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.
Effekte einer freiwilligen Mitgliedschaft in Berufsverbänden auf das Einkommen: Eine Analyse der Einkommensdynamik bei Freiberuflern in Deutschland
Central question in our analysis is if voluntarily organised Professions, i.e. self-employed Liberal Professions (Freiberufler) in professional organisations, yield a higher income than those not associated to any professional organisation. To answer this question four waves from the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey Study (GSOEP) are used. Descriptive statistics show a positive link of gross monthly income and those who are voluntarily associated in professional organisations. Because gross monthly income is influenced by the amount of actual hours worked, gross hourly income is the central magnitude of interest. The aforementioned positive link is widely confirmed by descriptive statistics of corresponding gross hourly income. To measure causal effects through voluntary membership in professional organisations a fixed-effects-model in consideration of unobserved and time constant heterogeneity is estimated. We find a negative premium in gross hourly income for voluntarily organised Professions which varies between -7,67 und -9,15 %.