LIFT: The Journal of Literature and Performing Arts
LIFT: Journal of Literature and Performing Arts is an open access journal published in open access format under the Creative Commons License by the Department of Literature, Linguistics, Foreign Languages and Film Studies, for maximum dissemination and use. It welcomes only original research that has not been submitted to any other journal. Contributions must be in English (or translated into English by the author before submission), and articles are subjected to a review process where the author and the reviewers remain anonymous, and only in special circumstances is the doctrine of anonymity not invoked.
Orality and Informality in Video-Film Distribution in Kenya
The history of Cinema in Africa is clearly one of marginalization at all levels, including film making, distribution and access. As various film scholars have noted these processes of exclusion were closely tied to the colonial and imperialist interests of domination and exploitation and later the ideological concerns of the African postcolonial state which not only inherited colonial structures and policies but employed these instruments to privilege the political class and serve the interests of the powerful and wealthy citizenship. This paper examines the strategies employed by the traders marginalized from access to formal structures of distribution of films who have established informal modes of transaction with their equally economically disenfranchised clients in Eldoret town. We employ Erving Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical framework to analyze data obtained through ethnographic field study involving interaction with traders and their clients in the streets of the town through observation, interviews and personal testimonies. Our findings are that (i) Informal trade in video is a consequence of marginalization in access to films (ii) There is a close link between informal trade in video films and the broader Jua Kali informal systems which can be traced back to strategies of coping in urban economies established by marginalized African populations during the colonial era (iii) Despite the digital transformation in the way cinema is produced and watched, the in-formalization of film distribution continues in Kenya and traders find innovative ways of linking with their clients (iv) Orality which has been part of the African cultural heritage of communication and social interaction remains an important mode of transaction in informal video trade in Kenya.
Unsung Hero(ine)ism in the Making of a Nation
This article delves into the exploration of unsung Hero(ine)ism, with particular focus on the role of heroines, in the context of nation-building through an in-depth analysis of Muthoni Likimani's work, Fighting Without Ceasing. Likimani's self-narrative serves as a rich source for understanding the often-overlooked contributions of individuals in shaping a nation's destiny. We uncover and elucidate the unsung heroine(s) portrayed in the text, shedding light on their pivotal roles in the making of a nation. Through a close reading of Likimani's autobiography, the paper unveils the nuanced facets of Hero(ine)ism, emphasizing the multifaceted efforts that go beyond conventional narratives. It underscores the importance of recognizing and acknowledging these unsung heroines as integral contributors to the collective story of nationhood, thereby enriching our understanding of the complex dynamics involved in the formation of a nation.
Images of Women in Agikuyu 'Mwomboko' Poetry
The position of women in African societies has been contested in terms of their treatment in social and poetic discourse in contemporary society. The case of traditional and modern poetic dances is spelt out in the composing and rendition of Mwomboko poetry of the Agikuyu people of Mount Kenya Region. The objectives of this study are: (a) To assess how select compositions of Mwomboko poetry spell out treatment of women in Mount Kenya region community; (b) To analyze how figurative language is applied in select compositions of Mwomboko poetry to approximate images of women in Mount Kenya region community, and (c) To explore the innovativeness of oral poets’ poetic architecture in charting out the position of women in contemporary society. Popular artists in Africa have tended to be the mouth pieces of revealing the societal structures that spell out the relationship between men and women as shown through poetic discourse. The place of performance has emerged as a central pivot for linking up members of the community in their efforts to understand their worldview. The emergence of modern performers has created a new forum for capturing the imagination of target recipients in an open multi–ethnic audience. The audience has been mainly in hotels, motels and bars, social halls, wedding reception halls/grounds, political rally grounds, and church service halls among others. The current work hinges on the level of deconstruction theory as seen through feminist and gender lens in contemporary times. The images of women revealed in Mwomboko poetry are constructions by architects of the traditional cum modern poetic genre, and the findings reveal a move towards balanced portrayal of both genders in emergent renditions. The study uses descriptive techniques in analysis of figurative language applied by traditional and modern singers to approximate old meanings to new meanings in their performances as far as images of women are represented.
