.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Sola Owonibi

Introduction Ideology underscores how we make sense of history and reality. It is the underlying theory that governs every organized movement, institution, and government. In Politics, ideology superintends the constructs, subversions, moderations, and resistance of power. In Literature, ideology plays even a deluxe role as it is the vehicle that drives political and cultural purposes. A close consideration of the African creative canvass reveals that her imaginative writings are burdened with the ideology of socio-cultural redemption. Although replete with a recasting of themes that stress the subversions and resistance of political and religious power, especially in the continent’s post-colonial space, there is not much thematic commitment among creative writers to the ideology that constructs and moderates power. Using the New Historicism as the theoretical basis, this paper proposes that to understand the logic that has bedeviled post-colonial African governance, there is need to revisit power structures that characterize the continent’s pre-colonial history. It is in this burden that this paper shall attempt to examine the dialectics of political ideology, power relations and the prophetic in Baṣọrun Gáà ̀. The paper also argues that the private anxieties of the playwright, as presented in the play, 160 Lere Adeyemi are prophetic in nature and that Baṣọrun Gáà is weakened by the burdens of ̀ his strength, in other words, blinded by sight.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicia Ohwovoriole

The reflective disclosure of the past is a major trend in African literature as indicated in writers like Wale Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and Ngugi Wa Thi­ong'o. Personal memory is also often employed aesthetically to mirror what is embedded in the past. Toyin Faiola the author of A Mouth Sweeter than Salt and Counting the Tiger's Teeth presents his childhood and teenage years, fam­ily history and the social and historical events of Ibadan, Ilorin and Ile-Ife, Nigeria. He also details his personal experiences as a witness to the Agbekoya rebellion of 1968-70. In presenting actions in the two self-narratives, Toyin Faiola exploits the resources of indigenous and contemporary African songs, incantatory chants and transliterated version of many lyrics. He uses the lyrics to also investigate the symbolic meaning of words used in the past and reiter­ates the prevalence of songs in Yoruba culture. The lyrics link together many themes as well as serving as an avenue for community and individual expres­sion. We have memorial songs, songs of rebellion, songs of sexuality and sa­tirical songs which mock teachers, the police and government officials. Faiola presents an inseparable relationship of mutual exchange between the oral and written traditions. However, our point of emphasis is to evaluate the context and usage of the lyrics and panegyrics in the two texts.


Author(s):  
Klohinlwélé Kone

Illness is no new subject in the history of african literature. It has fecunded the narratives of many generations. As a true metaphor of the state of the culture and society presented in the narrative, illness has become the symptom of a society that is sick of the corruption of its own cultural norms and values. In such a context, illness is metaphorized as an outlet for the patients to express their rejection of the prevailing social norms. Healing will consist in becoming aware of such a state of affairs and finding by oneself the ressources of one’s healing process with the help of the eponymous healers. Frantz fanon’s psychological findings of the link between society’s malfunctionning and its consequences on the individual’s mental state will be used to conduct that study. These theories will reveal the underlying social determinants of health condition.


Afrika Focus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 262-282
Author(s):  
Enajite Eseoghene Ojaruega

Abstract Death and the King’s Horseman, published in 1975, is undoubtedly Wole Soyinka’s most acclaimed play. When awarding the playwright the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 1986, the Committee specifically cited it as a “drama of existence”. Many literary critics have written about the play from multifarious perspectives. However, the dramatic text is still open to multidimensional interpretations that can further illuminate the rich texture of this canonical work. My study contextualises this dramatic masterpiece as yielding to a form of critical inquiry that makes it cohere with definitions of various literary traditions. It can be interrogated as Yoruba/Nigerian national literature, African literature, postcolonial literature, and world literature. It is, therefore, in this effort to use many approaches to see the play as a holistic text that I have chosen to interrogate it as “one text, many literary traditions”.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (5) ◽  
pp. 12-27
Author(s):  
Ayodele Adebayo Allagbé ◽  
Yacoubou Alou ◽  
Ibrahim Sanusi Chinade

This paper examines the tropes of (sexually) objectified or/and oppressed men in selected contemporary African prose works. Drawing on Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth, FCDA) for theoretical underpinnings, Systemic Functional Linguistics (henceforth, SFL) for grammatical tools and the qualitative research method, this study seeks to analyze how contemporary feminist writers like Amma Darko, Daniel Mengara, and Lola Shoneyin employ language in their fictional texts The Housemaid (1998), Mema (2003) and The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives (2015) respectively to represent the phenomenon of (sexually) objectified or/and oppressed male characters. This article cogently argues that the tropes of (sexually) objectified or/and oppressed men, as enacted in the aforementioned prose works, encode a form of gendered experience which irrefutably has a given recondite function or meaning which only a critical linguistic analysis of the writers’ language can uncover. The findings reveal that the three authors intentionally use language to depict their male personae as (sexually) objectified or/and oppressed individuals with a view to challenging the established social order in social life and establishing a certain balance in the representation of gender or/and power relations in African literature.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (II) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sadia Ghaznavi

South African metafictive literature by white writers, specifically J. M. Coetzee (Nobel laureate, 2003), is essentially pivoted on the black-white dialectics of discourse. The narrative is informed with a variety of sociopolitical inflections that pronounce in various ways the contemporary ideology in South African literature. Critics have greatly delineated the racio-political quagmire of the colonial subject in metafictive literature appearing in the last few decades of twentieth century. However, a deeper analysis of the representation of the colonial subject that interrogates the discourses in narrative is still untapped. J.M.Coetzee’s South African-based novels, mainly Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Life and Times of Michael K (1983) and Age of Iron (1990), manifest a metafictional consciousness that investigates the constructs of reality of the colonial subject. It is significant to explore the logocentric premise in the representation of colonial subject and how this contributes to the meaning of the fictional word. This study is a narratological research of Coetzee’s technique of transmodalization (narrative mode shifts) between two types of discourses, the pedagogical and performative, and employs Homi K Bhabha’s (1994) theoretical framework of representative discourse. In examining the narrative mode shifts between frame breaks, metanarrative, narrative of words, narrative of dreams, and narrative of topography, this research argues that a non-position is generated between the contesting discourses. This research becomes a model for the study of colonial dynamics in metafictive white writing. It aims to unravel the elements integral in voicing the conditionality of the colonized subject and the contention of representation. This study also explores the metonymical relationships in narrative that reflect intrinsic aspects of the signification of representation.


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