African Lit Lectures

African Literature
M5.6
Pr. M. El Ouali
A-Introductory Notes
To my African Literature students,
Hi and welcome to these lectures.
The book we are going to study this semester in African Lit. is

entitled the BEauTyFul ONeS ARe NOT YeT BORN ( this is how
the title is spelt) by Ayi Kwei Armah
-You must read the book before we embark on its analysis. A

second reading is always recommended for you to be able to
understand it and analyze it.
-You can either download it or get it from Adam Space ( ‫فضاء‬

‫ ;)آدم‬I have left a scanned copy there for all students to print.
B-Basic definitions
1-African Literature: A Definition
Here is a definition by Elizabeth Ann Wynne Gunner.

Britanica.com/art/ African-literature
African Literature is “the body of traditional oral and written

literatures in Afro-Asiatic and African languages together with
1
works written by Africans in European languages. Traditional
written literature, which is limited to a smaller geographic area
than is oral literature, is most characteristic of those sub-
Saharan cultures that have participated in the cultures of the
Mediterranean. In particular, there are written literatures in both
Hausa and Arabic, created by the scholars of what is now
northern Nigeria, and the Somali people have produced a
traditional written literature. There are also works written in
Geʿez (Ethiopic) and Amharic, two of the languages of Ethiopia,
which is the one part of Africa where Christianity has been
practiced long enough to be considered traditional. Works
written in European languages date primarily from the 20th
century onward… Modern African literatures were born in the
educational systems imposed by colonialism, with models drawn
from Europe rather than existing African traditions. But the
African oral traditions exerted their own influence on these
literatures.”
2-Postcolonial Literature
Here is a definition by Ato Quayson

thebritishacademy.ac.uc/blog what-is-colonial- literature/
“A good way to start any definition of postcolonial literature is

to think about the origins of the term postcolonialism and how it
has been used in literary criticism, from roughly the late 1980 to
present times. The term is sometimes written with a hyphen,
sometimes left unhyphenated, with the two forms used to
designate the same areas of interest by different critics. The
hyphenated version was first used by political scientists and
economists to denote the period after colonialism, but from
about the late seventies it was turned into a more wide-ranging
culturalist analysis in the hands of literary critics and others. The
unhyphenated version is conventionally used to distinguish it
from the earlier iteration that referred only to specific time
period and to indicate a tendency toward literary criticism and
2
the analysis of various discourses at the intersection of race,
gender and diaspora, among others.
Postcolonialism... involves a studied engagement with the

experience of colonialism and its past and present effects.
A possible working definition for postcolonialism is that it

involves a studied engagement with the experience of
colonialism and its past and present effects, both at the local
level of ex-colonial societies and at the level of more general
global developments thought to be the after-effects of empire.
Postcolonialism often also involves the discussion of
experiences such as slavery, migration, suppression and
resistance, difference, race, gender and place as well as
responses to the discourses of imperial Europe such as history,
philosophy, anthropology and linguistics. The term is as much
about conditions under imperialism and colonialism proper, as
about conditions coming after the historical end of colonialism.
A growing concern among postcolonial critics has also been
with racial minorities in the west, embracing Native and African
Americans in the US, British Asians and African Caribbeans in
the UK and Aborigines in Australia and Canada, among others.
Because of these features, postcolonialism allows for a wide
range of applications, designating a constant interplay and
slippage between the sense of a historical transition, a socio-
cultural location and an epochal configuration Edward Said
Orientalism (1978) is considered as pivotal in the shaping of
postcolonial studies. In Orientalism, Said argued for seeing a
direct correlation between the knowledges that oriental scholars
produced and how these were redeployed in the constitution of
colonial rule. It should be acknowledged, however, that
whatever the developments were that led to the formation of the
field of postcolonial studies, it has to be seen more in terms of a
long process rather than a series of events, with the central
impulses of this process coming from a variety of sources,
sometimes outside any concern with colonialism. These may be
traced in a variety of directions, such as in the changing face of
global politics with the emergence of newly independent states;
in the wide-ranging re-evaluation begun in the 1980s of the
3
exclusionary forms of western reason and in the perception of
their complicity with imperial expansion and colonialist rule; in
the debates that raged about empiricism and culturalism in the
social sciences from the 1960s; and in the challenges to
dominant discourses of representation from feminist…and ethnic
studies in the 1970s and the 10980s
Postcolonial literature represents all these conditions and comes