Women Navigating Minority Status in Selected Stories in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s "The Thing Around Your Neck"
This paper provides an intertextual reading of three stories purposely selected from Chimamanda Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neckagainst the theoretical backdrop of her feminist treatise ‘A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions’. The ‘Manifesto’ is her theoretical attempt to condense the practical application of African feminism into the modern context within which her stories are set. In this paper, I distil the practical implications of Adichie’s postulations on a feminist manifesto through a reading of selected stories in The Thing Around Your Neck. I rely on a close reading of the text, in which key concerns and aesthetic approaches of African feminism are identified and critically assessed. Through the three short stories from the collection, namely ‘Imitation’, ‘The Arrangers of Marriage’ and ‘The Headstrong Historian’ Adichie demonstrates her feminist philosophy: In ‘Imitation’ and ‘The Arrangers of Marriage’, for example, she tells the stories of two women who are both physically and psychologically uprooted from their cultures and forced to struggle for their identities and place in society by circumventing the patriarchal order. They embrace sisterhood as one of the strategies to overcome their segregation. These women also refuse to be defined by society and instead choose to assert their identities and value. They are more than just mothers or wives of rich Nigerian men. In ‘The Headstrong Historian’, Adichie dramatizes the story of a woman who, despite living in a traditional and highly patriarchal society where women have no voice, is able to rise and confound men (both native and foreign). Therefore, the most engaging feature in Adichie’s writing is how she uses marriage as a dramatic stage to test out her theories on feminism and gender issues and to demonstrate how women navigate their minority status.
Narrating Feminine Rebellion, Dynamism and Resilience in Meja Mwangi’s "The Last Plague"
The postcolonial literature that underscores feminist realization has used varied ways to engage and interrogate the many aspects of the fight against the enduring grip of patriarchy. However, as this paper shows, to defeat the plague, believable human effort laced with such enduring virtues as dynamism and resilience should be cultivated. This paper argues that Meja Mwangi’s The Last Plagueis an inspiring metaphor that, with a slant, narrates female rebellion, dynamism and resilience in taming HIV/AIDS in the context of cultural and patriarchal resistance. What Janet and right-minded people like Frank do to have people accept the plague is real and can be deduced through acceptance and change of people’s sexual behaviour. Thus, using Psychoanalytic and Feminism theories, this paper examines the apparent resistance to combating HIV/AIDS and the reasons why Janet rebels and, with evident dynamism and resilience, at first and second, take a bold step to fight the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Using The Last Plague as the unit of analysis, the paper utilizes a close reading textual analysis methodology for data collection, analysis, discussion and presentation. This paper argues that ‘The Last Plague’ is a metaphor for HIV/AIDS, and in Mwangi’s thinking, this disease is wiping humanity to the bubonic plague level.
Most postmodern authors narrate societal ills by conferring foregrounded traits to selected characters. Often, the traits ascribed to these individual characters reflect events that affect the bigger or larger society outside the text. Published in 2019, Yvonne A. Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea, to a great degree, encompasses this aspect of postmodern fiction. The novel revolves around the life of the Pate island-born Ayaana. From her relationship with her mother, Munira; to her obsession with Muhiddin; to her experience with rape; to her expedition at sea en route to China then to Turkey; and her eventual experiences in foreign lands and back to Pate, Ayaana’s experiences provide the image of a character whose tribulations depict the challenges faced by the poor, girls/women and black minority people in the postmodern world. This paper analyzes the extent to which the author uses Ayaana’s experiences as a microcosm of Africa as a minority in the global socio-political and economic interactions. Guided by Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak”, the paper explores incidences where this character [and others] is treated as “the other” and establish how this treatment accurately serves as a representation of the treatment of Africa as a minority in global affairs.
