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This paper examines the representation of slavery in the fiction of Chinua Achebe. The author suggests that the complex representation of slavery in Achebe's first three novels offers an insight in how writers of Achebe's generation wrote within a period of ideological crisis and multiple competing orders of social reality; they needed to resist European cultural imperialisms and colonial conquest at the same time that they had to evaluate the imperialisms, injustices, and, more generally, the shortcomings of African political institutions. The author suggests in this paper that Achebe responds to these situations of competing pluralizing forces by embedding African articulations of slavery within rival moral frameworks in his first three novels: Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God . Achebe places slavery in an ongoing process in which the onslaught of colonialism uncovers and also radically transforms the moral and legal dispensations in which African slavery was worlded. These novels are thus narratives of loss and alienation; the afterlives of slavery become an intimate but deeply perturbing part of postcolonial heritage.

The paper explores how Helen Oyeyemi searches for an appropriate form and language to describe the multiple cultures, histories and tongues she has inherited. She can barely remember Africa, a loss she only partially shares with slave descendents because she was born in Nigeria, but raised in England from the age of four. The novel is set within the triangular space of the trade between Britain, the West Coast of Africa and the Caribbean. I show how Oyeyemi conducts a thought experiment, imagining the journey, not of the slaves themselves, but of their gods. This journey is less physical than metaphysical, as the gods metamorphose or die in the opposite house; the house is Oyeyemi's mind, which contains the poetry and all the paraphernalia with which the writer struggles to come to terms with her confusions. The paper suggests that Oyeyemi's challenge is to write in such a way that she can invent new codes through which to tell the truth of her past, which is always refracted, unfocussed and skittering at the zigzag. The novel is ultimately impossible fully to understand, except at a visceral level. Yet, Oyeyemi's narrative voices are as compelling as they are bewildering, in their cacophony emerging beneath and beyond the realist narrative of slavery.

This paper examines representations of historical guilt, agency, and trans formation in Doris Lessing’s novel The Grass is Singing. In particular, this paper argues that the warped interracial relationship between the nov el’s white female protagonist, Mary Turner, and her black servant Moses, becomes the vehicle for a cathartic and redemptive alleviation of white postcolonial guilt. The allegorical violence that infuses this narrative of atonement is historicized within the context of the Black Peril in South africa and the heightened surveillance of feelings under apartheid. Mary’s experience of guilt is analyzed according to Judith Butler’s argument that subject formation relies paradoxically upon the twin experiences of both abjection and agency. Even as Mary’s sense of historical guilt becomes a debilitating form of abjection, it encodes and bolsters powerful forms of agency. Mary’s dementia is read as a symbol of J. M. Coetzee’s more recent characterization of apartheid as an event of “collective insanity,” and forms the basis for a broader critique of the limits and exclusions of white postcolonial guilt.

This paper departs from and problematizes the almost exclusive focus in criticism of Ngugi's early works on Christianity and the effects of the colonial intrusion. Following Ngugi's exhortation to resume the broken dialogue with the gods of his people, Ngugi's early novels are read in relation to precolonial East African discourses and practices of prophecy, Gikuyu religion, and Gikuyu nationalist strategies that drew on different and opposing prophetic traditions, and, in a broader sense, discourses of religion in Africa. By locating his early work within the nexus of these discourses, a far more nuanced view of Ngugi's relation to religious and nationalist discourses emerges. This paper also attempts to uncover a symbolic geometry in Ngugi's novels determined by Gikuyu religious and cultural concepts. A focus on The River Between reveals certain authorial deployments of historical inaccuracies and dislocations in the interests of a schematization of the conflicts in the novel.

This paper reflects on the project of the nation and nation-ness in postco lonial Africa with specific attention to the two plays by the anglophone Cameroonian playwright Bole Butake. The paper argues that in Butake’s dramatic imaginary, the project of the nation and nation-ness are highly romanticized. The paper locates its argument in Butake’s two play-texts: Betrothal without Libation (2005) and Family Saga (2005).

This paper explores the auto/biographical, panegyric, and cultural features of the different chants, and particularly that of Otis Hampton, a young African American man, in Isidore Okpewho’s Call Me by My Rightful Name within the contexts of orality, memory, and the diaspora. The paper also discusses how Otis’s panegyric poem becomes an archaeological artifact needed to probe his memory and ancestry to unravel the mysteries of the ancient and the contemporary cord that links Black Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. Finally, the paper considers how this cord foregrounds the infamous triangular slave trade, black consciousness, and resistance both on the continent and in the diaspora.

