We should never underestimate stories. Like the jinns1 in The Thousand and One Nights, Gurnah tel... more We should never underestimate stories. Like the jinns1 in The Thousand and One Nights, Gurnah tells us that stories ‘are always slipping through our fingers, changing shape, wriggling to get away’ (130). This essay examines some of those shape shifting stories and the material culture that attempts to anchor and strip them of their beguiling power. It does so in the context of their travelling owners in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel, By the Sea. This journal article is available in Kunapipi: http://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol30/iss1/8
Oxford: James Currey; Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008. 192pp. ISBN: 184... more Oxford: James Currey; Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008. 192pp. ISBN: 1847015077.
The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 1987
based on the 1971 Cerisy-la-Salle colloquium. However, instead of exploring the problems relating... more based on the 1971 Cerisy-la-Salle colloquium. However, instead of exploring the problems relating to the New Novel, such as the relationship of the 'nouveau roman" to film, criticism, phenomenology, politics, and so forth, the New York colloquium delineates the present situation of the New Novel within a retrospective framework. It is an excellent addition to the library of all readers interested in the "nouveau roman," innovative fiction, and the "trans-Atlantic refraction"~the name Harry Levin once gave to French-American literary connections.
Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies, 2021
Could there be a more apt chant to bring us a smile as we mourn and celebrate Harry? Who here has... more Could there be a more apt chant to bring us a smile as we mourn and celebrate Harry? Who here has not seen him with his coffee at the table outside the Centre for African Studies (CAS) building at the University of Cape Town (UCT)? Talking, reading, writing, thinking, whatever. Always with the coffee. He once said, towards the end of a dinner, that he needed a good strong cup before bed to help him sleepwe laughed as we all sipped our mint and chamomile. I was asked to remember Harry in the old days of CAS. So, I have permission for nostalgia for a very bygone age in our corner of UCT. We had a vision of a centre of learning in which we could be academics, friends, parents and hosts. We believed that embracing all these different life dimensions at work could make us better scholars, more whole people. It was a time of hospitality, towards ideas, towards visiting scholars and towards our children, who were always welcome, especially at the Friday teas. Harry brought baby Ruona to take tea with us one Friday. It didn't work out well. The little boy wept throughout in terror of Jackson Hlungwane's snake sculpture, which is just outside. My memory is of Harry gently hugging and rocking his beloved baby boy, while simultaneously discussing the issue of the demonisation of Africa in the media. We liked each other and our students; we were on a mission to find and make the tools, and the language, with which to research and teach our complicated, diverse, continent, with all its differences and its shared struggles. I met Harry in 2001 when he applied for the post of a lectureship in African Studies. He flew in from Zululand for his interview for the post. I met with him in my office the day before the interview. He could not take his eyes off my bookcase. Hells bells, he was supposed to be impressing me, as Chair of his selection committee, but all he wanted to do was to get at the books. I knew I had my person for the job! What a gift to have top notch scholars from other countries in Africa to deepen and broaden our South African minds! Thank you for Harry, Nigeria! He was a man with a driving urge to know more and to know better. I find Harry nuggets entering my mind. One of the best was his intervention in a heated seminar
What are the politics of the genre of academic writing, and its enabling networks? This genre of ... more What are the politics of the genre of academic writing, and its enabling networks? This genre of writing and those networks shape the form and substance of our writing within an African research context. I examine the dominant template of academic writing style, which operates across many fields of scholarly endeavour. It enables different sorts of knowledge to be accepted as true, or to be excluded. What and how to write academically have been filtered through the colonial library, making it urgent to surface this template and its operationalizing networks of academic writers. The links between the language of academic writing, the colonial past, the field of African Studies, and networks of academics who appoint each other to posts and review each other’s submissions to journals, is usually silent. They became deafening in the aftermath of what became known as the Philip Curtin debacle. This article is situated at the 20-year anniversary of the notorious Philip Curtin intervention...
