African Pasts: Memory and History in African Literatures

Description

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. 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 Conclusion 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