Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Stop Press/ Tribute To Nadine Gordimer 1923–2014
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Editorial Article: Fiction & Socio-Political Realities in Africa: What Else Can Literature Do?
- The Novel as an Oral Narrative Performance: The Delegitimization of the Postcolonial Nation in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Matigari Ma Njirũũngi
- Abiku in Ben Okri’s Imagination of Nationhood: A Metaphorical Interpretation of Colonial-Postcolonial Politics
- Refracting the Political: Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write About This Place
- Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Resolutionaries: 47 Exoteric Fiction, the Common People & Social Change in Post-Colonial Africa – A Critical Review
- In Quest of Social Justice: 58 Politics & Women’s Participation in Irene Isoken Salami’s More Than Dancing
- Breaking the Laws in J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus – Philosophy & the Notion of Justice
- The Rhetoric & Caricature of Social Justice in Post-1960 Africa: A Logical Positivist Reading of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Matigari
- ‘Manhood’ in Isidore Okpewho’s The Last Duty: Authenticity or Accountability?
- Remembering Kofi Awoonor (13 March 1935–21 September 2013)
- Reviews
Abiku in Ben Okri’s Imagination of Nationhood: A Metaphorical Interpretation of Colonial-Postcolonial Politics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 February 2023
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Stop Press/ Tribute To Nadine Gordimer 1923–2014
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Editorial Article: Fiction & Socio-Political Realities in Africa: What Else Can Literature Do?
- The Novel as an Oral Narrative Performance: The Delegitimization of the Postcolonial Nation in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Matigari Ma Njirũũngi
- Abiku in Ben Okri’s Imagination of Nationhood: A Metaphorical Interpretation of Colonial-Postcolonial Politics
- Refracting the Political: Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write About This Place
- Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Resolutionaries: 47 Exoteric Fiction, the Common People & Social Change in Post-Colonial Africa – A Critical Review
- In Quest of Social Justice: 58 Politics & Women’s Participation in Irene Isoken Salami’s More Than Dancing
- Breaking the Laws in J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus – Philosophy & the Notion of Justice
- The Rhetoric & Caricature of Social Justice in Post-1960 Africa: A Logical Positivist Reading of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Matigari
- ‘Manhood’ in Isidore Okpewho’s The Last Duty: Authenticity or Accountability?
- Remembering Kofi Awoonor (13 March 1935–21 September 2013)
- Reviews
Summary
A literary text may serve to remind us of what of the past has never been past. In this, it may not be just a crypt but an abiku and, as such, a way of rethinking the relation between past and future. Literature may be both crypt and abiku.
(Rooney, 2000: 114)Literature, like other semiotic regimes such as sculpture, painting photography and film, can and has been used to present individual and group experiences. Artists have utilized all of the modes mentioned above, with varying degrees of success, to engage with such social and political issues as colonialism, politics, religion, corruption and underdevelopment. Thus, the role of art, besides its traditional functions of entertainment and education, includes the provision of a critique of the life and experiences of participants involved in social interaction. The postcolonial African literary text has been used to provide an appraisal of ideology, identity, power relations and inter-group relationships in Africa. Literary and linguistic analysts have also tried to explore whether the resources of art can be harnessed to provide a good interpretation of life situations and function as an instrument for shaping and reshaping of the socio-political direction of the society.
Colonialism is one historical experience the full impact of which generations of African scholars have yet to fully unravel. Besides the physical balkanization of the continent to serve imperial interests, there are issues of economic and human exploitation, cultural and linguistic distortions, negative representation/presentation of Africa, its people, and its values by the West. The West invented reasons to justify its acts of aggression as a rescue mission that was in the best interest of Africa. To them, Africa should be grateful for their timely intervention because it was a dark continent – without language, culture, system of government, philosophy or human dignity, prior to its colonization. Even when the colonialists and their apologists acknowledge the existence of these basic forms of humanity in Africa, they still downgrade and fetishize the peoples as barbaric, primitive, crude and evil. This epistemic assumption which forms the basis of Western configuration of the other has been contested by African writers such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Ben Okri.
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- Information
- Politics and Social JusticeAfrican Literature Today 32, pp. 20 - 32Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014
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