This paper explores the significance of the autobiographical element in hunters' chants among the Yoruba. Since hunters primarily occupy the subject position in these chants, they use them to construct and praise themselves and their communities and to contest their representation by others as well as to teach communal history. The paper examines the art of composition and recitation in the chants, showing how subjects are formed, developed, and contested to promote heteroglossia as different discourses and counterdiscourses are developed. Finally, the paper argues that the chants are crucial in reconstructing historical and literary aspects of precolonial Africa.

Using two books from the 1960s as a point of reference, this paper addresses the literary quality of African oral literature. Both books surprisingly underscore orature's objectives such as propriety as well as quotability, which are discussed together with orature's quality of finalization. The paper finally answers the question in its title, and points to a possible resolution of the comparative dilemma entailed in the varying notions of literature embraced by different cultures and eras.

This paper analyzes the political and cultural thought of Hugh MacDiarmid, a poet, and John Maclean, a radical labor leader, in the context of Scottish political and literary history between World War I and the mid-1930s. It offers an historical parallel for MacDiarmid's notorious ideological contrariety via the narrative of Maclean's political career, which moved from militant socialist internationalism during the war to an idiosyncratic form of "Scottish Workers' Republicanism" in the years before his death in 1923. The paper goes on to argue that the political paradox of MacDiarmid and Maclean's "nationalist internationalism" was only ever solved in the linguistic medium of MacDiarmid's "synthetic Scots" poetry. This situation reflects the redoubtable strength and internal paradoxes of the sovereign state in an era of international modernism and Communist internationalism.

I derive my title from Gayatri Spivak, who declares that postcolonial writers and intellectuals, like Buchi Emecheta and Assia Djebar, are banished from Oedipus. Thus they are also outside the patriarchal Law of the Symbolic and the dominant Western metaphors to which it is bonded. The paper goes on to examine the transformative potential of the metonymic language of material culture and the everyday. We see how the writers transform commonplace objects, like a pram or a lettuce, into metonyms of daily life in order to wrest language away from the Oedipal, Western, male Symbolic and to find their voices, as writers, as women, and as Africans. The paper emphasizes, however, that language is always, in fact, blended. What is being contested is the hierarchy between polarized dimensions, such as the figurative over the literal, the Symbolic over the Imaginary, English over indigenous languages, and Europe over Africa. What we see is how the protagonists of Emecheta and Djebar are constituted as subjects within multiple dimensions, knowledges, cultures, and traditions.

The West African writer Amos Tutuola burst onto the postwar metropolitan literary scene with The Palm-Wine Drinkard published by Faber and Faber in 1952. This paper explores the correspondence between Tutuola and his publishers so as to assess the value Faber placed on the manuscript, and to explore the part they played in the shaping and presentation of Tutuola's book. In particular, the paper seeks to explore the interface between the manuscript's (alleged) importance as an anthropological artifact and/or a literary product, and examines how "authenticity" signifies in the presentation of The Palm-Wine Drinkard as written by a naive artist. In doing so, the paper will seek to demonstrate that if an ambivalence over the value and significance of The Palm-Wine Drinkard provided a window of opportunity that enabled its publication, such instability also provoked acute anxiety over how to manage the work of a "natural artist."

Norman Mailer's 1984 detective novel Tough Guys Don't Dance, this paper argues, is an allegorical satire on the politics of the Reagan eighties and its codes of masculinity. Taking as its starting point Kate Millett's feminist assertion that Mailer "always seems to understand what's the matter with masculine arrogance, but he can't give it up," this paper contends that Tough Guys Don't Dance encodes masculinity as a form of addiction. The addiction of masculinity is played through an analysis of the novel's identification of differing masculine language games. The revenge plot of Mailer's detective tale of buried heads in the marijuana patch is read as a satire of the eighties twin backlashes against feminism and the sixties. Set in Cape Cod's Provincetown, the novel's tough guy plot is also entangled in early AIDS crisis.

The paper considers novels in Sesotho by five authors, three of which were short-listed in the "100 Best Books" project conducted in South africa in 2003. It provides a critique of the style, structure, and content of five novels: Mofolo's Chaka, Segoete's Monono ke Moholi ke Mowane, khatketla's Mosali a Nkhola, Matlosa's Mopheme, and Maake's Kweetsa ya Pelo ya Motho. The paper summariZes aspects of plot for the english-speaking reader and draws comparisons and contrasts between the writers and their respective novels.

This paper examines the marginalized writing career of David Manisi, a rural South African praise poet who published and performed in Xhosa between 1947 and 1988. Although Xhosa newspapers had produced an illustrious tradition of written praise poetry, by the mid-1950s Manisi found his terms of address compromised by the official discourses of apartheid and his chances of reaching an adult, educated readership greatly reduced. The paper discusses his writing in the context of the diminishing opportunities available to poets who wished to publish in African languages, and argues that Manisi continued to write books, despite his failure to reach audiences, in the hope of finding future readers. It discusses, with reference to several of Manisi's newspaper and book poems, the special adaptability of praise poetry (a performance genre) to print media. The paper shows how the poet's conception of print media changed in response to his constraining political and publishing context.

