North-south Linkages and Connections in Continental and Diaspora African Literatures

North-south Linkages and Connections in Continental and Diaspora African Literatures
Author: African Literature Association. Meeting
Publisher: Africa World Press
Total Pages: 580
Release: 2005
Genre: African literature
ISBN: 9781592211579

This volume collects some of the best lectures at the African Literature Association's 25th annual conference held in 1999. The conference brought together for the first time a large number of scholars, creative writers and artists from Northern Africa and their counterparts from Sub- Saharan Africa. The conference and this collection highlight the inspiring and stimulating dialogue between two literary and cultural areas that have often been artificially compartmentalised. The essays draw suprising connections and illustrate the breadth and dynamism of African literature.

Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou
Author: Linda Wagner-Martin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2015-11-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501307851

Machine generated contents note: -- Preface -- Chapter One: Marguerite Annie Johnson, April 4, 1928 -- Chapter Two: Ambivalence Is Not So Easy -- Chapter Three: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings -- Chapter Four: Gather Together in My Name -- Chapter Five: Music, poetry, and being alive -- Chapter Six: Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas -- Chapter Seven: The Heart of a Woman -- Chapter Eight: Africa -- Chapter Nine: A Song Flung Up to Heaven -- Chapter Ten: Poems and the Public Spotlight -- Chapter Eleven: From Autobiography to the Essay -- Chapter Twelve: Maya Angelou as Spirit Leader

Coloniality of Diasporas

Coloniality of Diasporas
Author: Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2014-07-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137413077

Focusing on piracy in the seventeenth century, filibustering in the nineteenth century, intracolonial migrations in the 1930s, metropolitan racializations in the 1950s and 1960s, and feminist redefinitions of creolization and sexile from the 1940s to the 1990s, this book redefines the Caribbean beyond the postcolonial debate.

The Famished Road

The Famished Road
Author: Vanessa Guignery
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2014-09-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 144386773X

Some twenty years after the publication of Ben Okri’s 1991 Booker Prize winning novel, The Famished Road, this volume proposes a spiralling journey into the imaginary homelands of its main protagonist, the adventurous spirit-child Azaro. Over the years, The Famished Road has been attributed a variety of mixed and sometimes contradictory labels (postcolonial, magic realist, mythopoeic, new ageist, picaresque, epic, to name just a few). Contributors to this volume have chosen to look beyond pre-conceived patterns and categories in order to embrace the otherness of the text and accept to be challenged by it. Disentangling themselves from the rationality of Western discourses, they have opened their minds to unfamiliar ground and new modes of being and seeing the world, which entailed bringing together various structures of feeling, modes of knowledge and protocols of representation, both African and Western. The purpose of this volume is therefore to offer new ways of reading The Famished Road that testify to the richness of Okri’s poetic prose and his reliance on indigenous mythical and oral traditions. The volume also includes an exclusive interview with Ben Okri who provides an insight into his writing processes and discusses the main themes, narrative techniques and literary strategies at work in The Famished Road.

Rising Anthills

Rising Anthills
Author: Elisabeth Bekers
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2010-08-05
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0299234932

Female genital excision, or the ritual of cutting the external genitals of girls and women, is undoubtedly one of the most heavily and widely debated cultural traditions of our time. By looking at how writers of African descent have presented the practice in their literary work, Elisabeth Bekers shows how the debate on female genital excision evolved over the last four decades of the twentieth century, in response to changing attitudes about ethnicity, nationalism, colonialism, feminism, and human rights. Rising Anthills (the title refers to a Dogon myth) analyzes works in English, French, and Arabic by African and African American writers, both women and men, from different parts of the African continent and the diaspora. Attending closely to the nuances of language and the complexities of the issue, Bekers explores lesser-known writers side by side with such recognizable names as Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Flora Nwapa, Nawal El Saadawi, Ahmadou Kourouma, Calixthe Beyala, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor. Following their literary discussions of female genital excision, she discerns a gradual evolution—from the 1960s, when writers mindful of its communal significance carefully “wrote around” the physical operation, through the 1970s and 1980s, when they began to speak out against the practice and their societies’ gender politics, to the late 1990s, when they situated their denunciations of female genital excision in a much broader, international context of women’s oppression and the struggle for women’s rights.

