Re-writing Pasts, Imagining Futures

Critical Explorations of Contemporary African Fiction and Theater

N. Gomia, Shang Ndi, N. Gomia, Shang Ndi, N. Gomia, Gilbert S. Ndi

• Publisher: Spears Media Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781942876182
• eBook ISBN: 9781942876199
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The papers in this volume focus on fiction and theatre in their traditional forms as well as in their encounters with novel and innovative forms and avenues of dissemination. As a cultural practice that emerged from a process of protest and contestation of hegemony, it is understandable that one main concern in African literature and literary criticism is the resistance against the emergence of marginalizing centers in formerly or currently marginalized societies with regard to discourses, aesthetics and media of creation. These new centers that sometimes undermine the strategic/tactical exploitation of the relative advantage procured by each medium run the risk of leading to new forms of stratification that mitigate the import of African and African diasporic literatures. The collection of essays therefore seeks to analyze the representation of pertinent socio-political and historical questions in a variety of postcolonial texts from Africa and the African diasporas, notably the Caribbean islands and the United States of America. However, far from re-writing of history in a way that cedes to conservative worldviews, creative writers and critics simultaneously attempt to chart ways forward for socially all-inclusive futures. In the context of colonial and neo-colonial legacies that seem to forestall any sense of individual and collective self-fulfillment, contributors to this volume examine the pertinence of African fiction and theatre in imagining new vistas of re-conceptualizing the postcolonial condition in ways that re-galvanize the belief in an enabling future.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• In Memoriam
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 - Bayreuth-Africa Summer School: Model for North-South/South-South Partnerships and Cultural Knowledge Production and Transfer
• CHAPTER 2 - Historical Mythopoeia as Dramatic Resource: A Study of selected plays by Amiri Baraka and Bate Besong
• CHAPTER 3 - The Adaptation of History for Revolutionary Motifs in Femi Osofisan’s Plays
• CHAPTER 4 - ‘As it was in the Beginning...’: Religious Fanaticism and the Quest for a New Messiah in the Plays of Derek Walcott and Bate Besong
• CHAPTER 5 - Post-Apartheid South Africa and the Advent of Social Change in the Selected Novels of Nadine Gordimer and Nicholas Mhlongo
• CHAPTER 6 - Triple Marginality in Cameroon Anglophone Literature
• CHAPTER 7 - Ayi Kwei Armah and the Pan-African Quest for an Ethical Future
• CHAPTER 8 - Theorizing the Police State: Postcolonial Dystopia in Mongo Beti’s The Story of the Madman
• CHAPTER 9 - Alobwed’Epie’s The Day God Blinked: Complexities, Ambiguities and Contradictions in Female Representation
• CHAPTER 10 - Globalization and Gender politics in the Indigenous African Society: Knowing the African Woman in Tell it on the Mountain
• CHAPTER 11 - Mythic Imagination and the Construction of Postdiasporic Identity in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise
• CHAPTER 12 - Tracing the Beginnings and the Importance of Development Theater Practice in Sub-Saharan Africa
• CHAPTER 13 - Tracking the Absence of Theorizing Applied Theater in Africa
• CHAPTER 14 - The Protest Theatrical Space in Twenty-first Century Social Media Oriented Africa: Re-assessing Bole Butake’s And Palm wine will Flow (1990) and Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi is Dead (2014)
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Back cover