Materialist Animism, the Rhetoric of Metonymy, and the Resistance of the EverydayAfrican writers ... more Materialist Animism, the Rhetoric of Metonymy, and the Resistance of the EverydayAfrican writers communicating in English - and particularly migrants living and writing in the Western world - have found ways of challenging European imperialist power through playing with language. What they struggle with, specifically, is the fact that English is saturated with the metaphors and meanings linked to imperialism. The exemplary metaphor is, of course, Africa as the dark heart of Conrad's classic. Writers struggle against the tentacles of this language of their colonisers, a language through which they themselves have been constituted as reluctant, ambivalent subjects; they therefore seize this language, with which they have a love-hatred, and attempt to manipulate its tropes and symbols in a variety of ways. These include anchoring their fictions in the visceral material realities of their previous lives and their new experiences in the diaspora; it involves infusing the sounds and words and worldviews of the other languages into which they were born and socialised, such as Arabic, Igbo or Yoruba. To depict these literal realities and to incorporate the rhythms of other languages into their fictions, some African writers find that the rhetoric of metonymy holds the potential to interrogate the hierarchical law of dominant metaphors. What I will be demonstrating in this article is the crucial link between material culture, solid objects, language and subjectivity, as applied to Biyi Bandele's novel, The Street.The connections that are metonymic include contiguity - the chance ordering of elements that find themselves next to each other, which contrasts with the deep, symbolic, figurai bonds of metaphor. Rhymes and jingles, songs, the concrete and happenstance are all the stuff of metonymy. Bill Ashcroft has focussed on one particular use of this trope, what he has called "the metonymic gap" (2001: 75). He continues to emphasise how cultural differences of experience are "actually installed in the text in various ways" (ibid: 75, his emphasis). The metonymic gap, by means of which this installation of difference is accomplished, occurs when postcolonial writers "insert unglossed words, phrases or passages from a first language, or concepts, allusions or references which may be unknown to the reader" (ibid: 75). What then happens is that:Such words become synecdochic of the writer's culture - the part that stands for the whole ... Thus the inserted language 'stands for' the colonized culture in a metonymic way, and its very resistance to interpretation constructs a 'gap' between the writer's culture and the colonial culture, (ibid: 75)Ashcroft also observes that this harnessing of metonymy flies in the face of the law of the powerful, Western centre: "in the European tradition the contiguous and accidental, those characteristics which seem to accrue to the metonymic, will never have the power of truth" and truth, of course, "is the province of the metropolitan" (ibid: 75). Ashcroft, in fact, describes this "metonymic gap" as "a crucial feature of the transformative function of post-colonial writing" (ibid: 75) and goes so far as to suggest that it is "the distinguishing feature of post-colonial literature" (ibid: 76). Deleuze and Guattari call this kind of subcultural, combative writing a "minor literature". They explain that "minor" does not refer to a minor language but is "that which a minority constructs within a major language" (1986: 16). Specifically, with regard to Kafka, there is "the situation of the German language in Czechoslovakia, as a fluid language intermixed with Czech and Yiddish" (ibid: 20). Deleuze and Guattari describe Kafka's language as a "melange", "a Harlequin costume in which very different functions of language and distinct centers of power are played out" (ibid: 26). The challenge is how "to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one's own language?" (ibid: 19). …
I derive my title from Gayatri Spivak, who declares that postcolonial writers and intellectuals, ... more I derive my title from Gayatri Spivak, who declares that postcolonial writers and intellectuals, like Buchi Emecheta and Assia Djebar, are banished from Oedipus. Thus they are also outside the patriarchal Law of the Symbolic and the dominant Western metaphors to which it is bonded. The paper goes on to examine the transformative potential of the metonymic language of material