from various sources and inspiration. It includes works such as
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude,
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight children, Chinua Achebe’s Things
Fall Apart , Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North ,
Toni Morrison’s Beloved, J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the
Barbarians , Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, Arundhati
Roy’s The God of Small Things, NoViolet Bulawayo’s We need
New Names , Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, and Ingolo Mbue’s
Behold the Dreamers among many others. Shakespeare’s
Othello, Anthony and Cleopatra and the Tempest have been
taken as key texts for the application of postcolonial modes of
analysis. This suggests that postcolonial literature is a broad
term that encompasses literatures by people from the erstwhile
colonial world, as well as from the various minority diasporas
that live in the west. Postcolonialism has also been a term used
to reinterpret western canonical literature from a variety of fresh
and diverse perspectives.”
3- Post-Colonial Reading
The following excerpt is quoted from the book entitled: Post
Colonial Studies: Key Concepts by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth
Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. 2nd edition London & New York:
Rutledge, 2007.
“A way of reading and rereading texts of both metropolitan and

colonial cultures to draw deliberate attention to the profound and
inescap-able effects of colonization on literary production,
anthropological accounts, historical records, administrative and
scientific writing. It is a form of deconstructive reading most
usually applied to works emanating from the colonizers (but may
be applied to works by the colonized) which demonstrates the
extent to which the text contradicts its underlying assumptions
4
… and reveals its …colonialist ideologies and processes.
Examples of post-colonial readings of particular texts include
Eric Williams’ interrogation of the formerly authoritative texts
of Caribbean history in British Historians and the West Indies
(1966); contemporary rereadings of the works of canonical
European anthro-pologists such as Malinowski; numerous post-
colonial rereadings (and rewritings) of Shakespeare’s The
Tempest in French, English and Spanish; rereadings of Jane
Austen’s Mansfield Park (see contrapuntal reading); Jean
Rhys’ rereadings (and thus rewriting, in Wide Sargasso Sea) of
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.”
NB. The word “reading” is used here not in its first elementary
sense but in its new sense adopted by the modernist and
postmodernist theories of reading in the sense of a critical
reading and analysis.
Bibliography
Armah, Ayi Kwei. The Beautiful ones Are not Yet Born.
London: Ibadan Nairobi: Heineman, 1968.
Ato Quayson, thebritishacademy.ac.uc/blog what-is-colonial-

literature/
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. Post

Colonial Studies: Key Concepts 2nd edition London & New
York: Rutledge, 2007.
Wynne Gunner, Elizabeth Ann. Britanica.com/art/ African-

literature
5
6
7
8
9

African Lit Lectures

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

African Lit Lectures

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

African Lit Lectures

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

African Literature

To my African Literature students,

Hi and welcome to these lectures.

The book we are going to study this semester in African Lit. is

-You must read the book before we embark on its analysis. A

-You can either download it or get it from Adam Space ( ‫فضاء‬

1-African Literature: A Definition

Here is a definition by Elizabeth Ann Wynne Gunner.

African Literature is “the body of traditional oral and written

Here is a definition by Ato Quayson

“A good way to start any definition of postcolonial literature is

Postcolonialism... involves a studied engagement with the

A possible working definition for postcolonialism is that it

Postcolonial literature represents all these conditions and comes

“A way of reading and rereading texts of both metropolitan and

Ato Quayson, thebritishacademy.ac.uc/blog what-is-colonial-

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. Post

Wynne Gunner, Elizabeth Ann. Britanica.com/art/ African-

You might also like