Black on Black: (In)Visibility in African Literary Heterotopias
In The African Image, Es'kia Mphahlele wonders "What is the African's literary image of himself?," a question he answers when he observes that "Africa is still the African's burden," therefore underlining the connection between the concerns of Africans and their literatures. Femi Osofisan, arguing that African authors cannot but be inspired by the very issues (famine, war, etc.) that today represent Africa's distinctive traits, contends that such issues should remain a priority of African literature. If the presence of "hypervisible topics" in world media does not imply a real visibility of Africa on the global political scene, those topics, however, remain at the core of its history. Does this condemn Africa to be portrayed as the sum of its problems? Does the literary discussion of African priorities necessarily lead to enforcing the stereotype of Africa? This paper will discuss how African literary "heterotopias"—Femi Osofisan's Kolera Kolej, Buchi Emecheta's The Rape of Shavi, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow—deal with both the positive and negative stereotypes of Africa, consciously employing them to construct a political and representational counter-discourse.
The Postcolonial Wizard
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow attempts to create an epic novel out of oral storytelling traditions in Kenya, but does he succeed? Simon Gikandi reads the work as an expression of traditions and folklore but also as a commentary on contemporary Kenyan politics, as well as a story about freedom.
Communist History: An Annual Bibliography (2005)
The subject of this bibliography is the scholarly literature of communist history. For the USA coverage is extensive. For the rest of the Anglophone world coverage is selective, while coverage for the rest of the world is more selective still. Coverage of the former and presently communist countries is largely limited to works dealing with the Communist parties of those countries. Anti-communism is covered selectively, with somewhat more emphasis on its interaction with communism than its nature as a movement/ideology per se. Coverage of related topics, i.e. the labor movement, Marxism, other strains of radicalism, etc., is highly selective and limited to items directly relevant to communism. For coverage of current reportage (newspapers, news weeklies, journals of opinion, Internet/WWW discussion lists, etc.) see the Newsletter of the Historians of American Communism and the Historians of American Communism Discussion List (h-hoac@h-net.msu.edu). The Bibliography is organized into seven sections, listed below. Sections 1–5 are form and genre based (monographs, serials, etc.), while sections 6 and 7 are format based (sound and visual, electronic). Entries are arranged alphabetically within each section. Where the number of entries warrants it, a section is divided into USA and Other. There is no index. Please be aware that most citations for items in electronic format are listed under their appropriate form/genre, i.e. articles in electronic serials are listed under serials. Section 7 (Internet, WWW, etc.) only contains citations for items in forms and genres irreducibly unique to the electronic environment, i.e. discussion lists (and postings and threads therein) and for those web sites and other electronic resources not subsumed under categories 1–7. Items cited are from the calendar year in the title of the Bibliography, with two exceptions, Internet/WWW items, where publication/creation date information is often unavailable or indeterminate, and older items not cited