Dominant literary conversations like post-structuralism have crowned the literary writer as an impartial and reliable voice for the voiceless in oppressive cultural settings. Since the marginal group is weak and cannot speak for themselves, the intellectual is given express authority to articulate their issues. Emerging voices have nonetheless questioned the author’s eligibility to speak for the marginal groups. Given the diversity typical of the marginal group, these voices doubt the author’s ability to perfectly represent it. This article extends the conversation that the literary writer lacks the capacity to speak for the marginal group because of their heterogeneity. Using the postcolonial concept of representation, the article overturns the literary writer’s articulation of issues affecting marginal groups in Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood, Nuruddin Farah’s Close Sesame, Brian Chikwava’s Harare North and Zukiswa Wanner’s London, Cape Town, Joburg. The ideas of Gayatri Spivak will form the theoretical basis of interpretation. One major finding of the study is that the author cannot perfectly represent the marginal groups without silencing some of them.
Domestic Workers and the Politics of Space Within the Household in Ferdinand Oyono’s "Houseboy"
Domestic workers have constantly been disregarded within the domestic space. However, owing to their immense contribution to the smooth running of the household, this disregard comes at a cost. The mistreatment of the house servants inevitably results to the detriment of the home owners or the employers. The frosty relationship that frequently exists between the domestic workers has been a subject of concern for some post-colonial Africa literary writers. Literary critics have however paid minimal attention to the tense relationship that exists between house servants and their employers. Critics have chosen to concentrate on the more ‘serious issues’ of colonialism pitting the colonizer versus the colonized. This research paper epitomizes the plight of domestic servants in the course of re-reading Ferdinand Oyono’s Houseboy (1966). The tools of analysis employed are Karl Marx and Frederick Engel’s strand of Marxism.
This paper examines symbolism in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart to unravel the two faces of colonisation in Africa. In Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, colonisation, on the one hand, is a symbol of conquest, subjugation and marginalisation of Umuofia clan and Igbo society by West and arguably, on the other hand, a symbol of the similar process for Africa. Therefore, this paper uses Historicism as an ideological praxis to examine the Umuofia-Igbo’s colonial encounter with the West while drawing some parallelism to Africa’s colonisation by the West. Artistically, Achebe has delved into the history to present colonial encounter with Africa, especially the Umuofia-Igbo society, the latter’s reactions to this crippling process and the far-reaching consequences on its social, political and economic organisation. In Achebe’s thinking, reflections and presentation “Things Fell Apart” for Umuofia-Igbo in the aftermath of this encounter. This paper contends that Africa’s encounter with the West from the late 18th century to the early 20th century is a similar narrative. Thus, Achebe utilizes proverbs, allegorical forms and anecdotes among other stylistic devices to underline symbolism to advance the colonisation narrative in Umuofia-Igbo and Africa at large. Indeed, the focus of this paper in most part is on the allegory of colonialism: The Double Edged Symbolism of Colonisation in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Ultimately, the paper reiterates its central argument that colonisation in whatever form is racist, exploitative, impoverishing and dehumanizing to the colonized.
Informational Social Power in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s "Purple Hibiscus"
This paper establishes how Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Purple Hibiscus (Fourth Estate, 2004) depicts the use of informational social power as an alternative hegemonic trope that characters rely on in the negotiation for social power. The study is justified by the fact that studies on Purple Hibiscus have tended to deal with the gender-based portrayal of patriarchal power while ignoring a sociological approach to the study of power in the text. The gap addressed by the paper is hence an elucidation of how manipulation of knowledge as provided, supported, and underscored by the discourses of one’s orientation and background, is responsible for the tragic twist of the text under study. The theoretical lens used in the paper is Michel Foucault’s idea of power and discourse. This study is ‘interpretivist’ with primary data on informational power collected through a reading of the primary text while secondary data is acquired from a reading of related print and electronic sources. The conclusion reached is that the author uses different aspects of traditions to entrench informational social power and by so doing contest influence that hinges on modernity and its attendant indifference.
