African Literature - Recent Titles from Ohio University Press

The Sacred Door and Other Stories

Sat, 01 Dec 2007

The Sacred Door and Other Stories (2007)
Cameroon Folktales of the Beba

By Makuchi

The Sacred Door and Other Stories: Cameroon Folktales of the Beba offers readers a selection of folktales infused with riddles, proverbs, songs, myths, and legends, using various narrative techniques that capture the vibrancy of Beba oral traditions. Makuchi retells the stories that she heard at home when she was growing up in her native Cameroon.

The collection of thirty-four folktales of the Beba showcases a wide variety of stories that capture the richness and complexities of an agrarian society’s oral literature and traditions. Revenge, greed, and deception are among the themes that frame the story lines in both new and familiar ways. In the title story, a poor man finds himself elevated to king. The condition for his continued success is that he not open the sacred door. This tale of temptation, similar to the story of Pandora’s box, concludes with the question, “What would you have done?”

Makuchi relates the stories her mother told her so that readers can make connections between African and North American oral narrative traditions. These tales reinforce the commonalities of our human experiences without discounting our differences.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/The+Sacred+Door+and+Other+Stories.
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Swahili beyond the Boundaries

Thu, 15 Mar 2007

Swahili beyond the Boundaries (2007)
Literature, Language, and Identity

By Alamin Mazrui

Africa is a marriage of cultures: African and Asian, Islamic and Euro-Christian. Nowhere is this fusion more evident than in the formation of Swahili, Eastern Africa’s lingua franca, and its cultures. Swahili beyond the Boundaries: Literature, Language, and Identity addresses the moving frontiers of Swahili literature under the impetus of new waves of globalization in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These momentous changes have generated much theoretical debate on several literary fronts, as Swahili literature continues to undergo transformation in the mill of human creativity.

Swahili literature is a hybrid that is being reconfigured by a conjuncture of global and local forces. As the interweaving of elements of the colonizer and the colonized, this hybrid formation provides a representation of cultural difference that is said to constitute a “third space,” blurring existing boundaries and calling into question established identitarian categorizations. This cultural dialectic is clearly evident in the Swahili literary experience as it has evolved in the crucible of the politics of African cultural production.

However, Swahili beyond the Boundaries demonstrates that, from the point of view of Swahili literature, while hybridity evokes endless openness on questions of home and identity, it can simultaneously put closure on specific forms of subjectivity. In the process of this contestation, a new synthesis may be emerging that is poised to subject Swahili literature to new kinds of challenges in the politics of identity, compounded by the dynamics and counterdynamics of post–Cold War globalization.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Swahili+beyond+the+Boundaries.
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Rewriting Modernity

Wed, 26 Jul 2006

Rewriting Modernity (2006)
Studies in Black South African Literary History

By David Attwell

Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History connects the black literary archive in South Africa—from the nineteenth-century writing of Tiyo Soga to Zakes Mda in the twenty-first century—to international postcolonial studies via the theory of transculturation, a position adapted from the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz.

David Attwell provides a welcome complication of the linear black literary history—literature as a reflection of the process of political emancipation—that is so often presented. He focuses on cultural transactions in a series of key moments and argues that black writers in South Africa have used print culture to map themselves onto modernity as contemporary subjects, to negotiate, counteract, reinvent, and recast their positioning within colonialism, apartheid, and the context of democracy.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Rewriting+Modernity.
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Broken Lives and Other Stories

Fri, 01 Aug 2003

Broken Lives and Other Stories (2003)

By Anthonia C. Kalu

In her startling collection of short stories, Broken Lives and Other Stories, Anthonia C. Kalu creates a series of memorable characters who struggle to hold d isplaced but dynamic communities together in a country that is at war with itself.

Broken Lives and Other Stories presents a portrait of the ordinary women, children, and men whose lives have been battered by war in their homeland. Written in response to the Nigerian Civil War, known on the Igbo side as Ogu Biafra--the Biafran War--this collection focuses on the everyday conditions of the local people and how their personal situations became entangled in national crises. The stories capture a diversity of issues, from the implications of self-rule and the presence of soldiers among civilians, to masquerades, air raids, and rape.

Through her riveting narratives, Kalu draws the reader into the depths of some of Africa's most troubling issues, such as the concern for safety during the frequent outbreaks of hostilities, which can range from civil unrest to armed combat. How do young people, women, and the elderly cope during those crises? Are the struggles for national political power greater than the everyday struggle for decent living by the person on the street?

While conveying the vitality and joy of Africa's women and youth, Broken Lives and Other Stories also examines the impact of the brain drain caused by wars and instability within the continent itself. Both the war against women and women¿s constant war to survive in contemporary Africa are brought into sharp focus throughout these stories.

For readers interested in the last thirty-five years of unrest across Africa, this collection is essential reading.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Broken+Lives+and+Other+Stories.
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Voices from Madagascar/Voix de Madagascar

Tue, 01 Apr 2003

Voices from Madagascar/Voix de Madagascar (2003)
An Anthology of Contemporary Francophone Literature/Anthologie de littérature francophone contemporaine

Edited by Jacques Bourgeacq and Liliane Ramarosoa

There is currently in Madagascar a rich literary production (short stories, poetry, novels, plays) that has not yet reached the United States for lack of diffusion outside the country. Until recently, Madagascar suffered from political isolation resulting from its breakup with France in the 1970s and the eighteen years of Marxism that followed.