This volume presents a powerful selection of reprinted and new essays by one of the most importan... more This volume presents a powerful selection of reprinted and new essays by one of the most important critics in postcolonial studies. It constitutes a trenchant critique of the textualism that has dominated the field and proposes alternative critical and reading practices more attentive to historical circumstances and socio-material conditions. In a first, introductory chapter, Benita Parry outlines the historical and personal contexts from which her work has emerged and points to 'directions and dead ends' in the field she has helped to shape. This is followed by a series of essays that vigorously challenge colonial discourse theory and postcolonialism as we have known them. Parry then turns to literature with a series of detailed textual and contextual readings of wellknown texts. These not only demonstrate her theoretical position at work, but also give new dimensions to widely studied texts by Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells and E. M. Forster. While acknowledging the significance of much work done under the emblem of postcolonial studies, Parry argues throughout that the material impulses of colonialism, its appropriation of physical resources, exploitation of human labour and institutional repression have too long been allowed to recede from view. What then is the future of postcolonialism? Parry concludes with the compelling argument that theoretical work must strive to join remembrance of the material past with a critique of the contemporary condition, remaining unreconciled to the past and unconsoled by the present. Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique offers an invaluable framework upon which to build such a future. Born in South Africa and resident in the United Kingdom since 1958, Benita Parry is Honorary Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. For many years Professor Parry worked as an independent critic writing books and essays on the literature of the British Empire, and more recently on colonial discourse and the postcolonial discussion. Her many influential contributions to the field of postcolonial studies include Delusions and Discoveries: Studies on India in
The goals of the Centre are to encourage and coordinate teaching and research in the various fiel... more The goals of the Centre are to encourage and coordinate teaching and research in the various fields concerned with people in Africa, as well as developing African Studies graduate courses and programmes. We also provide service courses for non-Humanities students, such as Engineers and Architects, at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. At the core of our teaching and research is our intellectual project of examining the ways in which knowledge of Africa has been constructed in a range of discourses that cut across a number of disciplines. Within this forum, our courses cover themes such as the representation of Africa across a number of media in both popular culture and in academic disciplines. In this regard, we provide a critical understanding of how knowledge in and about Africa has been filtered through the colonial library. In addition, the Centre's activities include producing our journal, Social Dynamics, holding regular seminars, workshops and forums for debate and providing a venue for performances, art exhibitions and film. Professor Brenda Cooper African fiction; representations of Africa; literary theory quite broadly defined; including postcolonial studies and African studies Dr Harry Garuba postcolonial theory and criticism; African and African diasporic literature; cultural studies Dr Nick Shepherd postcolonial theory; public archaeology; archaeology and education Ms Noeleen Murray modern architectural studies; architectural design; heritage studies; landscape studies Research Associates
... that flap in the charmed wind. There are the yellow butterflies that hover around the head of... more ... that flap in the charmed wind. There are the yellow butterflies that hover around the head of Mauricio Babilonia, the brave, upright and tragic man, butterflies that torment and betray him. Such beautiful and enhancing images ...
I derive my title from Gayatri Spivak, who declares that postcolonial writers and intellectuals, ... more I derive my title from Gayatri Spivak, who declares that postcolonial writers and intellectuals, like Buchi Emecheta and Assia Djebar, are banished from Oedipus. Thus they are also outside the patriarchal Law of the Symbolic and the dominant Western metaphors to which it is bonded. The paper goes on to examine the transformative potential of the metonymic language of material culture and the everyday. We see how the writers transform commonplace objects, like a pram or a lettuce, into metonyms of daily life in order to wrest language away from the Oedipal, Western, male Symbolic and to find their voices, as writers, as women, and as Africans. The paper emphasizes, however, that language is always, in fact, blended. What is being contested is the hierarchy between polarized dimensions, such as the figurative over the literal, the Symbolic over the Imaginary, English over indigenous languages, and Europe over Africa. What we see is how the protagonists of Emecheta and Djebar are constituted as subjects within multiple dimensions, knowledges, cultures, and traditions.