Most studies done on the subject of deformity and gender always seek to investigate the extent to which society generates and sustains biasness against minorities. They highlight the conditions and factors that engender biasness and segregation plus the resultant stigma. This study however, takes the view that oral narratives do go beyond the mere exposure of cultural/social limitations; that they, in effect project more vibrant, incisive and radical alternatives to matters oppression. The essay takes cognizant of the fact that language is a formidable force in social construction that shapes identities and influences perceptions. Language is not only a purveyor of social attitudes but a crucial tool in engineering and sustaining created attitudes. In this study, I use two oral narratives, “Simbi Nyaima” recorded by Onyango-Ogutu (1974) and “Simbi” recorded by Jane Nandwa (1983), to reflect on deformity and disability as a form of marginalization. Both narratives are centered on women with some form of physical disability or limitation, which inspires socio-cultural distancing, fear or revilement. Both are doubly marginalized: as women and as deformed. They suffer open and hostile discrimination. Specifically, the essay seeks to: First, analyze the dynamics of social construction and labeling. Second, analyze the tension/ironies between the dynamics of good and evil as they are given physical identity and value. Thirdly, demonstrate how the selected oral narratives transpose the dominant/minority relations and images in society.
The Treatment of Minority Rights in African Literature in Selected Texts
The eleven articles in this volume cover a wide variety of the minority issues in African Literature. Two articles deal with materials from oral texts, namely Narratives and Songs, two others handle Ngozi Adichie’s texts – Purple Hibiscus and The Thing Around Your Neck – while Achebe comes in with Things Fall Apart, Oyono with Houseboy, as Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood, Farah’s Close Sesame, Chikwava’s Harare North and Wanner’s London, Cape Town, Joburg also earn a prominent place in focusing on minorities. Yvonne Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea, Meja Mwangi’s The Last Plague, and Noadia Muthoni Gachanja Likimani’s autobiography Fighting Without Ceasing too receive substantial attention from researchers in this volume, while the film subsector receives its fair share of analysis from the article by Waliaula et al. From the oral to the written, from the 1960’s to our contemporary times, from West to South to East Africa, not forgetting the diaspora, this volume comprehensively tackles the thorny subject of minority issues in African literature, and opens up space for more research in this area.
“Tell Your Neighbour Life is Very Tricky”
There has been phenomenal growth in the entertainment and creative industries in Kenya, especially since the turn of this millennium. The emergence and rising popularity of comedy shows in the country attests to this trend. To illustrate this development in Kenya, this paper offers a close reading of performances by MCA Tricky, a comedian who appears on Churchill Show, which is broadcast on Nation Television (NTV) and whose recorded videos are available on the YouTube channel of the same name. Focusing on various aspects of humor and the trickster motif, the multilayered nuances and meanings of these performances are examined. Based on everyday life experiences, the Kenyan audience can easily identify with and relate to the jokes and comedy of MCA Tricky. MCA Tricky satirizes the actions and choices of various characters in the urban space of Nairobi, including the street boys, whom his persona exemplifies. Following Bakhtin’s notion of “carnivalesque,” the comic performances of MCA Tricky can be considered as subversions of dominant narratives and political power. These comedies generate humor particularly due to how Tricky fashions his persona along the lines of the trickster figure, found in many traditional African oral narratives, through the use of such techniques as parody, paronyms, puns, and ellipsis. By mocking their actions and ways of thinking, Tricky lets members of the audience laugh at their own miscalculations and bad decisions. At the same time, the audience can obtain insight into situations in their lives that are similar to the ones Tricky dramatizes. Just as his stage name suggests, the performances of MCA Tricky portray him as tricky and streetwise. Ironically, he often finds himself in tricky circumstances. For instance, in the episode where he addresses a letter to the president with the aim of applying for employment, the boundaries separating two social categories—the ordinary person and the political elite—are demolished. But this closeness to the presidency, albeit through epistolary form, does not alter his status as a street boy. All in all, most of MCA Tricky’s performances help to promote a democratic mindset among the citizenry, since the underprivileged can be seen here to subvert hegemonic discourses. To arrive at these conclusions, I outline nine steps in one of MCA Tricky’s performances, “MCA Tricky Writes A Letter to the President.” Clearly, what this episode exemplifies is that comedy serves the dual function of entertainment as well as sociopolitical critique.
