Metaphor and the slave trade in West African literature / Laura T. Murphy.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Murphy, Laura (Laura T.)

Series:

Western African Studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

West African literature (English)--History and criticism.

West African literature (English).

Slave trade in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (255 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Athens, Ohio : Ohio University Press, 2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Metaphor and the Slave Trade provides compelling evidence of the hidden but unmistakable traces of the transatlantic slave trade that persist in West African discourse. Through an examination of metaphors that describe the trauma, loss, and suffering associated with the commerce in human lives, this book shows how the horrors of slavery are communicated from generation to generation. Laura T. Murphy's insightful new readings of canonical West African fiction, autobiography, drama, and poetry explore the relationship between memory and metaphor and emphasize how repressed or otherwise margina

Contents:

Against amnesia: metaphors and memory in West Africa

Magical capture in a landscape of terror: the trope of the body in the bag in Amos Tutuola's My life in the bush of ghosts

Geographies of memory: mapping slavery's recurrence in Ben Okri's The famished road

The curse of constant remembrance: the belated trauma of the slave trade in Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments

Childless mothers and dead husbands: the enslavement of intimacy and Ama Ata Aidoo's secret language of memory

The suffering of survival

The future of the past: the new historical fiction.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780821444122

0821444123

OCLC:

793494344