Afrikanische Literatur

Poetry. In reading this vast new collection by the prolific Iván Argüelles, written in ten months straddling 2017 and 2018, we participate in a universal mind with an oceanic breadth and impact unique in American poetry, rich with history, myth, vision, soul and sound.

This book examines South Africa's post-apartheid culture through the lens of affect theory in order to argue that the socio-political project of the "new" South Africa, best exemplified in their Truth and Reconciliation Commission Hearings, was fundamentally an affective, emotional project. Through the TRC hearings, which publicly broadcast the testimonies of both victims and perpetrators of gross human rights violations, the African National Congress government of South Africa, represented by Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, endeavoured to generate powerful emotions of contrition and sympathy in order to build an empathetic bond between white and black citizens, a bond referred to frequently by Tutu in terms of the African philosophy of interconnection: ubuntu. This book explores the representations of affect, and the challenges of generating ubuntu, through close readings of a variety of cultural products: novels, poetry, memoir, drama, documentary film and audio anthology.

This book examines the poetics of autobiographical masterpieces written by Leila Abouzeid, Hanan al-Shaykh, Samuel Shimon, Abd al-Rahman Munif, Salim Barakat, Mohamed Choukri and Hanna Abu Hanna. Sheetrit offers in-depth literary studies that expose each text's distinct strategy for life narrative.

Witches, Goddesses and Angry Spirits: The Politics of Spiritual Liberation in African Diaspora Women's Fiction explores African diaspora religious practices as vehicles for Africana women's spiritual transformation, using representative fictions by three contemporary writers of the African Americas who compose fresh models of female spirituality: Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) by Haitian American novelist Edwidge Danticat; Paradise (1998) by African American Nobel laureate Toni Morrison; and I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1992) by Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé. Author Maha Marouan argues that while these authors' works burst with powerful female figures-witches, goddesses, healers, priestesses, angry spirits-they also remain honest in reminding readers of the silences surrounding African diaspora women's realities and experiences of violence, often as a result of gendered religious discourses. To make sense of Africana women's experiences of the diaspora, this book operates from a transnational perspective that moves across national and linguistic boundaries as it connects the Anglophone, the Francophone, and the Creole worlds of the African Americas. In doing so, Marouan identifies crucial shared thematic concerns regarding the authors' engagement with religious frameworks-some Judeo-Christian, some not-heretofore unexamined in such a careful, comparative fashion.

Mqhayi dreams of the reunification of the Xhosa people under the leadership of Don Jadu, a high principled black statesman, in his utopian view of what it takes to create a great nation.

Asylum features interviews with sixteen Canadian refugees from around the world. The interviews are shaped into a five-act play in the likeness of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream to address poignant questions about what is true, what is real. Philosophers, artists, and politicians take the stage alongside the refugees to highlight stories of war, displacement, and being other.

Poetry. LOGOGRAPHY: A POETRY OMNIBUS brings together three collections of extraordinarily vigorous and electric poetry from the quicksilver mind of Anis Shivani: Confessions II, Lyric/Resistance, and The Art of Love.

Throughout the twentieth century, Nigerians have been writing about their travels within Nigeria using a variety of media and forms, from serialised newspaper travelogues to personal diaries, autobiographies and online narratives. These works offer important insights into how Nigerians have represented Nigeria to itself and to the world.This is the first book to examine the production of Nigerian travel narratives about Nigeria in the century from colonisation to independence. Rebecca Jones argues that we can read these texts both as the products of a local Nigerian print culture, and through their articulations with global travel writing traditions. Focusing on travel writing published from 1914 to 2014 in the Yoruba-speaking region of southwestern Nigeria, home to a well-established and prolific writing and print culture in both Yoruba and English, this cultural history of Nigerian travel comprises close readings of these works, and argues that the production of travel writing in the region can be read not simply as a foreign import, but as a cluster of genres with a cohesive local history.Writers discussed include Samuel Ajayi Crowther, I.B. Thomas, E.A. Akintan, Isaac Delano, D.O. Fagunwa, Amos Tutuola, Ben Okri, Babatunde Shadeko, Damilola Ajenifuja, Chibuzor Mirian Azubuike, Pelu Awofeso, Lape Soetan, Teju Cole, Adewale Maja-Pearce, Noo Saro-Wiwa, and the Invisible Borders collective.Rebecca Jones is a Lecturer in the Department of African Studies and Anthropology at the University of Birmingham.