Quaseilhas (“Almost Islands”), a theater play written by Afro-Brazilian author Diego Araújo, premiered at Barbalho Fort, Salvador da Bahia (Brazil), in April 2018. The set consists of a three-room wooden shed placed in the courtyard of a historic castle in Salvador da Bahia, designed to contribute to the entanglement of various memories inscribed in time and space: as the spectators can only attend the play in one room at a time, they have only limited access to the overall events of the play which moreover is transmitted in an unknown language, namely Yorúbà. The shed also refers to the stilts built close to the shore, where the majority of the population is of Afro descent. Araújo borrows features from the alárinjótheatrical form, which blends performance, song, dance, projections of clips, and music, drawing the spectators into a vortex of a polyphonous and intermedial process of remembering fragments of the Middle Passage, slavery, and the difficult living conditions of socially marginalized communities. In its aesthetic, the play also refers to Afrofuturism, highlighting how the memory of the past should be the basis for reimagining the future.
East African Indian Writing and the Worlding of Diasporas
This paper proceeds from the understanding that artworks can constitute worlds that are different from present realities. In this process of world-making, art and literature, in general, constitute fictional spaces that either contest the existing ones or are relational to them. What this means, then, is that the process of “worlding” can equally be understood as that of undoing hegemonic formations and spaces. This article explores how diasporic writings produce political and cultural realities—imagined and utopic—that contest and transform relations based on national rootedness and territorial logic. I will use the term “world-making” to mean the artworks’ ability to contest and transform existing relations of power—whether or not these relations are subsumed under such categories as gender, religion, ethnicity, nation, class, or race—to call alternative temporalities into being. In this sense, I take diaspora-making as a constitutive process that seeks to challenge certain dominant premises,including capitalist globalization, that structure being in the world or being of the world.
Dividual Processes of Worlding from Philosophical, Sociological, and Aesthetic Perspectives
This philosophical essay starts with an explanation of the concepts of “world” and “worldliness” in the philosophy of Heidegger in order to trace their transformation into processes of worlding in the philosophies of Deleuze & Guattari and Edouard Glissant. Their reinterpretations insist on the temporal, relational, and composite-cultural character of processes of worlding and on the necessity of the respective actors and agents becoming minor, other, multiple, and heterogeneous. Secondly, the essay traces the explanation of sociopolitical and digitalized processes in sociological and philosophical texts: the concept of “world society” as defined by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck, characterized as a positive form of transnational collaboration between different nongovernmental organizations. As in Deleuze’s negative assessment of digital control together with the constraint of personal flexibilization and dividuation in his final text (from the mid-1990s), the late Beck also provides rather negative descriptions of more recent processes of worlding. According to his analysis, these are provoked by global economic, technological, and political players and national interests exporting risks and catastrophes to neighboring countries, and subjecting certain people and populations to precarious dividual border existences. Finally, the text tries to uncover dividual processes as defined by Deleuze, including dividual processes in aesthetic articulations—in film, art, and exhibitions—due to their temporal, composite-cultural, and digital character and the inevitable mutual appropriations and resonances between these different aesthetic manifestations. Once again, using the concept of dividuation, this essay also diagnoses trends of aesthetic repetition and differentiation as well as of progressive homogenization due to international exchange and competition in the art sphere.