We should never underestimate stories. Like the jinns1 in The Thousand and One Nights, Gurnah tel... more We should never underestimate stories. Like the jinns1 in The Thousand and One Nights, Gurnah tells us that stories ‘are always slipping through our fingers, changing shape, wriggling to get away’ (130). This essay examines some of those shape shifting stories and the material culture that attempts to anchor and strip them of their beguiling power. It does so in the context of their travelling owners in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel, By the Sea. This journal article is available in Kunapipi: http://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol30/iss1/8
Oxford: James Currey; Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008. 192pp. ISBN: 184... more Oxford: James Currey; Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008. 192pp. ISBN: 1847015077.
The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 1987
based on the 1971 Cerisy-la-Salle colloquium. However, instead of exploring the problems relating... more based on the 1971 Cerisy-la-Salle colloquium. However, instead of exploring the problems relating to the New Novel, such as the relationship of the 'nouveau roman" to film, criticism, phenomenology, politics, and so forth, the New York colloquium delineates the present situation of the New Novel within a retrospective framework. It is an excellent addition to the library of all readers interested in the "nouveau roman," innovative fiction, and the "trans-Atlantic refraction"~the name Harry Levin once gave to French-American literary connections.
Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies, 2021
Could there be a more apt chant to bring us a smile as we mourn and celebrate Harry? Who here has... more Could there be a more apt chant to bring us a smile as we mourn and celebrate Harry? Who here has not seen him with his coffee at the table outside the Centre for African Studies (CAS) building at the University of Cape Town (UCT)? Talking, reading, writing, thinking, whatever. Always with the coffee. He once said, towards the end of a dinner, that he needed a good strong cup before bed to help him sleepwe laughed as we all sipped our mint and chamomile. I was asked to remember Harry in the old days of CAS. So, I have permission for nostalgia for a very bygone age in our corner of UCT. We had a vision of a centre of learning in which we could be academics, friends, parents and hosts. We believed that embracing all these different life dimensions at work could make us better scholars, more whole people. It was a time of hospitality, towards ideas, towards visiting scholars and towards our children, who were always welcome, especially at the Friday teas. Harry brought baby Ruona to take tea with us one Friday. It didn't work out well. The little boy wept throughout in terror of Jackson Hlungwane's snake sculpture, which is just outside. My memory is of Harry gently hugging and rocking his beloved baby boy, while simultaneously discussing the issue of the demonisation of Africa in the media. We liked each other and our students; we were on a mission to find and make the tools, and the language, with which to research and teach our complicated, diverse, continent, with all its differences and its shared struggles. I met Harry in 2001 when he applied for the post of a lectureship in African Studies. He flew in from Zululand for his interview for the post. I met with him in my office the day before the interview. He could not take his eyes off my bookcase. Hells bells, he was supposed to be impressing me, as Chair of his selection committee, but all he wanted to do was to get at the books. I knew I had my person for the job! What a gift to have top notch scholars from other countries in Africa to deepen and broaden our South African minds! Thank you for Harry, Nigeria! He was a man with a driving urge to know more and to know better. I find Harry nuggets entering my mind. One of the best was his intervention in a heated seminar
What are the politics of the genre of academic writing, and its enabling networks? This genre of ... more What are the politics of the genre of academic writing, and its enabling networks? This genre of writing and those networks shape the form and substance of our writing within an African research context. I examine the dominant template of academic writing style, which operates across many fields of scholarly endeavour. It enables different sorts of knowledge to be accepted as true, or to be excluded. What and how to write academically have been filtered through the colonial library, making it urgent to surface this template and its operationalizing networks of academic writers. The links between the language of academic writing, the colonial past, the field of African Studies, and networks of academics who appoint each other to posts and review each other’s submissions to journals, is usually silent. They became deafening in the aftermath of what became known as the Philip Curtin debacle. This article is situated at the 20-year anniversary of the notorious Philip Curtin intervention...