With little hope that their voices would be heard outside the island, writers nevertheless have continued to express themselves in French (alongside a literature written in the Malagasy language). Malagasy literature in French had begun in the colonial era with three poets: Jean–Joseph Rabearivelo, Jacques Rabemananjara, and Flavien Ranaivo, all three presented in Léopold Senghor’s celebrated Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (1948).

More recently, although a few Malagasy writers living outside the country have been published in France, the bulk of Malagasy literature today has remained largely unpublished, circulating locally mostly in manuscript form. Voices from Madagascar will bring a wide selection of these texts, both in French and in English, to the North American public.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/0896802183.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Ayi Kwei Armah, Radical Iconoclast

Fri, 15 Dec 2000

Ayi Kwei Armah, Radical Iconoclast (2000)
Pitting the Imaginary Worlds against the Actual

By Ode Ogede

Ghanaian novelist, essayist, and short-story writer Ayi Kwei Armah has won international recognition as one of Africa’s most articulate writers. In this book, Ode Ogede argues that previous critics have misinterpreted the aesthetic and literary influences that have shaped Armah’s artistic vision and overlooked his most significant and valuable contribution to the problems of writing “outside the prison-house of conventional English.”

Professor Ogede situates Armah’s writing within its cultural, historical, and political contexts and examines Armah’s ability to create new literary forms based on his masterful manipulation of African oral traditions. Armah is presented here as a writer who looks beyond the corruption that would seem to have engulfed Africa and who successfully bridges the concerns of first- and second-generation postcolonial African writers.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Ayi+Kwei+Armah%2C+Radical+Iconoclast.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Nigerian Video Films

Wed, 30 Aug 2000

Nigerian Video Films (2000)
Revised and Expanded Edition

Edited by Jonathan Haynes

Nigerian video films—dramatic features shot on video and sold as cassettes—are being produced at the rate of nearly one a day, making them the major contemporary art form in Nigeria. The history of African film offers no precedent for such a huge, popularly based industry.

The contributors to this volume, who include film and television directors, an anthropologist, and scholars of film studies and literature, take a variety of approaches to this flourishing popular art. Topics include aesthetic forms and distribution; the configurations of various ethnic audiences; the new media environment dominated by cassette technology; the video's materialism in a period of economic collapse; transformation of the traditional Yoruba traveling theater; individualism and the moral crisis in Igbo society; Hausa cultural values; the negotiation of gender roles, and the genre of Christian videos.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Nigerian+Video+Films.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Oral Literature and Performance in Southern Africa

Sat, 01 Apr 2000

Oral Literature and Performance in Southern Africa (2000)

Edited by Duncan Brown

This book draws together contributions from literary studies, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and African language studies to analyze the complex functioning of oral texts and models in differing contexts. It examines the continuing role of orality in modern society, the adaptation of oral models to printed forms, and the ability of oral forms to 'talk back' to the technology of print.

Subjects include: orality and Christianity; the role of orality in the liberation struggle; domestic predicaments by Kiba performers from the Northern Province; Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom, and the image of the book in Xhosa oral poetry.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Oral+Literature+and+Performance+in+Southern+Africa.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Nomadic Voices of Exile

Thu, 15 Jul 1999

Nomadic Voices of Exile (1999)
Feminine Identity in the Francophone Literature of the Maghreb

By Valérie Orlando

Contemporary French writing on the Maghreb—that part of Africa above the Sahara—is truly postmodern in scope, the rich product of multifaceted histories promoting the blending of two worlds, two identities, two cultures, and two languages.

Nomadic Voices of Exile demonstrates how that postmodern sentiment has altered perceptions concerning Maghrebian feminine identity since the end of the French-colonial era. The authors discussed here, both those who reside in the Maghreb and those who have had to seek asylum in France, find themselves at the intersection of French and North African viewpoints, exposing a complicated world that must be negotiated and redefined.

In looking at the authors whose writings extend beyond a gender-based dialogue to include such issues as race, politics, religion, and history, Valérie Orlando explores the rich and changing landscape of the literature and the culture, addresses the stereotypes that have defined the past, and navigates the space of the exiled, a space previously at the peripheries of Western discourse.

Nomadic Voices of Exile will be useful to a variety of classrooms—women's studies, Middle East studies, Francophone literature, Third World women writers—and to anyone interested in postcolonial and postmodern theory and philosophy and the history of the Maghreb through literature.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Nomadic+Voices+of+Exile.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.

Es’kia Mphahlele

Mon, 15 Mar 1999

Es’kia Mphahlele (1999)
Themes of Alienation and African Humanism

By Ruth Obee

"If you really want to understand South Africa, read black African writers. Read Es'kia Mphahlele," is the advice proffered to diplomats and scholars by professor and publisher Donald Herdeck.

The irony is that in the past, many of Mphahlele's works were out of print or banned under censorship laws in South Africa from the early 1950s on. Readers were denied access to these seminal works, while black South African youths in particular were deprived of any knowledge of one of their preeminent writers, thinkers, and educators.

In Es'kia Mphahlele, Ruth Obee presents the works of this important voice in South African literature against the backdrop of alienation and humanism: two themes central to the shaping of a black nationalist vision in South Africa.

For more information about this book visit ohioswallow.com/book/Es%E2%80%99kia+Mphahlele.
For a look at new releases from Ohio University Press visit ohioswallow.com/new_releases.