African Literature
African literature encompasses the diverse literary works produced by writers from the African continent. It reflects the rich cultural, historical, and social experiences of the continent, often addressing themes such as colonialism, post-colonialism, identity, and the struggle for independence. African literature includes a wide range of genres, from novels and poetry to oral storytelling traditions, and has made significant contributions to world literature.
7 Key excerpts on "African Literature"
...14 African Literature In this survey of African Literature, this chapter will discuss both traditional African Literature and modern African Literature and will attempt to demonstrate that the roots of modern African Literature lie partly in various aspects of traditional African culture, especially the oral tradition. African oral literature will be thoroughly discussed, and the chapter will then move on to illustrate that modern African Literature is, in a sense, a hybrid which has drawn from both indigenous sources and influences as well as trends and influences from the outside world. The story of African Literature begins with the very considerable body of African oral literature which has been going on from time immemorial. There are various categories of African oral literature or folk lore. These include prose, folk poetry, and epigrams. We will look at each category in turn and into the forms into which they can be further subdivided. Prose folk lore Myths Oral literature in prose consists of relatively long pieces that can be chanted, narrated, or recited. These pieces can be further subdivided into myths, legends, and folk tales. Some epics are also in prose. Myths can be defined as stories that attempt to explain or illustrate the relationship between human beings and the supernatural forces in the universe, and almost every culture in the world has its own myths that attempt to define man’s place in the universe and man’s relationship to the extra-human forces. The research of scholars like Professor Northrop Frye and Joseph Campbell have demonstrated that many of these myths have archetypes in common because they spring from a universal desire embedded in the human psyche to define man’s relationship with the gods or with the divine. Thus, there are creation myths in most cultures explaining how humans came into being and there are also myths demonstrating the separation of man from the gods...
eBook - ePubThe Literary History of the Igbo Novel
African Literature in African Languages
- Ernest N. Emenyonu(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The values portrayed and narrative techniques employed were different from the portraits in novels about Africa by European authors. In African Language Literatures (1981), Albert S. Gérard points out that creative writing in African languages predated European presence in Africa (and, therefore, the introduction of the Western art of the novel set in Africa). Ethiopian writers were producing works in African languages long before “the earliest literatures in western Europe in Celtic and Germanic languages” (xi). Yet the learning and teaching of literature in African languages take a distant back seat to African Literature in European languages because of a dearth of sourcebooks, student guides, and authentic teacher’s handbooks. There are more than 50 different African languages in which creative works are produced. In general, however, they possess common forms of origin and development, differing only in historic and linguistic particularities. Therefore, a successful production of a literary history of the novel in one language would open the door for studies into those in other languages. Creative writings in African languages were largely inspired by the early European missionary educators at the turn of the twentieth century, who took an interest in the development of African languages for the purposes of evangelism and proselytization. They encouraged the first products of Mission schools to write down folktales, songs, epics, myths, legends, etc., which, up until this point, had been disseminated by word-of-mouth from generation to generation. Building on these, they began to write prose fiction—full novels and memoirs. The number of these volumes grew because the missionaries motivated the budding writers by organizing national, regional, and continent-wide contests, and publishing winning entries. Omenuko won the continent-wide contest and was published in 1933, making it possibly the first African-language novel in West Africa...
eBook - ePubContemporary African Literature in English
Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications
- M. Krishnan(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...In both cases, the question of the will-to-knowledge in the transnational construction and circulation of an African literary canon in the context of a ‘continuous history’ of the postcolonial, 5 along with the related question of truth-value in representation, remains obscured through a cleaving of the aesthetic from the political. This is evidenced in the range of studies which focus alternatively on magical realism, orality and pre-colonial tradition, on the one hand, 6 and those which focus on anti-colonial nationalism, Marxism and historical determinism, on the other. 7 Even those works which foreground the construction of African Literature as a global category remain hesitant to address the text as a specifically literary work, favouring instead what has been called the sociology of the text in their approaches. 8 While these studies represent important contributions to the on-going study of African Literature, the current schism in studies of African writing nonetheless reflects a critical lacuna in approaching the African literary text in its totality. Unlike scholars of South African Literature, a context of writing directly influenced by the immediacy of the ethical imperatives created by apartheid, criticism of continental African Literature, writ large, has remained largely unable to address the narrative space where aesthetic and political imperatives overlap with the constraints of material culture in the transmission of the image of Africa dispersed across the globe today...
eBook - ePubTheory of African Literature
Implications for Practical Criticism
- Chidi Amuta(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Zed Books(Publisher)
...In conference after conference on African Literature and in the now familiar avalanche of amputated reviews and subjective exegeses that inundate journals in the field, it would appear that the bulk of intellectual energy in African literary discourse has been dissipated on the quest for an “African” aesthetic value system for our literature. The road to authentic African aesthetic values and artistic practices has led inexorably to precolonial and often destroyed or forgotten socio-cultural formations. Understandably, therefore, Africanist literary scholarship has had to fall back on those disciplines traditionally equipped to handle the past of societies. In this regard, history, anthropology and religious studies would ordinarily provide ready services. But here again, we come face to face with the ubiquitous West. Colonialist history of Africa of the sort associated with early Rowland Oliver and Eurocentric (primitivist) anthropology of the brand linked with Placide Temples, Levi-Bruhl and Jack Goody has had only stock European prejudices to offer. 6 Most scandalous perhaps, is the work of African professional religionists like Idowu and Mbiti whose sense of divinity and the sacred is so steeped in Judeo-Christian mythology that it cannot but see a hierarchy of Christian angels in African ethnic pantheons! 7 We shall return to this point later. Given the discordant tone and suspicious nature of information from these auxiliary disciplines, traditionalist aesthetics of African Literature has tended to content itself with vague generalizations about the “African oral narrator”, “the African world view”, “the traditional poet” and so on. In some cases, the quest for an African aesthetic of African Literature has been hijacked from African scholars by the Euro-American counterparts. I am referring specifically to the flurry of centres and institutes of African studies in North America in the last decade...
