The Dialectics of Political Ideology and Power Relations in African Literature: A Reading of Adébáyọ̀ Fálétí’s Baṣọ̀run Gáà

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.

Quest for Female's Identity in Tiwari's Prashnaharuko Kārkhānā

Sarita Tiwari (2015) in her collection of poems, Prashnaharuko Kārkhānā [Factory of Questions] protests the tradition of wearing ornaments and cosmetics by women. Likewise, she rejects the use of submissive symbols and metaphors that have been used by the creative writers to define women. She identifies them as ploys that patriarchy has invented to maintain the subordination and subjugation of women to men. She argues that these techniques mystify and blur women's identity, so she questions and challenges them. Thus, this article analyzes five poems from the anthology to examine how the poet protests the traditional norms and values of patriarchy that define women as secondary to men and search for female's identity through them. To examine the quest for female's identity in her poetry, this article takes theoretical support from feminist critics like Mary Daly, Kate Millet, Naomi Wolf and others. These critics believe that patriarchy uses different types of myths to maintain women's secondary position in the society. The article concludes that in the quest for female's identity independent of men, Tiwari protests the tradition and culture that emphasize women's beauty and their submissive roles in the society. Through their interrogating tone and syntax, the selected poems challenge patriarchal norms which have been imposed upon women to erase their identity. The study helps to understand how patriarchy manipulates the myths of religion and beauty to maintain males’ supremacy over females.

Notes on writing from writers of note

Each "Communication Corner" essay is self-contained; however, they build on each other. For best results, before reading this essay and doing the exercise, go to the first essay "How an Ugly Duckling Became a Swan," then read each succeeding essay. A distinction is often made between creative writing (fiction) and expository writing(non-fiction). However, they are more alike than most people think. Creative writers can learn from expository writers, and vice versa.

Reading Literary Theory between the Lines of Creative Writing: The Dialectics of Theory and Practice in the Creative Writing Pedagogy

Literary theory and critical writing have been traditionally perceived as being in tension, either silently ignoring or polemically rejecting each other. In this paper we argue that literary theory and creative writing are interconnected on various levels. By acknowledging this fact, theory may be profitably deployed in the creative writing class, in order to enhance creative writers’ sense of literary mechanisms, conventions, and purposes in specific sociocultural contexts. In this way, theory informs students not only in relation to the poetics, but also to the pragmatics of the literary phenomenon. Theory askes creative writers to contemplate on how they themselves are socially, ideologically and culturally positioned as writers (and as readers) of literature, and how their activity is enmeshed in a broader process of personal and communal identity formation through language and literary representation.

Over Forty Years of Resisting Compulsory Veiling

While text-based and cyberspace campaigns against compulsory veiling in Iran have received much attention, Iranian diasporic creative writers have also engaged in this resistance through their writings, but they have remained almost unacknowledged. This article argues that diasporic literary narratives have functioned as part of what has led to today’s online platforms and cyberactivism. The article approaches these literary narratives as forms of counterdiscourse, rearticulating alternative narratives about women’s movements against compulsory veiling. Produced in diaspora, these transnational feminist works raise questions of authenticity and legitimacy. However, these authors emerge as activists from their position abroad, pushing back against the limits placed by the state on women’s bodies; in posing these challenges, they contribute to dissent from the mainstream narrative and to a rearticulation of the movement even as their works are viewed as marginal.

Experiential metafunction: representing environmental degradation

The constant exploration and exploitation of crude oil in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria had had a negative consequential effect on the entire ecosystem of the region. This has been a source of national and international concern and has attracted the attention of scholars from several disciplines, within and outside the region. Creative writers were not left out and this had given birth to which poetry was one of its most prolific genres. Though regional, the literature in general and poetry, in particular, had attracted myriads of attention from eco-literary criticism while the language of the poems had been understudied. Therefore, this study is a linguistic analysis of Niger Delta environmental poetry. Seven poems were purposefully selected from Tanure Ojaide’s Songs of Myself: Quartet (2015) and Nnimo Bassey’s We Thought It Was Oil but It Was Blood (2002). The Hallidayan Transitivity system of the Experiential meaning of the clause was adopted as a linguistic framework to show how the ecological realities of the region were encoded in the structure of the clause. The study revealed that the nature of the processes and the participants’ roles aptly encoded ecological degradation in the structure of the clause.

Introduction

The all-too-common refrain “I can’t breathe,” in response to obscene incidents of police brutality and the murder of Black people in America, has haunted us through this time where breath is not only dangerous and necessary but also, in this nation, hyperpoliticized at a number of flash points. The widespread refusal to wear a mask is effectively an insistence on breathing together, even if it marks the condition of one’s own last breath—or that of someone else, who may or may not have consented to sharing potentially deadly aerosol particles. Once a concern largely restricted to those with respiratory health conditions, breathing has now become a central preoccupation of the world. This special dossier, “Breath,” considers the politics, history, geography, and conditions of breathing from a moment of respiratory crisis amid a respiratory pandemic, the ecological crisis of California’s increasing wildfires and unbreathable air, and the brutal policing of Black American life. The short meditations in this dossier, from academics in various fields as well as creative writers, are responses to our current moment’s heightened awareness of the complexities of one of the most fundamental requirements for life.

Curious and Fantastical: The Daydreaming of Creative Writers

What are the daydreams of creative individuals like? Do they reflect the daydreamer’s level of creativity? To answer this question, this research examines the daydreams of creative writers and ordinary people. Among several daydream qualities, the research focused particularly on curiosity, or the extent to which daydreams revolve around unresolved questions and problems. Studies 1 and 2 provide evidence that curious daydreams—along with fantastical daydreams—predict creativity in community samples. Study 3 compares the daydreams of professional creative writers and non-writers, and examines what daydream qualities predict creativity within these groups. On questionnaires and in a week-long experience sampling procedure, writers reported more curious and fantastical daydreams than non-writers. Fantastical daydreams predicted their lifetime history of creative behavior and achievement. Moreover, daily creative behavior and inspiration throughout the study were predicted by curious, fantastical, meaningful, and pleasant daydreaming, with notable differences between writers and non-writers.