Media and Politics in the Southern Mediterranean

Media and Politics in the Southern Mediterranean
Author: Roxane Farmanfarmaian
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2020-10-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351025287

This edited volume presents ground-breaking empirical research on the media in political transition in Tunisia, Turkey and Morocco. Focusing on developments in the wake of the region’s upheavals in 2011, it offers a new theoretical framework for understanding mediascapes in the confessional and hybrid-authoritarian systems of the Middle East. In this book, media scholars focus on three themes: the media’s structure as an expression of governance, the media’s function as a reflection of the market, and the media’s agency in communicating between power and the public. The result is a unique addition to the literature on two counts. Firstly, analysis of similar players, issues and processes in each country produces a thematically consistent comparative assessment of the media’s role across the southern Mediterranean region. The first cross-country comparison of specific media practices in the Middle East, it covers issues such as women in talk shows, media’s relationship with surveillance, and comparative practices of media regulation. Secondly, actualising the idea that media reflects the society that produces it, the studies here draw on field data to lay the foundations for a new theory of media, Values and Status Negotiation (VSN), which evolved from the region’s unique characteristics and practices, and offers an alternative to prevailing Western-centric approaches to media analysis. Media and Politics in the Southern Mediterranean will appeal to students and scholars of politics, sociology, Media Studies, Cultural Studies and Middle Eastern Studies.

Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou
Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2009
Genre: African Americans in literature
ISBN: 1604131772

Presents a collection of critical essays which discuss the major works of the African American poet.

Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
Total Pages: 151
Release: 2014-05-14
Genre: African American authors
ISBN: 160413187X

Presents a collection of essays analyzing Angelou's story, I know why the caged bird sings. Also includes a chronology of events in the author's life.

Cannibal Writes

Cannibal Writes
Author: Njeri Githire
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2014-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0252096746

Postcolonial and diaspora studies scholars and critics have paid increasing attention to the use of metaphors of food, eating, digestion, and various affiliated actions such as loss of appetite, indigestion, and regurgitation. As such stylistic devices proliferated in the works of non-Western women writers, scholars connected metaphors of eating and consumption to colonial and imperial domination. In Cannibal Writes, Njeri Githire concentrates on the gendered and sexualized dimensions of these visceral metaphors of consumption in works by women writers from Haiti, Jamaica, Mauritius, and elsewhere. Employing theoretical analysis and insightful readings of English- and French-language texts, she explores the prominence of alimentary-related tropes and their relationship to sexual consumption, writing, global geopolitics and economic dynamics, and migration. As she shows, the use of cannibalism in particular as a central motif opens up privileged modes for mediating historical and sociopolitical issues. Ambitiously comparative, Cannibal Writes ranges across the works of well-known and lesser known writers to tie together two geographic and cultural spaces that have much in common but are seldom studied in parallel.

The Independence of the News Media

The Independence of the News Media
Author: Loïc Ballarini
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2020-10-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030340546

This book explores the different ways Francophone research on news media has faced the challenges of dependence and independence from three complementary perspectives. The first is economics - how can sustainable business models be developed and to what extent can crowdfunding help to maintain the financial and editorial independence of newsrooms? Secondly, in a time where the role of journalism in the public sphere is more questioned than ever, the authors evaluate to what extent news media can embody the needs of their readers. Thirdly, the authors consider the historical and political context of publication in the light of the ‘Arab Spring’. This book deals with major, contemporary evolutions of news media, bringing together research that considers the media in France, Canada, and the Arab region (notably Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Egypt). Using numerous case studies, this book helps to define how complex the question of independence is today.