The Balance of Personality

Traballo fin de grao (UDC.FIL). Galego e portugues estudios linguisticos e literarios. Curso 2015/2016

A posição das escritoras angolanas no campo da crítica académica lusófona (1975-2015)

Rendering visible African immigrants’ shared and differing experiences of civic learning and action, the authors present findings from in-depth semi-structured interviews with second- and 1.5-generation African immigrants in New York City. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework of African immigrant identities constructions and civic engagement, we highlight a multilayered view of civic teaching, learning, and action within and across contexts of families, identities, and schooling in the United States, Africa, and globally. In so doing, the research affirms African immigrant youth’s racial and ethnic identities toward broadened understandings of civic engagement such as participatory communal citizenship. The findings support the need for teacher educator preparation for immigrant youth and curriculum within secondary schools in a diverse U.S. society.

Toward Participatory Communal Citizenship Rendering Visible the Civic Teaching, Learning, and Actions of African Immigrant Youth and Young Adults

Nigeria's postcolonial nationality has been marked by disjunctions that continue to highlight its character, as a product of the colonial will, and of what Biodun Jeyifo has articulated as "arrested decolonization"-the basis of its problematic modernity. Nigeria is, in its current formation, a hybrid state; a nation of multiple nations coalescing to form the basis of nationness and national belonging. One of the fundamental sources of its evolution is to be found in its literature, particularly in poetry, that most nationalist of genres, but significantly also, in the form of the novel, which constitutes much of the narrative of nation. Modern Nigerian literature can now be categorized in three to four movements, or generations, starting with the Azikiwe/ Osadebe generation of nationalist poets, to the late modernists Achebe, Okigbo, Soyinka, etc., to the current generation or category of writer whose writings encompass the new attitudes, desires, values, and anxieties of the postcolonial nation. In this paper, I specifically examine the intriguing presence or overwhelming prominence of Igbo novelists writing in the English language, whose works, I argue, are currently defining the canon of contemporary Nigerian national literature. I claim the implicit value of Igbo traveling identity in the formation of the modern state as providing the cultural and historical factors, stimulus or circumstances that animate this literature. The nature of the Igbo traveling identity-its cosmopolitanism, transborder claims, and new metropolitan tropes-permits us therefore to fully comprehend the nature of Nigeria's contemporary cultural production as well as its implication or significance in shaping modern, postcolonial Nigerian identity and the direction of its narrative of the nation.

Metonymic eruptions: Igbo novelists, the narrative of the nation, and new developments in the contemporary Nigerian novel

Em que medida sao africanos os chamados Estudos Africanos? O estudo da Africa, tal como desenvolvido ate hoje por uma longa tradicao intelectual, faz parte de um projecto abrangente de acumulacao do conhecimento iniciado e controlado pelo Ocidente. Este artigo defende que as sociedades africanas devem eles proprias apropriar‑se activa, lucida e responsavelmente do conhecimento sobre elas capitalizado durante seculos. Defende, mais genericamente, o desenvolvimento em Africa de uma tradicao autonoma, confiante em si propria, de investigacao e conhecimento que responda a problemas e questoes suscitados directa ou indirectamente por africanos. Convida os investigadores africanos da area dos Estudos Africanos e de todas as outras disciplinas a compreenderam que, ate ao momento, tem vindo a levar a cabo um tipo de pesquisa macicamente extravertido, isto e, orientado para fora, destinado em primeira linha a ir ao encontro das necessidades teoricas e praticas das sociedades do Norte. Propoe uma nova orientacao e novas ambicoes para a investigacao feita por africanos em Africa.

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Conhecimento de África, conhecimento de Africanos: duas perspectivas sobre os Estudos Africanos

