Corpus Assisted Approach To Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

Armah’s The Beautyful Ones are not yet Born is a novel known for its extensive portrayal of the ills and anomalies in the Ghanaian society right after independence. The majority of studies on the novel have overwhelmingly concluded that corruption is the preoccupation of the text. This view appears skewed in many respects. This paper argues that the corpus assisted approach can contribute methodologies to support objective investigation of the subject matters of the text. This study, adopting the corpus-assisted approach in a mix of numerical data and qualitative description of Armah’s The Beautyful Ones are not yet Born, used frequencies of the occurrence of pejorative terms in the text to determine the dominant subject matters in the novel. The approach reveals that “rot” and “decay” are the most dominant motifs used, followed by “filth”, “corruption”, and “bribery”. It suggests that clusters, i.e., recurrence of words, characters’ association with the words, and context of use serve as textual cues in thematic exploration. The approach aids in revealing that the real intent of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is that the total breakdown of the society rests on seemingly insignificant characters. The paper has implications for methodological approaches to thematic analysis of literary texts, particularly, the novel.

Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons: A Case Study Of The Epic Plot

This work examines the plot of Two Thousand Seasons as an epic plot. The work contends that contrary to the popular belief that an epic narrative is a new form in Africa, epic narratives have long been known in African literary cycles. There are many models on the Epic analysis, but in this work, Albert Sackey’s eight-part division of the epic plot as identified by Aristotle is used in this analysis. In the Poetics, Aristotle identified five elements of an epic: plot, character, setting, diction and thought. Two Thousand Seasons is subjected to an epic plot analysis. In analysing the epic plot, Albert Sackey’s eight-point parts of the epic plot, which he refers to as “structural devices” of the Epic: the unity of time and action, Deux ex Machina, in medias res, opening invocation, extensive geographical travelling, catalogues of troops, digressions and division of texts, are used in this analysis.

Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born in the History of African Literature: A Critical Analysis of a Landmark Novel

This study shows the central position held by Ayi Kwei Aramh’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born in the African literary world. It tries to prove that the publishing of this work was a landmark in the early post-colonial context of African literature. Through a series of breaks from still prevailing colonial and neocolonial literary discourses, it has initiated an innovative aesthetics which has left a tremendous legacy which is being continued by subsequent generations.

Speak Like You Were Dead: Episteme of the Ghosted in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The White Tiger has been hailed as a paradigmatic narrative of postcolonial wealth-formation in the 21st century, and as a novel that speaks to the “shining” India of globalization in its transformative moment of an emergent centrality on the global stage. I argue that The White Tiger, by using counter-intuitive epistemes, is also a transnational novel whose primary motive is to offer a trenchant critique of global neoliberalism, and its underlying epistemes of violence and inequality. Through the voice of its protagonist Balram Halwai, the novel, I claim, projects the 21st century postcolonial nation of India as Capital’s colony—a thriving and free “market”, if you will—whose well-being, in turn, is predicated on the phagocytizing of the human capital of the other India that is hidden from the gazes of those who admiringly gawk at “shining” India of Capital.

Futuring Africa: Immature Men and the Utility of Hope in Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

The purpose of this paper is to provide a re-reading of Armah as a writer of decadence and frustration. I argue that such readings remain prejudiced since scholars rarely identify the philosophy of Kant as a particularly useful resource which will aid one to understand the full complexity of Armah’s vision for postcolonial Ghana. Drawing on Kant’s age of enlightenment, this paper redeems Armah’s debut of pejorism by locating the novel’s diagnostic function within the complex paradigms of maturity and immaturity. Thus, this paper examines the ambiguities of Armah’s characterization and how it strengthens the utopian sensibilities embedded in the text. The paper concludes that Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born remains therapeutic for the advent of the new nation.

Representation of The Other in Ghanaian Literary Texts: A Reading of Some Selected Works

Ghanaian literary texts have been greatly influenced by post-colonial theory which tends to depict and (expose) the inaccuracy of the duality embedded in western imperialism manifested in the concepts of the self and the other. With post-colonial theory as background and specifically the theoretical formulations from Said’s Orientalism (1978), Bhabha’s The location of Culture (1994), and Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (2001), this paper examines how Ghanaian written literature re-inscribes the concept of the Other with intent of justifying the existence of the advantageous self which apparently denigrates the other. Using textual analysis of some representative texts, I argue that Ghanaian literary artists portray the concepts of the self and the other with different connotations and permutations which reflect the ideals of the society within the geo-political space of world Literatures.

Permanence of the Negative in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

The present essay identifies the defining feature of Armah’s first novel as changelessness in the negative carried by language steeped in scatology. It pitches this reading against Armah’s later efforts at signaling missed optimism. The later reading raises also technical considerations that should make the novel’s scatology less irritating to readers’ senses. This essay argues that the changelessness derives from the perspective that frames the novel. That perspective, cast in the metaphysical method of reflection, conceives the world as made up of things ‘ready-made’, ‘rigid’. This, the essay argues, forbids the possibility of change and regeneration that Armah reads, post facto, into the novel.

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

The creation and publication of a journal is a remarkable scholarly event. Most importantly, the inaugural issue marks the actualisation of an original idea and vision that evolved out of the identification of a scholarly niche in the production and dissemination knowledge. Which is why we are proud to introduce the inaugural issue of KENTE: Cape Coast Journal of Literature and the Arts. Kente is a peer-reviewed online journal founded and based in the Department of English, University of Cape Coast, Ghana. The fundamental objective of the journal is to provide an open-access scholarly platform for the publication and dissemination of original papers that make significant contributions to specific authors, genres, thematic and theoretical issues within the areas of literature and the arts. Kente is also interested in putting our readers in direct contact with distinguished and emerging scholars and creative writers through the publication of interviews and poems. Furthermore, we publish reviews on scholarly and creative books that fall within the broad scope of the journal.

Replacing “Whole Limbs with Borrowed Ones”: Whiteness, Decolonization, and Early Nationalist Identification

In this essay, I center an examination of the satirical play “The Blinkards,” written by Kobina Sekyi in 1915 in the context of British colonization of the Gold Coast in West Africa, present-day Ghana. I show that postcolonial modes of identification emerged within the conceptual framework of cultural nationalism. As such, I argue that emergent postcolonial practices of identification are grounded in transnational modes of modernity. My examination of a selection of Sekyi’s texts shows how whiteness structures oppositional self-making practices within a colonial context, positioning whiteness itself as a key ground of transnational subject positions that develop in modernity.