Materialist Animism, the Rhetoric of Metonymy, and the Resistance of the EverydayAfrican writers ... more Materialist Animism, the Rhetoric of Metonymy, and the Resistance of the EverydayAfrican writers communicating in English - and particularly migrants living and writing in the Western world - have found ways of challenging European imperialist power through playing with language. What they struggle with, specifically, is the fact that English is saturated with the metaphors and meanings linked to imperialism. The exemplary metaphor is, of course, Africa as the dark heart of Conrad's classic. Writers struggle against the tentacles of this language of their colonisers, a language through which they themselves have been constituted as reluctant, ambivalent subjects; they therefore seize this language, with which they have a love-hatred, and attempt to manipulate its tropes and symbols in a variety of ways. These include anchoring their fictions in the visceral material realities of their previous lives and their new experiences in the diaspora; it involves infusing the sounds and words and worldviews of the other languages into which they were born and socialised, such as Arabic, Igbo or Yoruba. To depict these literal realities and to incorporate the rhythms of other languages into their fictions, some African writers find that the rhetoric of metonymy holds the potential to interrogate the hierarchical law of dominant metaphors. What I will be demonstrating in this article is the crucial link between material culture, solid objects, language and subjectivity, as applied to Biyi Bandele's novel, The Street.The connections that are metonymic include contiguity - the chance ordering of elements that find themselves next to each other, which contrasts with the deep, symbolic, figurai bonds of metaphor. Rhymes and jingles, songs, the concrete and happenstance are all the stuff of metonymy. Bill Ashcroft has focussed on one particular use of this trope, what he has called "the metonymic gap" (2001: 75). He continues to emphasise how cultural differences of experience are "actually installed in the text in various ways" (ibid: 75, his emphasis). The metonymic gap, by means of which this installation of difference is accomplished, occurs when postcolonial writers "insert unglossed words, phrases or passages from a first language, or concepts, allusions or references which may be unknown to the reader" (ibid: 75). What then happens is that:Such words become synecdochic of the writer's culture - the part that stands for the whole ... Thus the inserted language 'stands for' the colonized culture in a metonymic way, and its very resistance to interpretation constructs a 'gap' between the writer's culture and the colonial culture, (ibid: 75)Ashcroft also observes that this harnessing of metonymy flies in the face of the law of the powerful, Western centre: "in the European tradition the contiguous and accidental, those characteristics which seem to accrue to the metonymic, will never have the power of truth" and truth, of course, "is the province of the metropolitan" (ibid: 75). Ashcroft, in fact, describes this "metonymic gap" as "a crucial feature of the transformative function of post-colonial writing" (ibid: 75) and goes so far as to suggest that it is "the distinguishing feature of post-colonial literature" (ibid: 76). Deleuze and Guattari call this kind of subcultural, combative writing a "minor literature". They explain that "minor" does not refer to a minor language but is "that which a minority constructs within a major language" (1986: 16). Specifically, with regard to Kafka, there is "the situation of the German language in Czechoslovakia, as a fluid language intermixed with Czech and Yiddish" (ibid: 20). Deleuze and Guattari describe Kafka's language as a "melange", "a Harlequin costume in which very different functions of language and distinct centers of power are played out" (ibid: 26). The challenge is how "to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one's own language?" (ibid: 19). …
I derive my title from Gayatri Spivak, who declares that postcolonial writers and intellectuals, ... more I derive my title from Gayatri Spivak, who declares that postcolonial writers and intellectuals, like Buchi Emecheta and Assia Djebar, are banished from Oedipus. Thus they are also outside the patriarchal Law of the Symbolic and the dominant Western metaphors to which it is bonded. The paper goes on to examine the transformative potential of the metonymic language of material