F. Abiola Irele. The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. xviii + 296 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. No price reported. Paper. Abiola Irele's critical examination of African literature is an interesting collection of essays written from 1981 to 1994. Published in 2001, these essays come across as a nice way to review some of the essential literary and cultural events that have influenced contemporary African literature. In other words, Irele is not breaking new ground, but rather refreshing one's memories. His intellectual insights, as always, are well worth the reading time. In the preface and again in chapter 1, Irele informs us of his purpose in putting together The African Imagination. The work responds to two ways of looking at African literature. The first is to challenge the view of the African experience, both on the African continent and in the New World, as a collective experience, a type of cultural monolith. This position, he notes, has been taken by Europeans such as Janheinz Jahn and by those Africans who garner their literary experience from the negritude movement or who have at least been influenced by this Francophone phenomenon. The other cultural monolith he notes is the Black Aesthetic movement of the 1960s found primarily in the United States. A second group that Irele challenges comprises the contemporary literary critics of the 1980s and 1990s who have grown out of structuralism, deconstruction, and Marxism. These critics, he explains, are more interested in literature as a form of sociological development than of aesthetic expression. He does not ignore or deny these other positions, he comments, but he will not pursue them for their own sake. He has decided, rather, "to explore the terrain of African literature in the widest acceptance of the term and to arrive at a sense of its possible boundaries" on both the African continent and in the New World (4). Further, he maintains that the term "African imagination" is more appropriate than "African literature" because it allows for a "wider scope of expression of Africans and people of African descent, which arises out of . . . historical circumstances" (7). Chapter 2 addresses the issues of orality and literacy and their relation to the two interpretations of African literature, Western and African. Irele allows Ruth Finnegan, Jack Goody, and Walter J. Ong to state the European view of the orality-literacy connection, while the African perspective is conveyed by D. O. Fagunwa, Thomas Mofolo, J. P. Clark-Bekederemo, and Irele himself. This discussion sheds light on the cultural complexity of literature, especially on the African continent with its hundreds of languages. Often the critics that Irele questions in the preface, especially structuralists and poststructuralists, lose sight of this complexity because of their own redefined cultural perspectives. …

The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora

Concentrating on issues of power and change, this analysis of texts by Chinua Achbe, Bessie Head and Dambudzi Marechera teases out each author's view of how colonialism affected Africa, the contributions of Africans to their malaise, and how many reacted in creative, progressive, pragmatic ways.

Achebe, Head, Marechera: On Power and Change in Africa

Tirop Peter Simatei. The Novel and the Politics of Nation Building in East Africa. Bayreuth, Germany: Bayreuth University Press, 2001. 182 pp. Bibliography. Index. Tirop Peter Simatei presents the reader with an overview of the aesthetic and political dynamics that have created and continue to shape East African literature. Besides examining the precolonial, colonial, and post-colonial triad common in African literary studies, Simatei also delves into the much more complex world of the Arab-Asian-African mix that both challenges and merges with European colonial influences. Simatei contends that it is the novelist, more than other intellectual combatants, who most intensely engages in the decolonization of Africa: "The novelist in East Africa responds with a certain urgency to the need not only to decolonize the minds of the citizens but more importantly to reveal the subtle and indigenised forms which oppressive power has taken in the postcolonial era" (9). It is also important to note that he goes on in the next paragraphs to identify the "oppressive power" as both colonial and postcolonial political institutions. To begin with, the East African novelist, in Simatei's view, contends with the corrupt and disruptive settler literature of the colonial era. This is especially true in Kenya because of the British mindset that Kenya was the "White Man's Country," an extension of English country life. During the colonial era and the early years of independence, the writer stood shoulder-to-shoulder with African nationalist politicians; in the postcolonial era, however, he has become marginalized, an enemy of the political elite. This evolution provides an major theme of Simatei's text. The first East African writer discussed is the often overlooked Leonard Kibera. In an examination of Kibera's works such as The Potent Ash and Voices in the Dark, Simatei finds the unfortunate but all too realistic "literature of disillusionment" (29): "The formative years of Leonard Kibera, as he himself attests, were defined by two antagonistic forces, namely colonial oppression and its outgrowth, the optimism of nationalism. However, as a writer, he matures into a post-colonial world of violated dreams that requires some measure of scepticism with regard to ideologies of redemption" (31). The psychological, political, and aesthetic conflicts resulting from the colonial and postcolonial attacks on the community's and the individual's ideals lead Kibera to write of independence as irony, absurdity, and paradoxically, as commitment. Simatei engages the reader in this fine discussion of an extremely complex world, while avoiding some of the more simplistic ideological arguments so common in the field. Sadly, Simatei does not offer very much new scholarship when it comes to Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Ngugi appears to be in this text for no other reason than because he is Ngugi. Although Simatei does focus his essay on Ngugi's concepts of nation-building, specifically in the novel Matigari, the analysis appears to be little more than a rehashing of multiple other essays on the well-known Kenyan writer. In the conclusion to the essay, he offers an interesting interpretation: [Ngugi's] critique of the nationalist project does not entail its rejection. Following Frantz Fanon, Ngugi instead seeks to distinguish between a bourgeois nationalism, which despite its anti-colonial thrust is not revolutionary. Such nationalism merely places the colonial state in the hands of the African elite class. Because this class represents the interests of metropolitan capitalism, its being in power ensures the continued exploitation of the ordinary people. …

Glen Bush

Papers

The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora

Achebe, Head, Marechera: On Power and Change in Africa

The Novel and the Politics of Nation Building in East Africa