African Realism?

African Realism?
Author: Errol A. Henderson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2015-03-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1442239514

African Realism explains Africa’s international conflicts of the post-colonial era through international relations theory. It looks at the relationship between Africa’s domestic and international conflicts, as well as the impact of factors such as domestic legitimacy, trade, and regional economic institutions on African wars. Further, it examines the relevance of traditional realist assumptions (e.g. balance of power, the security dilemma) to African international wars and how these factors are modified by the exigencies of Africa’s domestic institutions, such as neopatrimonialism and inverted legitimacy. This study also addresses the inconsistencies and inaccuracies of international relations theory as it engages African international relations, and especially, its military history

Rethinking Social Realism

Rethinking Social Realism
Author: Stacy I. Morgan
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2004
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780820325798

The social realist movement, with its focus on proletarian themes and its strong ties to New Deal programs and leftist politics, has long been considered a depression-era phenomenon that ended with the start of World War II. This study explores how and why African American writers and visual artists sustained an engagement with the themes and aesthetics of social realism into the early cold war-era--far longer than a majority of their white counterparts. Stacy I. Morgan recalls the social realist atmosphere in which certain African American artists and writers were immersed and shows how black social realism served alternately to question the existing order, instill race pride, and build interracial, working-class coalitions. Morgan discusses, among others, such figures as Charles White, John Wilson, Frank Marshall Davis, Willard Motley, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Elizabeth Catlett, and Hale Woodruff.

Magical Realism in West African Fiction

Magical Realism in West African Fiction
Author: Brenda Cooper
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2012-10-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134673787

This study contextualizes magical realism within current debates and theories of postcoloniality and examines the fiction of three of its West African pioneers: Syl Cheney-Coker of Sierra Leone, Ben Okri of Nigeria and Kojo Laing of Ghana. Brenda Cooper explores the distinct elements of the genre in a West African context, and in relation to: * a range of global expressions of magical realism, from the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez to that of Salman Rushdie * wider contemporary trends in African writing, with particular attention to how the realism of authors such as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka has been connected with nationalist agendas. This is a fascinating and important work for all those working on African literature, magical realism, or postcoloniality.

Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race

Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race
Author: Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2020-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 080717341X

Winner of the SAMLA Studies Award Honorable Mention for the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize From the 1880s to the early 1900s, a particularly turbulent period of U.S. race relations, the African American novel provided a powerful counternarrative to dominant and pejorative ideas about blackness. In Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race, Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus uncovers how black and white writers experimented with innovative narrative strategies to revise static and stereotypical views of black identity and experience. In this provocative and challenging book, Daniels-Rauterkus contests the long-standing idea that African Americans did not write literary realism, along with the inverse misconception that white writers did not make important contributions to African American literature. Taking up key works by Charles W. Chesnutt, Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain, Daniels-Rauterkus argues that authors blended realism with romance, often merging mimetic and melodramatic conventions to advocate on behalf of African Americans, challenge popular theories of racial identity, disrupt the expectations of the literary marketplace, and widen the possibilities for black representation in fiction. Combining literary history with close textual analysis, Daniels-Rauterkus reads black and white writers alongside each other to demonstrate the reciprocal nature of literary production. Moving beyond discourses of racial authenticity and cultural property, Daniels-Rauterkus stresses the need to organize African American literature around black writers and their meditations on blackness, but she also proposes leaving space for nonblack writers whose use of comparable narrative strategies can facilitate reconsiderations of the complex social order that constitutes race in America. With Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race, Daniels-Rauterkus expands critical understandings of American literary realism and African American literature by destabilizing the rigid binaries that too often define discussions of race, genre, and periodization.

Political Development and the New Realism in Sub-Saharan Africa

Political Development and the New Realism in Sub-Saharan Africa
Author: David Ernest Apter
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 339
Release: 1994
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780813914800

Since the 1950s David Apter and Carl Rosenberg have been among the leading American scholars in African Studies. In this volume they, along with other major specialists in the field, explore the new configurations of African politics. With tentative efforts at a revival of democracy now taking place, it seems appropriate to reasses the theoretical debates ad empirical themes that have characterized postwar Sub-Saharan African politics. Focusing on "new realism" that has emerged among Africanists since the dismantling of colonial rule, the essays are presented as a corrective both to the initial euphoria informing African studies and to the later tendency to place blame for all Africa's political and economic difficulties on the receding specter of colonial oppression.

The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born

The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born
Author: Ayi Kwei Armah
Publisher: Heinemann
Total Pages: 196
Release: 1988
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780435905408

A beginners' guide to the fundamentals of the Dru meditation technique, a method for soothing the mind and relaxing the emotions. The programme includes six short guided meditations designed to instill a sense of profound stillness, quieten and calm a stressed mind and reconnect with the important aspects of life. Each nine-minute meditations is based on one of the elements: Earth, Water, Light, Air and Sky.

