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 Ballistic Bard: Postcolonial Fictions
The ballistic bard - intertexuality and postcolonial fiction I walked with a zombie - "Wide Sargasso Sea", Jean Rhys retrofitting the raj - "Heat and Dust", Ruth Prawer Jhabvala babytalk - "Baumgartner's Bombay", Anita Desai postcolonial Gothic - Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and the Sobhraj case empire as a dirty story - "Waiting for the Barbarians and Foe", J.M. Coetzee he neo-Tarzan, she Jane? - "The Rape of Shavi", Buchi Emecheta don't cry for me, Argentina - Jane Eyre as Evita Peron - "Guerrillas", V.S. Naipaul the mad woman in the hotel - "Jasmine" and "Jasmine", Bharati Mukherjee Nadine Gordimer and the naked ape - "Something Out There" conclusion.
The Poet, The Critic, and the Moralist: Horace, Epistles 1.19
I begin by quoting from two valuable recent works on Horace. Professor Brink in his Horace on Poetry (1964) writes: ‘The centre of the short piece lies in lines 21—34. Readers, among them critics and poets, had denied one aspect of the Odes which was surely above criticism—the striking originality of these poems. Horace's defence turns on the question of originality’ (p. 180) and ‘Epistle 19 is unique in that it alone among the literary satires and letters reiterates Horace's claim to be the Latin fidicen’ (p. 182). And Dr. McGann in his Studies in Horace's First Book of Epistles (Collection Latomus 100: 1969): ‘In Ep. 19... as in the literary satires, Horace is a practising poet or at least a very recently practising one, engaged in defending himself against hostile criticism’ (p. 40) and ‘As the only epistle concerned exclusively with literary matters, the nineteenth stands apart’ (p. 82).