eBook - ePub- Moradewun Adejunmobi, Carli Coetzee, Moradewun Adejunmobi, Carli Coetzee(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Whether particular typologies do or do not apply to African writing and literature, how African variants of an expansive and global type differ from related forms elsewhere in the world, and when to isolate a strand of African writing as a genre are matters for consideration. To mention one example, should we think of literary works where the named author becomes a character in the narrative as a genre? Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel and Igoni Barrett’s Blackass represent recent illustrations of this trend. In their respective chapters, both Rebecca Duncan and Ian MacDonald investigate classifications that have been more frequently applied to literatures from Western societies than they have to African Literatures: namely the gothic, and utopian literature. Drawing on the work of Harry Garuba, Diane Mafe, Cheryl Stobie, Brenda Cooper and Ato Quayson, Duncan brings several conversations about the nature of the supernatural in African Literature into dialogue with each other. She makes a useful distinction between the association of magical elements with fear and anxiety, as a characteristic of the gothic, and the magical as manifestation of what Garuba has called an animist realism. MacDonald too pursues an interest in the magical dimensions of African Literature, but specifically in its relationship to the articulation of a utopian vision within a broad stream of African fantasy and science fiction. Ever since the politics of disenchantment set in during the decades after independence, African Literature has been more frequently thought of as motivated by a dystopian rather than a utopian impulse. But as MacDonald seeks to demonstrate in his chapter, locating utopia (which in Greek means ‘no-place’) and eutopia (‘good place’) is an important undertaking in Okri novels like In Arcadia and Starbook. MacDonald raises several questions with respect to these texts...
eBook - ePub- Simon Gikandi, Simon Gikandi(Authors)
- 2003(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Thus orature grows out of tradition, and keeps tradition alive. African orature is a development of a complex literary genre that demands the establishment of its own aesthetics for its interpretation and evaluation. Orature is a strategic communal tool for non-literate societies in their consolidation and socialization processes, and its spoken nature guarantees its widest circulation. Unlike written literature, orature has unfixed boundaries, which gives it greater freedom in its execution and interpretation—it can thus be used to praise and criticize those in power. The principal execution of orature is by performance, which combines sound, action, and meaning. Performance brings to the fore and concretizes the interaction among the principals of text, medium, performer, and audience so that an utterance can most adequately be interpreted and evaluated within the context of the total performance. African oral forms include ritual, divining/healing, folk tales, myths, legends, and song and dance. Genres of oral literature Oral traditions can be divided stylistically into those transmitted in a stereotypical way and those transmitted freely, changing with differences of time, place, and individual speakers. The first category includes traditions that function in ritual and cult, such as invocations, incantations, funeral songs, praise songs, etc. Language in this category is highly stylized, and meter and rhythm are more important than conceptual coherence because in traditional society every word is charged with a particular force. The second category includes stories and legends of the origin of man’s institutions, as well as stories told for didactic purposes and for entertainment. Myths and legends are concepts and beliefs about the early history of a race, or explanations of natural events, such as the seasons, handed down from olden times...
eBook - ePubWhere is Language?
An Anthropologist's Questions on Language, Literature and Performance
- Ruth Finnegan(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...9 What is literature? What is the existential status of what we call ‘literature’ and how is it differentiated from other art forms? Can we be sure what we are talking about in our facile references to the literary? In a challenging article that starts not from the conventional Western literary canon but from traditional Japanese theatre, Andrew Gerstle has suggested that the concept of ‘performance literature’ might be illuminating as an analytic and comparative tool when approaching the literatures of Africa and Asia (Gerstle 2000: 43). This chapter follows up his approach, seeing it as relevant not just for Africa or Asia but also for any verbalized forms in which performance has a part and thus for our theories of ‘literature’ more generally. It is a set of issues worth tackling. For despite the now-accepted problematizing of the concepts of ‘text’ and ‘literature’, conventional approaches to studying literature and literary theory still seem to bypass performance and to start from the position that the defining focus is ‘literary texts’, prototypically texts in writing, and that this is how and where literature exists. Most textbooks and glossaries on literature contain little or nothing about the complex performed aspects of literature in the sense of its realization as public enacted display in the here and now. The ramifications of the familiar notion by which, say, a display of African story-telling, a poetry recital or the production of a Nô drama are examples of performance in a way that, say, a theological treatise or a written libretto are not (on the face of it anyway) – these seem to have little visibility in the standard accounts of literature. It is perhaps scarcely surprising that scholars have conceived of ‘literature’ as basically existent in written texts. After all, we have long accessed past literary enactments – across centuries, sometimes millennia – through the medium of verbalized texts-on-a-written-page. This is what exists, it seems...