Artistic Imaginaries of War in East Africa
This article explores the idea of “worlding” as a form of agency in war-intervention imaginaries in East Africa. The article argues that these imaginaries draw their materiality from experiences of war and in return attempt to provide these “worlds” of wars with new and alternative meanings and possibilities. It is these new alternative meanings and possibilities that indeed constitute peace culture. The agency of (re)imagining a peace culture is what constitutes “worlding.” That is, the power of the imaginary to transform lived realities as found in the worlds of these artists as they know and experience them, and in return, the worlds their imaginations (en)vision. Thus, “worldings” in these war imaginaries are construed as a means of devising a world by choosing its chaotic and dysfunctional present while similarly aiming at its transformative future. “Worlding” in a work of art is the process of bringing into being or “setting up” a world or worlds; it is therefore the process of defamiliarizing the world as we know it, investing it with new meanings, and opening it to new possibilities. In demonstrating how “worlding” manifests as an agency of peace culture, the following imaginaries of war are the key subjects of analysis: Ni Sisi, a film for community development; the play Thirty Years of Bananas, by Alex Mukulu; and the novel Murambi, the Book of Bones, by Boubacar Boris Diop.
Unraveling Dichotomies in The Indian Ocean World
Today’s world is predominantly governed by a binary order that has estranged human beings from their natural environment. However, a fundamental paradigm change and ecological vision are increasingly being put forward by intellectuals and artists in order to sustain a viable planet. On the geographical and geostrategic levels, too, the changing force fields are inducing a reassessment of prevailing worldviews. The Indian Ocean is one such case in point. The literature, visual art, and concepts from Mauritius considered in this article problematize the culturally produced attitudes of human beings vis-à-vis their environmental counterparts, and question simplistic binaries such as land/sea, human/nonhuman, etc. They place emphasis on fluidity rather than rootedness, on connection rather than disjunction, and suggest new perspectives and modes of being. Informed mostly by an animistic cosmovision based on yogic notions that date back to pre-Vedic times and have condensed into what may be described as contemporary “Indian thought,” these novels and artworks explore alternative relationalities and reframe ontologies whereby environmental empathy, bonding, and interchangeability are expressed. This paper discusses the reconfiguration of the geopolitical framework as well as that of the imaginary and argues that a shift in perception is the key to redefining the relationship between the human and the more-than-human world.
My aim is to bring into conversation two novels, each by a renowned author from Zanzibar: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea (published in 2001) and Shafi Adam Shafi’s Vuta n’kuvute (“Tug of War,” published in 1999), which offer literary imaginings of Zanzibari worlds in the turbulent 1960s. The two novels—written in English and Swahili, respectively—have never been brought into relation with each other, since they belong to two different literary worlds. Questioning this dichotomy, however, I will show moments where the novels overlap, situate Gurnah’s By the Sea in a local Zanzibari context, and sketch out the more global panorama and multitude of narratives in Shafi’s Vuta n’kuvute, while also drawing attention to the novels’ differences. Lastly, instead of ceaselessly confirming its own (Western-dominated) paradigms of analysis, I argue that Indian Ocean literary studies needs to take into account greater literary diversity in terms of language, narrative, and historical perspective in order to gain a more diverse perspective on Indian Ocean worlds.
A World(-System) of Debris: Ruins, Remains, and Self-Writing in Narratives across The Indian Ocean
Addressing critical debates within the scholarship on Indian Ocean studies, African literary studies, and world literature, this article offers a reflection on the idea of ruins, remains (Stoler, 2013, 2016), and self-writing (Mbembe, 2002) as critical and aesthetic concepts through which visual and literary narratives register the past and problematize the future, suggesting new critical possibilities to address and analyze contemporary African literary writing. Addressing the photography project Mosquito Coast: Travels from Maputo to Mogadishu (Guillaume Bonn, 2015) and the literary works of contemporary authors such as Nuruddin Farah, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and João Paulo Borges Coelho, the article aims to problematize Indian Ocean literatures as a field of study and, therefore, to propose a redefinition of literary and visual narratives within the Indian Ocean as modes of registering the combined and uneven development of the capitalistic world-system. Following the theoretical formulations proposed by the Warwick Research Collective (WreC), the article establishes a counterpoint between the critical debate on world literature and Indian Ocean studies in order to address the Indian Ocean world and its literary forms within a materialist line of thought.