Written in the early 1960s, Songs of Mihyar the Damascene is widely considered to be the apex of the modernist poetry movement in the Arab world, a radical departure from the rigid formal structures that had dominated Arabic poetry until the 1950s. Drawing not only on Western influences, such as T.S. Eliot and Nietzsche, but on the deep tradition and history of Arabic poetry, Adonis accomplished a masterful and unprecedented transformation of the forms and themes of Arabic poetry, initiating a profound revaluation of cultural and poetic traditions. Songs of Mihyar is a masterpiece of world literature that rewrites-through Mediterranean myths and renegade Sufi mystics-what it means to be an Arab in the modern world. 

Poetry. In this prodigious outpouring of short pieces, Marvin Cohen looks into every corner of human affairs, even the darkest - death, reproduction, evolution, friendship, grief, the vagaries of adaptation and survival - with a joyful spark that never goes out.

"This book is endorsed by the First Lady of Nigeria, Her Excellency, Dr. (Mrs.) Buhari."We Are The Blessings of Africa is a reawakening call on every African, home and abroad to unite in turning their diversity into a powerful solution for African issues. When we see ourselves as the blessings of our communities, our attitude about our individual roles changes. We see ourselves as the solution, not powerlessly depending on the government or outside aid.This book advocates for the empowerment of every African, especially the women, the youths, and the impoverished rural people most vulnerable to subjugation, victimization, and marginalization. Women must be fully engaged to eradicate poverty, gender inequality, and victimization of the vulnerable people in need.The book makes a clarion call for women to lead the sustainable enrichment of the family, Community, City, Country, and Continent for greatness so that Africa can compete in an evolved world.

This edition commits to the depths of black identities in modern black texts. The cultural reclamation of an African origin and/or roots as tied to the solemn remembrance of the Ancestor has demanded the intense attention of enlightened black writers for the social and psychic revaluation of their generation and others that follow. In this series we further examine the status of the oral performer in African traditional societies which encouraged a wide range of human expression to create identity for members of the community Africa -and we have proposed a challenge to sustain the methods of creative transmission through the continuing presence of these African performers who are living proofs of the survival of her oral traditions, especially in the propulsion of communicative action and the communicative strength of men, women and children in the community.

Many African countries achieved independence from their colonisers over five decades ago, but the people and the continent largely remain mere spectators in the arena of their own dance. The post-independence states are supposed to be sovereign, but the levers of economic and political powers still reside in the donor states. Not in many fora is the complex reality that defines Africa more trenchantly articulated than in imaginative literature produced about and on the continent. This is the crux of the essays collected in African Literature and the Future. The book reflects on Africa's past and present, addressing anxieties about the future through the epistemological lens of literature. The contributors peep ahead from a backward glance. They dissect the trend and tenor of politics and their impact on the socio-cultural and economic development of the continent as portrayed in imaginative writings over the years. One salient feature of African literature is the close affinity between art and politics in its polemics. This is well established in all the six essays in the book as the authors stress the interconnections between literature and society in their textual analyses. On the whole, there is an overwhelming feeling of angst and pessimism, but the authors perceive a glimmer of hope despite daunting odds, under different conditions. Thus, they depict the plausible fate of Africa in the twenty-first century, as informed by its ancient and recent past, gleaned from primary texts.

