Women, Literature and Development in Africa

Women, Literature and Development in Africa
Author: Anthonia C. Kalu
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2019-12-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0429648278

This book is a powerful exploration of the role of women in the evolution of African thinking and narratives on development, from the precolonial period right through to the modern day. Whilst the book identifies women’s oppression and marginalization as significant challenges to contemporary Africa’s advancement, it also explores how new written narratives draw on traditional African knowledge systems to bring deep-rooted and sometimes radical approaches to progress. The book asserts that Africans must tell their own stories, expressed through the complex meanings and nuances of African languages and often conveyed through oral traditions and storytelling, in which women play an important role. The book’s close examination of language and meaning in the African narrative tradition advances the illumination and elevation of African storytelling as part of a viable and valid knowledge base in its own right, rather than as an extension of European paradigms and methods. Anthonia C. Kalu's new edition of this important book, fully revised throughout, will also include fresh analysis of the role of digital media, education, and religion in African narratives. At a time when the prominence and participation of African women in development and sociopolitical debates is growing, this book's exploration of their lived experiences and narrative contribution will be of interest to students of African literature, gender studies, development, history, and sociology.

Women, Literature, and Development in Africa

Women, Literature, and Development in Africa
Author: Anthonia C. Kalu
Publisher: Africa World Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2001
Genre: African literature (English)
ISBN: 9780865439276

In a powerful exploration of contemporary African scholars' efforts to re-chart and preserve the evolution of African thought on development, Kalu brings together various dominant perspectives on Africa's entry and participation in the international arena. Using African verbal arts to bring women into ongoing discussions about the search for feasible paradigms for African development, as well as world assumptions about Africa and African women, Kalu successfully elucidates the encounter between African and colonists' languages and narrative traditions.

Women, Literature and Development in Africa

Women, Literature and Development in Africa
Author: Anthonia C. Kalu
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2019-12-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0429650914

This book is a powerful exploration of the role of women in the evolution of African thinking and narratives on development, from the precolonial period right through to the modern day. Whilst the book identifies women’s oppression and marginalization as significant challenges to contemporary Africa’s advancement, it also explores how new written narratives draw on traditional African knowledge systems to bring deep-rooted and sometimes radical approaches to progress. The book asserts that Africans must tell their own stories, expressed through the complex meanings and nuances of African languages and often conveyed through oral traditions and storytelling, in which women play an important role. The book’s close examination of language and meaning in the African narrative tradition advances the illumination and elevation of African storytelling as part of a viable and valid knowledge base in its own right, rather than as an extension of European paradigms and methods. Anthonia C. Kalu's new edition of this important book, fully revised throughout, will also include fresh analysis of the role of digital media, education, and religion in African narratives. At a time when the prominence and participation of African women in development and sociopolitical debates is growing, this book's exploration of their lived experiences and narrative contribution will be of interest to students of African literature, gender studies, development, history, and sociology.

Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender

Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender
Author: Florence Stratton
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2020-09-23
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1000158772

The influence of colonialism and race on the development of African literature has been the subject of a number of studies. The effect of patriarchy and gender, however, and indeed the contributions of African women, have up until now been largely ignored by the critics. Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender is the first extensive account of African literature from a feminist perspective. In this first radical and exciting work Florence Stratton outlines the features of an emerging female tradition in African fiction. A chapter is dedicated to each to the works of four women writers: Grace Ogot, Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta and Mariama Ba. In addition she provides challenging new readings of canonical male authors such as Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiongo'o and Wole Soyinka. Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender thus provides the first truly comprehensive definition of the current literary tradition in Africa.

Literature and Development in North Africa

Literature and Development in North Africa
Author: Perri Giovannucci
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2008-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1135904987

A critique of modern development may be traced in the postcolonial and anti-colonial literature about North Africa. Works by Fanon, Camus, Djebar, Mahfouz, El Saadawi, Said, and others, offer a window upon contemporary modernization and related issues of identity, independence, and social justice.

The Palgrave Handbook of African Women's Studies

The Palgrave Handbook of African Women's Studies
Author: Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2021-10-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 9783030280987

This definitive handbook is the first reference of its kind bringing together knowledge, scholarship, and debates on themes and issues concerning African women everywhere. It unearths, critiques, reviews, analyses, theorizes, synthesizes and evaluates African women’s historical, social, political, economic, local and global lives and experiences with a view to decolonizing the corpus. This Handbook questions the gendered roles and positions of African women and the structures, institutions, and processes of policy, politics, and knowledge production that continually construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct African women and the study of them. Contributors offer a consistent emphasis on debunking erroneous and misleading myths about African women's roles and positions, bringing their previously marginalized stories to relief, and ultimately re-writing their histories. Thus, this Handbook enlarges the scope of the field, challenges its orthodoxies, and engenders new subjects, theories, and approaches. This reference work includes, to the greatest extent possible, the voices of African women themselves as writers of their own stories. The detailed, rigorous and up-to-date analyses in the work represent a variety of theoretical, methodological, and transdisciplinary approaches. This reference work will prove vital in charting new directions for the study of African women, and will reverberate in future studies, generating new debates and engendering further interest.

The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros

The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros
Author: Galawdewos
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 544
Release: 2015-10-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0691164215

A "geadl" or hagiography, originally written by Gealawdewos thirty years after the subject's death, in 1672-1673. Translated from multiple manuscripts and versions.

Encyclopedia of African Literature

Encyclopedia of African Literature
Author: Simon Gikandi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 1009
Release: 2003-09-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134582226

The most comprehensive reference work on African literature to date, this book covers all the key historical and cultural issues in the field. The Encyclopedia contains over 600 entries covering criticism and theory, African literature's development as a field of scholarship, and studies of established and lesser-known writers and their texts. While the greatest proportion of literary work in Africa has been a product of the twentieth century, the Encyclopedia also covers the literature back to the earliest eras of story-telling and oral transmission, making this a unique and valuable resource for those studying social sciences as well as humanities. This work includes cross-references, suggestions for further reading, and a comprehensive index.

Ngambika

Ngambika
Author: Carole Boyce Davies
Publisher: Africa Research and Publications
Total Pages: 298
Release: 1986
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780865430181

African Literature in the Digital Age

African Literature in the Digital Age
Author: Shola Adenekan
Publisher: James Currey
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023-03-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781847013637

The first book-length study on the relationship between African literature and new media. The digital space provides a new avenue to move literature beyond the restrictions of book publishing on the continent. Arguing that writers are putting their work on cyberspace because communities are emerging from this space, and because increasing numbers of Africans use the internet as part of their day-to-day engagement with their societies and the world, Shola Adenekan explores this transformative development in Nigeria and Kenya, both significant countries in African literature and two of the continent's largest digital technology hubs. Queer Kenyans and Nigerians find new avenues for their work online where print publishers are refusing to publish short stories and poems on same-sex desire. Binyavanga Wainaina's rise to critical acclaim arguably started on the literary blog Generator 21. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's literary celebrity partly relies on her prolific use of social media to tell thestory of powerful Nigerian women. With further examples from the development of literature across the continent, this innovative book sheds new light on narratives about digital Africa. It will also be the first major work to provide a trajectory of class consciousness in Kenyan and Nigerian writing. Through this analysis, the book articulates the difference in attitudes towards queerness, sexuality, and hetero-normativity among successive generations of writers.