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.
Neo-Tarzanism: The Poetics of Pseudo-Tradition
Pretenders to the crown of Pontifex Maximus of African poetics must learn to mind the thorns. For a start, especially when their credentials are declared to be a love and espousal of the virtues of traditional African poetry, they must penetrate into what constitutes poetry in traditional art or be contradicted by their own limitations and superficial understanding of this activity of the imagination. Traditional African poetry is not merely those verses which, being easiest to translate, have found their way into anthologies and school texts; it is not merely those lyrics which, because they are favourites at Festivals of the Arts haunted by ethnologists with tape-recorders, supply the readiest source-material for uprooted academics; nor is it restricted solely to the praises of yams and gods, invocations of blessings and evocations of the pristine. Traditional poetry is all of this; it is however also to be found in the very technique of riddles, in the pharmacology of healers, in the utterance of the possessed medium, in the enigmas of diviners, in the liturgy of divine and cultic Mysteries (in addition to the language of their public address systems), in the unique temper of world comprehension that permeates language for the truly immersed-from the Ifa priest to the haggler in the market, inspired perhaps by economic frustration! The critic who would arrogate to himself the task of formulating an African poetics-a typical preoccupation of the European critical tradition by the way -had better understand this from the start or confine himself to extolling the virtues of European nursery rhymes-a field which appears more suited to the analytical capacity of our critical troika.
Did the metamorphosis from Export Processing Zones to Special Economic Zones improve the efficiency of trade enclaves in India?
In this paper, the efficiency of seven conventional Special Economic Zones in India is analyzed, by adopting a stochastic production frontier technique, for the period between 1986–1987 and 2007–2008.Results indicate that although the efficiency scores of these enclaves have improved over the years, specifically with the introduction of the SEZ policy (2000–2001), it is far below the threshold level as identified in the literature. Besides, one can also observe a discrepancy emerging between better export earning zones and efficient zones. On the determinants side, policy intervention and large geographical area, accompanied by clustering of units, are found to have impacted the efficiency scores of these enclaves positively.