The paper's main argument is that texts do not have exclusively specific textual origins but are produced within historical conditions and linked to a variety of other texts within the broad spectrum of literary history. In retrieving and re-positioning Gaddiel Acquaah's historical poem of 1930 in Ghanaian literary history, it explores the impact of social and political contexts on its production and examines its intertextual links with contemporary texts in Ghanaian literature. It argues that while such textual connections illuminate differing negotiations of historical memory across time they at the same time reveal continuities in perspective and suggest plural rather than linear movements in literary history. The paper's intertextual reading of Gaddiel Acquaah's Oguaa Aban, Ayi Kwei Armah's Two Thousand Seasons, Opoku-Agyeman's Cape Coast Castle, and Ama Ata Aidoo's Anowa reveals that only such connections across periods and languages can illuminate the production of texts and the complexities of a postcolonial paradigm.

The paper discusses ways in which the song form known as isicathamiya mediates subjectivity on a national and transnational scale in the new post-1994 era, known by isiZulu speakers as uhlel' olusha. Singers are constantly testing the limits of the genre, both through the choice of subject matter for songs and in their performance style. They take it in new directions and through the "embodied knowledge" they display, they engage in emergent and established discourses on the nature of contemporary South African, and Zulu, identity. Singers align themselves and their audiences to the global through commentary in song on events such as 9/11 and this itself becomes a shifting topic of choral conversation through time, reflecting, among other items, changing responses to America and to "Bin Laden." The paper also explores the different publics with which performers interact and argues that a group such as the famous Ladysmith Black Mambazo, which now performs mainly on global circuits, has to limit its discourse accordingly; it cannot engage with urgent and topical events that inform social consciousness within South Africa as freely as groups more closely in touch with their local constituencies. The paper also sketches the history of the genre and sets the overall discussion within a paradigm of popular culture and the political; it draws on work by Catherine Cole, Johannes Fabian, Veit Erlmann, and Louise Meintjes.

Women characters play various roles in African epics, including heroic roles, but audiences and scholars generally fail to note and appreciate the full extent of these roles, focusing, instead, on male characters and their actions. The experiences and actions of men get more attention than those of women. Notions such as heroism are seen and understood from a male perspective. These biases are built into research tools such as the motif indexes and the hero pattern. This paper outlines these problems, offering a critique of how we hear or read stories, and advocating a new approach, founded on new critical and conceptual premises, such as the idea of female heroism. Though focusing on epics, this paper incorporates comments on women in folktales, based on the premise that folktales are a key part of the groundwork on which epics are based, in terms of both structural elements and the representation of female characters and roles.

Although he is known primarily as a novelist, between 1959 and 1982 Amos Tutuola wrote at least three plays-The Pupils of the Eyes, Ajaiyi and the Witch Doctor, and Sword of Vengeance-of all which remain unpublished. After an introductory account of the circumstances that appear to have led Tutuola to develop an interest in dramatic literature, this paper explores the thematic concerns of the plays and relates these to the thematic territory of Tutuola's fiction, in particular to the novel Ajaiyi and His Inherited Poverty. All three plays are shown to provide further evidence of Tutuola's preoccupation with conditions of isolation and marginalization, with the vulnerability of the individual to the schemes of the unscrupulous and greedy, and with the problematic nature of trust. In addition, the paper highlights Tutuola's attempts to develop his craft as a dramatist and in particular the difficulties he appears to have faced in handling the conventions of the dramatic text.

The main issue in this paper concerns the transition from oral to written. it illustrates with two Senegalese epics where the author was involved in the collection phase and in the production of written English and French versions. The first epic is “The Epic of Ndiadiane Ndiaye” performed by the griot Cheikh Niang. The second is “The Epic of El Hadj Umar Taal of Fuuta” whose author is a smith named birahim Thiam. both epics are replete with historical, religious, linguistic, and cultural references, in addition to con stituting important identity markers and memory preservation items for the constituencies and audience of the two performers. Three languages are involved in the production of the epics, each playing a specific role: Wolof, Arabic, and French. The first is the language of performance and is the culture carrier; Arabic is the language of the Islamic faith; and French is the medium of modernity. The paper discusses the translation process from word to print that poses a number of challenges, and the editing process, which is also an important step toward the production of the final text. The transmission process of the two epics stretches from earlier griots through the two performers discussed in this article to the English and French texts that the author has been involved in producing.