This volume presents a powerful selection of reprinted and new essays by one of the most importan... more This volume presents a powerful selection of reprinted and new essays by one of the most important critics in postcolonial studies. It constitutes a trenchant critique of the textualism that has dominated the field and proposes alternative critical and reading practices more attentive to historical circumstances and socio-material conditions. In a first, introductory chapter, Benita Parry outlines the historical and personal contexts from which her work has emerged and points to 'directions and dead ends' in the field she has helped to shape. This is followed by a series of essays that vigorously challenge colonial discourse theory and postcolonialism as we have known them. Parry then turns to literature with a series of detailed textual and contextual readings of wellknown texts. These not only demonstrate her theoretical position at work, but also give new dimensions to widely studied texts by Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells and E. M. Forster. While acknowledging the significance of much work done under the emblem of postcolonial studies, Parry argues throughout that the material impulses of colonialism, its appropriation of physical resources, exploitation of human labour and institutional repression have too long been allowed to recede from view. What then is the future of postcolonialism? Parry concludes with the compelling argument that theoretical work must strive to join remembrance of the material past with a critique of the contemporary condition, remaining unreconciled to the past and unconsoled by the present. Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique offers an invaluable framework upon which to build such a future. Born in South Africa and resident in the United Kingdom since 1958, Benita Parry is Honorary Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. For many years Professor Parry worked as an independent critic writing books and essays on the literature of the British Empire, and more recently on colonial discourse and the postcolonial discussion. Her many influential contributions to the field of postcolonial studies include Delusions and Discoveries: Studies on India in
The goals of the Centre are to encourage and coordinate teaching and research in the various fiel... more The goals of the Centre are to encourage and coordinate teaching and research in the various fields concerned with people in Africa, as well as developing African Studies graduate courses and programmes. We also provide service courses for non-Humanities students, such as Engineers and Architects, at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. At the core of our teaching and research is our intellectual project of examining the ways in which knowledge of Africa has been constructed in a range of discourses that cut across a number of disciplines. Within this forum, our courses cover themes such as the representation of Africa across a number of media in both popular culture and in academic disciplines. In this regard, we provide a critical understanding of how knowledge in and about Africa has been filtered through the colonial library. In addition, the Centre's activities include producing our journal, Social Dynamics, holding regular seminars, workshops and forums for debate and providing a venue for performances, art exhibitions and film. Professor Brenda Cooper African fiction; representations of Africa; literary theory quite broadly defined; including postcolonial studies and African studies Dr Harry Garuba postcolonial theory and criticism; African and African diasporic literature; cultural studies Dr Nick Shepherd postcolonial theory; public archaeology; archaeology and education Ms Noeleen Murray modern architectural studies; architectural design; heritage studies; landscape studies Research Associates
... that flap in the charmed wind. There are the yellow butterflies that hover around the head of... more ... that flap in the charmed wind. There are the yellow butterflies that hover around the head of Mauricio Babilonia, the brave, upright and tragic man, butterflies that torment and betray him. Such beautiful and enhancing images ...
I derive my title from Gayatri Spivak, who declares that postcolonial writers and intellectuals, ... more I derive my title from Gayatri Spivak, who declares that postcolonial writers and intellectuals, like Buchi Emecheta and Assia Djebar, are banished from Oedipus. Thus they are also outside the patriarchal Law of the Symbolic and the dominant Western metaphors to which it is bonded. The paper goes on to examine the transformative potential of the metonymic language of material culture and the everyday. We see how the writers transform commonplace objects, like a pram or a lettuce, into metonyms of daily life in order to wrest language away from the Oedipal, Western, male Symbolic and to find their voices, as writers, as women, and as Africans. The paper emphasizes, however, that language is always, in fact, blended. What is being contested is the hierarchy between polarized dimensions, such as the figurative over the literal, the Symbolic over the Imaginary, English over indigenous languages, and Europe over Africa. What we see is how the protagonists of Emecheta and Djebar are constituted as subjects within multiple dimensions, knowledges, cultures, and traditions.
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