Drinking from the Cosmic Gourd How Amos Tutuola Can Change Our Minds / Francis B. Nyamnjoh.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nyamnjoh, Francis B., 1961- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Tutuola, Amos--Criticism and interpretation.

Africans--Intellectual life.

Africans.

Knowledge, Theory of--Africa.

Knowledge, Theory of.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (326 pages)

Manufacture:

Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2017

Place of Publication:

Baltimore, Maryland : Project Muse, 2017

Summary:

This book questions colonial and apartheid ideologies on being human and being African, ideologies that continue to shape how research is conceptualised, taught and practiced in universities across Africa. Africans immersed in popular traditions of meaning-making are denied the right, by those who police the borders of knowledge, to think and represent their realities in accordance with the civilisations and universes they know best. Often, the ways of life they cherish are labelled and dismissed too eagerly as traditional knowledge by some of the very African intellectual elite they look to for protection. The book makes a case for sidestepped traditions of knowledge. It draws attention to Africa's possibilities, prospects and emergent capacities for being and becoming in tune with its creativity and imagination. It speaks to the nimble-footed flexible-minded "frontier African" at the crossroads and junctions of encounters, facilitating creative conversations and challenging regressive logics of exclusionary identities. The book uses Amos Tutuola's stories to question dualistic assumptions about reality and scholarship, and to call for conviviality, interconnections and interdependence between competing knowledge traditions in Africa.

Contents:

Foreword / by Richard Fardon

1. A preview

2. Dominant and dormant epistemologies of Africa

3. Tutuola and the extravagant illusion of completeness

4. Keeping alive popular ideas of reality

5. The palm-wine drinkard and the challenge of dichotomies

6. Activation, potency and efficacy in Tutuola's universe

7. Tutuola in conversation with the Cameroon grassfields and beyond

8. Conclusion : Tutuola's legacy.

Notes:

Issued as part of book collections on Project MUSE.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 277-310).

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9789956764433

9956764434

9789956764181

9956764183

OCLC:

982476003