The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Reimagination of Colombian Identity in the Poetry of Jorge Artel
The literary tradition of South America has generally been imagined and legitimized in terms of the continent’s Hispano-American cultural heritage, epistemologies, and genealogies. Amid this hegemonic tradition, Black and Indigenous cultural presences and creative imaginaries have been relegated in favor of Hispano-American worldviews. Artistic creations by these “other” subjects have long been considered secondary to the Creole/mestizo canons, and have thus not benefited from the same degree of critical attention and circulation in mainstream literary circles. However, the trend is gradually changing, at least with regard to Afro-Colombian literature, as new generations of creative voices have gradually gained space and interrogated the generally accepted paradigms of Colombian identity. In the same vein, works long shunned by critics and the reading public have been reevaluated and granted increased editorial attention, critical scrutiny, and legitimizing awards. Jorge Artel’s poetry reinscribes Black bodies, cultural symbols, epistemologies, and legacies of the transatlantic slave trade into Colombian national history. His poetry, which is inscribed within the negrista tradition, reexamines the Colombian Atlantic space, especially his home city of Cartagena de Indias, questioning entrenched cultures of marginalization. His collection, Tambores en la Noche (Drums in the Night), first published in 1940, can be considered a reimagination of that city’s memorial cartography in order to underline the vestiges of enslaved Africans and their continuous configuration of Colombian national identity.
The Slave-Trade Trauma in Léonera Miano’s "La Saison de l’ombre" (Season of the Shadow)
Recent developments in trauma studies call for increased research on postcolonial literatures to expand the scope of trauma theory to the experiences of non-Western societies. Despite numerous memorial initiatives, the slave trade remains relatively unaddressed in the Francophone literary sphere. Contemporary novelists have started to break the silence on this outrageous episode of African history and contribute to completing the puzzle of slave history which, now more than ever, needs the Francophone African perspective. This article will focus on Léonora Miano’s La Saison de l’ombre (2013). It will examine the notable aesthetic features of the slave trade and the ethical accounts through which the author, as a Franco-Cameroonian novelist, revisits the traumatic experience of the slave trade. This analysis will draw from trauma theories and postcolonial models of trauma to understand the tragedy of the slave trade and its effects on the African memory-building and explore the new avenue that African literature in French may open.
In this article, I reflect on the reframing of objects in museums. In a Western context, objects of African provenance seem to oscillate between being categorized as artworks and as artifacts. My main objective is to delineate how these categories were historically distinguished, and what contributed to that process. By examining current exhibitions, I demonstrate that this legacy adds a problematic dimension to contemporary museum displays. The problem is, firstly, that only these two categories exist; and secondly, that the distinction between these categories is still linked to distinct display practices that carry on a colonial legacy. This article thus contributes to the discussion of the current transformation of ethnographic museums into postcolonial museums of global art history.
This article draws on my PhD fieldwork, carried out in late 2019, for which I interviewed just under fifty Zanzibaris who were all involved in the production, performance, publication, and/or criticism of poetic works in Zanzibar. Poetry on the Swahili coast has been highly regarded for centuries and has formed a key part of knowledge production in Swahili society. Poetry remains ubiquitous in Zanzibar, as testified by the sheer quantity of poets who continue to produce, perform, and publish. These poets and their poetry, along with the relevant social and political institutions, play out struggles in a space that intersects all strata of society as they compete for literary capital or relevance. This article uses Pascale Casanova’s idea of a literary “world” or “space” to examine how a specifically Zanzibari poetic space functions, using two examples of poetic practices within this world. In particular, the article seeks to answer the following questions: how do artists, institutions, and poetry within this world relate to one another; what rules or norms govern this space; and how and why are these being adapted or developed to suit modern concerns?
… in the poetics of Relation, one who is errant (who is no longer traveler, discoverer, or conqueror) strives to know the totality of the world yet already knows he will never accomplish this—and knows that is precisely where the threatened beauty of the world resides (Glissant, 1997, p. 20).
