African Pasts: Memory and History in African Literatures

Overview

'A people who do not preserve their memory are a people who have forfeited their history.' So argues Wole Soyinka, in his book The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness, and this provides the overarching thematic concept for African pasts as a whole. Colonialism for Africans is not an event encapsulated in the past, but is a history whose repercussions and traumatic consequences are still actively evolving in today's political, historical, cultural and artistic scenes.

African pasts examines African ...

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Overview

'A people who do not preserve their memory are a people who have forfeited their history.' So argues Wole Soyinka, in his book The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness, and this provides the overarching thematic concept for African pasts as a whole. Colonialism for Africans is not an event encapsulated in the past, but is a history whose repercussions and traumatic consequences are still actively evolving in today's political, historical, cultural and artistic scenes.

African pasts examines African literatures in English since the end of colonialism, investigating how they represent African history through the twin matrices of memory and trauma. Inextricably tied up with the historical conditions of Africa's colonisation, charting the emergence of its independence, and scrutinising Africa's contemporary neo-colonial and postcolonial states as a legacy of the colonial past, African literatures are continually preoccupied with exploring modes of representation to 'work through' their different traumatic colonial pasts. Among other issues, this book deals with literature in the era of apartheid, the post-apartheid aftermath, metafictional experiments in African fiction, gender representation in reaction to the trauma of colonialism and 'imprisonment narratives'. African pasts covers a wide range of African literatures (drawn from West, East and Southern Africa) and a cross-section of genres - fiction, poetry, prison narratives, postcolonial theory - and embraces such well-known writers as Soyinka, Coetzee, Ngugi and Achebe, and more recent writers such as Nuruddin Farah, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Achmat Dangor, Etienne van Heerden, Zakes Mda, Gillian Slovo and CalixtheBeyala.

About the Author:
Tim Woods is Professor of English Literature and American Studies at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth

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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780719064937
  • Publisher: Manchester University Press
  • Publication date: 8/21/2007
  • Pages: 336
  • Product dimensions: 6.38 (w) x 9.66 (h) x 1.16 (d)

Meet the Author

Tim Woods Professor of English Literature and American Studies at Aberystwyth University.

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Table of Contents


List of Figures     ix
Acknowledgements     xi
Introduction     1
Figuring African history, memory, and trauma     19
Memory and self     25
Trauma     31
Purifying the language of the tribe: (pre)colonial memory     43
Precolonial history: Elechi Amadi     49
Oral narratives and the past: Tutuola and Okara     53
Memory and healing: the archetypal case of Ayi Kwei Armah     59
Loss or lack?     71
Critical and traumatic realist pasts     73
Ngugi, history and memory     79
Other realisms     92
Traumatic realism and 'postmemory'     96
Gender, memory, history     99
Memory-work and the 'double yoke'     101
Unfixing stereotypes of African womanhood     107
'A great big void': Tsitsi Dangarembga and women's memory     112
Oppressive memories     117
'A nothingness so strong that it was a presence': the violation of colonialism in Lindsey Collen's The Rape of Sita     125
Conclusion     131
Imprisonment narratives: history through the eyes of hostages     133
'Interstices of freedom': language and representation     137
The selfin prison     144
The body under torture     149
The roles of history and memory     155
Chronotopes of incarceration     162
Embedding memory, seizing history: South African resistance poetry in the 1970s and 1980s     165
Black consciousness and aesthetics     169
Memory and history in Soweto poetry     177
Language and memory     186
Oral influences, ancestors and izibongo     189
Conclusion     196
On shifting ground: South African fiction in the interregnum     199
Monuments and memorials     204
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in literary consciousness     209
Rewriting the Afrikaner past     217
Writing black history     225
Mandla Langa's fiction of memory     231
Getting beyond apartheid     236
Intimations of the postmodern     241
Postmodernism in an African literary context     243
History in Kojo Laing and J. M. Coetzee     248
M. G. Vassanji's textual pasts     255
Conclusion: what future postmodernism?     262
Works cited     266
Index     285
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