The Loss of the Native Language and Post-Imperial Narratives

This article addresses the issue of language in colonial and post-colonial contexts and its role in delineating authentic features of national identity. The first part tackles African and Irish theorists such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Douglas Hyde whose views of clinging to the native tongue promote the politics of an essentialist identity. According to them, the loss of the native language brings about feelings of inferiority and estrangement which serve only to empower the colonizer. The article, then, proceeds to more tolerant writers who believe in the colonizer’s share in the making of the present of the colonized and favor hybrid identities. For them, it is impossible to reduce the polyvocality of the moment into the too-familiar, too-reassuring fictions of the old days. Finally, this work focuses on the Irish context through Yeats and Joyce who radically transform the idea of the nation theorizing for style as an agent of redemption from colonial artistic and political confines. Their cosmopolitan techniques allow the breakthrough of a new context, a post-imperial writing. The loss of the native language, therefore, opens alternative artistic paths to experiment with the language of the colonizer fostering a modern, cosmopolitan and continuously changing “national” identity. Keywords: National identity, native language, essentialist, hybrid, experimentation, post-imperial

Decolonize Practical Criticism?

This article reflects on what it might mean to decolonize practical criticism in the current moment by considering previous responses to the same imperative. It discusses critical and institutional interventions by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Mervyn Morris, Chidi Amuta, and, more recently, Harry Garuba and Benge Okot. In this way, the article demonstrates that the antidote to colonial paradigms of literary criticism has not been a pedagogy that prioritizes context over text but a critical practice oriented to a work’s formal and technical context of intelligibility. Such a practice demands that readers inhabit the literary constraints and possibilities encountered by postcolonial or otherwise peripheral writers.

HISTÓRIA, POLÍTICA E SOCIEDADE: UMA ANÁLISE TEMÁTICA DAS LITERATURAS AFRICANAS PÓS-COLONIAIS

Este artigo analisa um conjunto de obras representativas das literaturas africanas pós-coloniais, a partir de recortes temáticos que transitam entre a história e a política das sociedades africanas. O trabalho apresenta uma série de leituras críticas sobre as obras O melhor tempo é o presente (2014) de Nadine Gordimer, Um Grão de Trigo (2015) de Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, O Planalto e a Estepe (2009) de Pepetela e Elizabeth Costello (2004) de J. M. Coetzee, a fim de apontar os grandes temas dessas literaturas, com destaque à questão colonial e seus desdobramentos no presente, a história política das nações africanas e a discriminação racial, como elementos fundamentais para se compreender o universo literário africano.

El peso de la identidad nacional: lengua, nación y tradición de los escritores translingües

En un tiempo en que la globalización pone en cuestión las categorías nacionales de la tradición literaria, la decisión de ciertos escritores de cambiar de lengua para escribir cobra especial importancia. Este trabajo estudia los casos de Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1938), keniano que abandona el inglés para escribir en gîkûyû; Juan Rodolfo Wilcock (1919-1978), argentino que renuncia al español y escribe en italiano; y Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), polaco que escribe en inglés sobre África; interroga las transacciones del pasaje a una lengua otra y analiza la constitución de sus obras en «zonas de contacto» entre culturas.

Soro-Soke Polemic & the contemporary African Female Revolutionary Trend: An Ngugian Perspective

A video revealing the assault of two men who were pulled out of a hotel and the execution of one of them by the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) became viral on October 4, 2020 spurring random protests across Nigeria. The protests which began as pockets of pickets snowballed into crowded rallies in the major cities comprising mainly, the youth shortly after the outbreak of a virtual protest with the hashtag #EndSARS littering the social media, and eventually, the print media, and banners. Christened, Soro-Soke, these protests can be linked with a certain history - the actuality of the #EndSARS protests against police brutality by Nigerians must have been predicted three decades ago by Ngugi wa Thiong’o whose late fictions prophesy palpable female intolerance of government ineptitude and a growing female revolutionary tendency in Africa; a fervor which is spread from Kenya through the entire continent. Ngugi’s present affinity to strong female characters can be regarded as archetypal of his late fictions and nonfictions published from the 1980s. Matigari, Wizard of the Crow and Devil on Cross will be interrogated as predictions of the #EndSARS protests from an Ngugian perspective, while Ngugi’s strongest nonfiction heroine, Me Katilili in his 2018 nonfiction, Wrestling with the Devil: A Prison Memoir will be synchronically analyzed alongside his imaginary heroines. Cultural Ecofeminism and Jungian Theory of archetypes interrogate the roles assigned by nature to Ngugi’s most outstanding women in his late fictions, as part of a collective unconscious which is urgently typical of mankind.

Women’s Virtue: Engendering Shame

A focus on shame and the feminine, considering how female characters and shame are linked in order to address both explicitly female concerns as well as how those concerns can stand in for larger societal issues. The chapter revisits elements from Le vieux nègre et la médaille and Les Bouts de bois de Dieu but concentrates much more on Une si longue lettre by Mariama Bâ, A River Between by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta, Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga, short stories by Ama Ata Aidoo, and Half a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Adichie.

Privileging the Decolonial Critical Theory in studying wa Thiong’o’s literary works

Literary theories are the lens in which reality is created and viewed. If an incorrect or limited lens in used, then they impact on vision hence the corrective lenses are used to correct impaired vision. The literary works of Ngugi wa Thiong’o have been comfortably viewed from Marxist, Nationalist and Post-colonialist lens. It is the argument of this paper that though these literary theories do shed clarity on the works of wa Thiong’o, they limit the span of what we see that is outside their frames. The paper privileges the Decolonial Critical Theory, a theory located in the Global South, as the most appropriate lens to visibilise the decolonial thoughts and philosophy of wa Thiong’o. The appropriateness of the Decolonial Critical Theory is that it provides a critical lens outside the Euro- North American “mainstream” canon foregrounded in coloniality. The argument expanded here is that essentialisms and fundamentalisms like Marxism, Nationalism and Post-colonialism are limited in the critique of wa Thiong’o as they do not take coloniality and decoloniality into account. Undoubtedly, wa Thiong’o has been many things politically and philosophically, but decoloniality as a philosophy is the organising idea and overarching line of his thought. Like decoloniality itself, wa Thiong’o has developed, journeyed and passed through different ideological and philosophical liaisons to arrive at his present decolonial consciousness and activism hence Decolonial Critical Theory is a betting lens in looking at this journey.