Pre-Texts of Black Intellectual Tradition
Any intellectual tradition, it may be argued, emerges through constant acts of transgression, translation and appropriation of prior epistemological positions. These prior epistemological positions may be thought as constituting points of reference for emerging traditions, in fact as pre-texts around and against which new textualities (traditions) announce their presence and distinctiveness. In the context of African literary tradition, which is my concern here, I use the term pre-texts to refer to both oral (African) and written (European) traditions, themselves already inscribing multiple traditions, and whose presence in African texts give the later a hybrid identity.
Navigating the Worlds of John Ruganda’s "The Burdens" and "Black Mamba"
Elam contends that the world of drama is constructed relative to the world of actuality, which the performer and spectator of drama inhabit. He says the dramatic world “is a spatio-temporal elsewhere represented as though actually present for the audience” but it is counterfactual; not real or factual (Elam, 1987, p.99). The interpretation of the dramatic world, therefore, is based on the conventionality of the world of actuality. This is to say that we access the world of drama from the position of the world of actuality. “The spectator assumes that the represented world, unless otherwise indicated, will obey the logical and physical laws of his own world,” (p. 104). The spectator, it is assumed, enjoys a shared semantic and cultural context with the dramatis personae of the dramatic world. This obtains because the semantic and cultural interactions that are observed in the dramatic world are modeled on those of the world of actuality. It is this shsred cultural awareness and socialization of the individual that enable the spectator to fill in the gaps that exist in the world of drama in order to make the same world complete and meaningful. This paper explores how past experiences of characters in John Ruganda’s plays, The Burdens and Black Mamba,bring into perspective the bearing their past has on their present and future.
Memory, The Return of the Repressed and Healing in John Ruganda’s "The Floods"
Memory, the agency of speech and the impossibility of forgetting traumatic experiences is central towards the healing process of survivors of violence. Witnessing through narration, although somewhat traumatizing and damaging in itself, is ironically therapeutic and the only way towards coming to terms with a painful past. This article interrogates how memory and remembering is not only a healing process for victims of abuse in an abusive state but also as a strategy that John Ruganda uses to testify to/against a tyranny of the past in “The Floods” to preserve a nation’ collective memory of repression in a violent political era.
Trans-Generational Apartheid Pain in Zwelethu Radebe’s Film "The Hangman"
The film makers’ contention is that “The Hangman’s” central theme is family, family secrets and the need for communication which is deeply imbedded in the storyline of the film, the sentiments of secrecy and a lack of dialogue in the South African society seem contradictory. This is because South Africa’s efforts for reconciliation after apartheid have been lauded world-wide. The establishment of a national platform where perpetrators and victims were able to tell of the horrors of apartheid regardless of political affiliation, class, race or tribe through South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is celebrated as having helped the country to reconcile, heal and move forward. The South African model has inspired ‘other similar efforts around the world’ especially as a ‘gold standard for how a divided society with a violent past might work through that past and move forward’ has been set by this model (Mary Kay Magistad – 2017). It would therefore be expected that South Africa should have moved on from this dark past after such efforts which have been lauded as largely successful. Least of all, the horrors and pain of the system should not be haunting millennial South Africans. Of course, many scholars including Desmond Tutu, the chair of Truth and reconciliation Commission (TRC) have accepted that the effort was borne with ‘challenges and limitations’ which resulted in a failure to meet its overall objective of healing, reconciliation and restorative justice. Magistad (2017) points out that the country ‘has learned over time that working through a complicated past takes time, and is still taking time.’ This paper therefore reads this film as a continuation of the TRC’s efforts through dialogue and national testimony of the horrors of apartheid.
The South African playwright Athol Fugard has crafted more than twenty five plays based on Apartheid South Africa, each of them prescribing a different solution to this malady known as Apartheid for both his non-white and white characters. The three film plays selected for this paper explore the period when the playwright seemed to suggest that self-exile could effectively work against apartheid policies, so his characters withdraw from the community and into themselves as a way of escaping the harsh conditions they find themselves in. The study adopts psycho-analytic theory as propounded by Sigmund Freud and enhanced by Carl Gustav Jung to explore the psychological conditions of the characters as they react to their physical environments.