Deans and Truants

Deans and Truants
Author: Gene Andrew Jarrett
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2013-03-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 081220235X

For a work to be considered African American literature, does it need to focus on black characters or political themes? Must it represent these within a specific stylistic range? Or is it enough for the author to be identified as African American? In Deans and Truants, Gene Andrew Jarrett traces the shifting definitions of African American literature and the authors who wrote beyond those boundaries at the cost of critical dismissal and, at times, obscurity. From the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, de facto deans—critics and authors as different as William Howells, Alain Locke, Richard Wright, and Amiri Baraka—prescribed the shifting parameters of realism and racial subject matter appropriate to authentic African American literature, while truant authors such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, George S. Schuyler, Frank Yerby, and Toni Morrison—perhaps the most celebrated African American author of the twentieth century—wrote literature anomalous to those standards. Jarrett explores the issues at stake when Howells, the "Dean of American Letters," argues in 1896 that only Dunbar's "entirely black verse," written in dialect, "would succeed." Three decades later, Locke, the cultural arbiter of the Harlem Renaissance, stands in contrast to Schuyler, a journalist and novelist who questions the existence of a peculiarly black or "New Negro" art. Next, Wright's 1937 blueprint for African American writing sets the terms of the Chicago Renaissance, but Yerby's version of historical romance approaches race and realism in alternative literary ways. Finally, Deans and Truants measures the gravitational pull of the late 1960s Black Aesthetic in Baraka's editorial silence on Toni Morrison's first and only short story, "Recitatif." Drawing from a wealth of biographical, historical, and literary sources, Deans and Truants describes the changing notions of race, politics, and gender that framed and were framed by the authors and critics of African American culture for more than a century.

Degenerative Realism

Degenerative Realism
Author: Christy Wampole
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2020-06-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0231546033

A new strain of realism has emerged in France. The novels that embody it represent diverse fears—immigration and demographic change, radical Islam, feminism, new technologies, globalization, American capitalism, and the European Union—but these books, often best-sellers, share crucial affinities. In their dystopian visions, the collapse of France, Europe, and Western civilization is portrayed as all but certain and the literary mode of realism begins to break down. Above all, they depict a degenerative force whose effects on the nation and on reality itself can be felt. Examining key novels by Michel Houellebecq, Frédéric Beigbeder, Aurélien Bellanger, Yann Moix, and other French writers, Christy Wampole identifies and critiques this emergent tendency toward “degenerative realism.” She considers the ways these writers draw on social science, the New Journalism of the 1960s, political pamphlets, reportage, and social media to construct an atmosphere of disintegration and decline. Wampole maps how degenerative realist novels explore a world contaminated by conspiracy theories, mysticism, and misinformation, responding to the internet age’s confusion between fact and fiction with a lament for the loss of the real and an unrelenting emphasis on the role of the media in crafting reality. In a time of widespread populist anxieties over the perceived decline of the French nation, this book diagnoses the literary symptoms of today’s reactionary revival.

Art of the Everyday

Art of the Everyday
Author: Ruth Bernard Yeazell
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2008
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780691127262

Realist novels are celebrated for their detailed attention to ordinary life. But two hundred years before the rise of literary realism, Dutch painters had already made an art of the everyday--pictures that served as a compelling model for the novelists who followed. By the mid-1800s, seventeenth-century Dutch painting figured virtually everywhere in the British and French fiction we esteem today as the vanguard of realism. Why were such writers drawn to this art of two centuries before? What does this tell us about the nature of realism? In this beautifully illustrated and elegantly written book, Ruth Yeazell explores the nineteenth century's fascination with Dutch painting, as well as its doubts about an art that had long challenged traditional values. After showing how persistent tensions between high theory and low genre shaped criticism of novels and pictures alike, Art of the Everyday turns to four major novelists--Honoré de Balzac, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Marcel Proust--who strongly identified their work with Dutch painting. For all these writers, Dutch art provided a model for training themselves to look closely at the particulars of middle-class life. Yet even as nineteenth-century novelists strove to create illusions of the real by modeling their narratives on Dutch pictures, Yeazell argues, they chafed at the model. A concluding chapter on Proust explains why the nineteenth century associated such realism with the past and shows how the rediscovery of Vermeer helped resolve the longstanding conflict between humble details and the aspirations of high art.

Magical Realism in Africa

Magical Realism in Africa
Author: Sarali Gintsburg
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2024-10-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1040155286

Magical realism has deep roots across many African languages and regions. This book explores African magical realism from a transregional and inclusive approach, drawing on contributions from different literary genres across the continent. The chapters in this book constitute a sustained and insightful reflection on the salient components of this literary genre as well as evaluating its connections to themes of conflict, violence, women’s rights, trauma, oppression, culture, governance, and connecting to the African self. As well as theorizing magical realism, this book engages with African expressive performance across various formats, novels, plays, and films. This book investigates African magical realism from its origins up to the present day, where local oral traditions link indigenous cosmogonic stories with Western literature, as well as with the specific narrative traditions of Arabo‐Islamic literature. The rich analysis draws on works from across the continent, including Egypt, Sudan, Mauritania, Cameroon, Kenya, Tanzania, Angola, and Mozambique. This book is a timely contribution to debates within African literature, cultural anthropology, ethnography, and folklore.