Silbenspiele sind ein weltweit verbreitetes Phänomen; auch in Afrika sind sie in vielen Sprachen bekannt und dokumentiert. Vor allem Kindern und Jugendlichen wird die belustigende Beschäftigung mit diesen 'Geheimsprachen' zugeschrieben. Das Buch widmet sich ihnen in zweifacher Hinsicht: Zum einen stellt es die formalen Bildungsregeln solcher Sprachen dar und systematisiert sie, zum anderen geht es auf die soziolinguistischen Gemeinsamkeiten dieses Phänomens ein. Im Anschluss daran werden Silbenspiele von ähnlichen sprachlichen Phänomenen wie Argots, Respektsprachen und Jugendsprachen abgegrenzt, mit denen sie sowohl Bildungsregeln als auch Funktionen teilen. Das Buch leistet damit einen Beitrag zur ganzheitlichen Betrachtung von Silbenspielen.

Challenging prevalent conceptualizations of modernity-which treat it either as a Western ideology imposed by colonialism or as a universal narrative of progress and innovation-this study instead offers close readings of the simultaneous performances and contestations of modernity staged in works by authors such as Rifa'a al-Tahtawi, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Tayeb Salih, Hanan al-Shaykh, Hamdi Abu Golayyel, and Ahmad Alaidy. In dialogue with affect theory, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis, the book reveals these trials to be a violent and ongoing confrontation with and within modernity. In pointed and witty prose, El-Ariss bridges the gap between Nahda (the so-called Arab project of Enlightenment) and postcolonial and postmodern fiction.

This landmark volume brings together a very rich harvest of forty critical essays on Cameroon literature by Cameroon literary scholars. The book is the result of the Second Conference on Cameroon Literature which took place at the University of Buea in 1994. The Buea conference was motivated by a determination to look at Cameroon literature straight into its face and criticize it using literary criteria of the strictest kind. Gone were the times when the criticism was complacent because it was believed that a nascent literature could easily be stifled by application of rather strict cannons of literary criticism. Both writers and critics had a lot to say. Subjects dealt with ranged from general topics on literature, survival and national identity, through specialized articles on prose, poetry, drama, translation, language, folklore, children's literature, Journalism and politics. It is the hope of the volume editors that the publication of these papers will instigate the kind of actions that were recommended and that the prolific nature of Cameroon literature will equally give rise to a prolific and robust criticism.

Wer als Europäer einen frankophonen Roman eines afrikanischen Schriftstellers liest, trifft auf eine ihm fremde erzählte Welt mit ihm fremden Begriffen aus den afrikanischen Kulturen. Hierzu analysiert und vergleicht die Autorin ein umfangreiches Bündel linguistischer, translationswissenschaftlicher, literarisch-poetischer und kulturspezifischer sowie interkultureller Fragestellungen zu den Afrikanismen in französischen Romanen der Moderne. Sie dienen als poetisch-rhetorisch verfeinerte Mittel, dem fremdkulturellen Leser die eigenen kulturellen Anliegen zu vermitteln, ohne die afrikanische Identität zu verleugnen. Zudem bietet der Band mit einer vergleichsfreundlichen Strukturierung differenzierte literarisch-sprachlich-kulturelle Informationen zu SchriftstellerInnen und ihren Werken aus 17 schwarzafrikanischen Staaten. Ein attraktives Glossar von literarischen Afrikanismen und ihren deutschen Äquivalenten rundet den Band ab.

The Sudanese peace agreement reached a crisis point in its final year. This book offers an analysis of the impact of the implementation of the agreement on different Sudanese communities and neighbouring regions.After a long process of peace negotiations the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was signed on 9 January 2005 between the Government of Sudan (GOS) and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A). The CPA raised initialhopes that it would be the foundation block for lasting peace in Sudan. This book compiles scholarly analyses of the implementation of the power sharing agreement of the CPA, of ongoing conflicts with particular respect to land issues, of the challenges of the reintegration of internally displaced people and refugees, and of the repercussions of the CPA in other regions of Sudan as well as in neighbouring countries. Elke Grawert is SeniorLecturer at the Institute for Intercultural & International Studies (InIIS), Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Bremen, Germany.