African pasts Memory and history in African literatures / Tim Woods.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Woods, Tim.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Postcolonialism in literature.

Memory in literature.

African literature (English)--History and criticism.

African literature (English).

Africa--In literature.

Africa.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (304 pages)

Edition:

Pbk. ed.

Manufacture:

Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2020

Place of Publication:

New York : Manchester University Press, 2012.

Summary:

African pasts examines African literatures in English since the end of colonialism, investigating how they represents African history through the twin matrices of memory and trauma. Inextricably tied up with the historical conditions of Africa's colonisation, charting the emergence of its independence, and scrutinising Africa's contemporary neo-colonial and postcolonial states as a legacy of the colonial past, African literatures are continually preoccupied with exploring modes of representation to 'work through' their different traumatic colonial pasts. Among other issues, this book deals with literature in the era of apartheid, the post-apartheid aftermath, metafictional experiments in African fiction, gender representation in reaction to the trauma of colonialism and 'imprisonment narratives'. African pasts covers a wide range of African literatures and a cross-section of genres - fiction, poetry, prison-narratives, postcolonial theory - and embraces such well-known writers as Soyinka, Coetzee, Ngugi and Achebe, and more recent writers such as Nuruddin Farah, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Achmat Dangor, Etienne van Heerden, Zakes Mda, Gillian Slovo and Calixthe Beyala.

Contents:

AFRICAN PASTS: Memory and history in African literatures

Half Title Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

Figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Figuring African history, memory and trauma

Memory and self

Trauma

2 Purifying the language of the tribe: (pre)colonial memory

Precolonial history: Elechi Amadi

Oral narratives and the past: Tutuola and Okara

Memory and healing: the archetypal case of Ayi Kwei Armah

Loss or lack?

3 Critical and traumatic realist pasts

Ngugi, history and memory

Other realisms

Traumatic realism and 'postmemory'

4 Gender, memory, history

Memory-work and the 'double yoke'

Unfixing stereotypes of African womanhood

'A great big void': Tsitsi Dangarembga and women's memory

Oppressive memories

'A nothingness so strong that it was a presence': the violation of colonialism in Lindsey Collen's The Rape of Sita

Conclusion

5 Imprisonment narratives: history through the eyes of hostages

'Interstices of freedom': language and representation

The self in prison

The body under torture

The roles of history and memory

Chronotopes of incarceration

6 Embedding memory, seizing history: South African resistance poetry in the 1970s and 1980s

Black consciousness and aesthetics

Memory and history in Soweto poetry

Language and memory

Oral influences, ancestors and

7 On shifting ground: South African fiction in the interregnum

Monuments and memorials

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in literary consciousness

Rewriting the Afrikaner past

Writing black history

Mandla Langa's fiction of memory

Getting beyond apartheid

8 Intimations of the postmodern

Postmodernism in an African literary context

History in Kojo Laing and J. M. Coetzee

M. G. Vassanji's textual pasts.

Conclusion: what future postmodernism?

Works cited

Index.

Notes:

Originally published: 2007.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [266]-284) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-5261-3079-3

OCLC:

1085660309