Decolonial Temporalities in Tsitsi Dangarembga's &lt;em&gt;The Book of Not&lt;/em&gt;

Gulick,

doi:10.2979/reseafrilite.50.4.03

Cited by 2 publications

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“…It is also because of this fluidity that there arise challenges about locating specific African writers. For example, although I present Tsitsi Dangarembga as a second-generation writer, Gulick (2019) hints that she is a first-generation writer, while Adesanmi and Dunton (2005) classify her as a thirdgeneration writer. In fact, Mukoma Wa Ngugi (2018) suggests that the so-called first-generation writers are better classified as the "Makerere generation", given that the term "first-generation" excludes the work of South African writers (such as Samuel Mqhayi, Sol Plaatje, AC Jordan, Thomas Mofolo and RRR Dhlomo) who were writing in (South) African languages long before writers such as Achebe.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Literary Turn in African Studies

Acheampong¹

2022

The Thinker

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The literary turn in African Studies is conceptualized here not as entailing the shift to textual/ discourse analysis pioneered by Edward Said, but as how African literary figures have contributed to the advancement of decolonization/ decoloniality in African Studies. Its point of departure is the “decolonial turn”, which refers to the varied patterns of decolonial thought emerging from different geographic and epistemic sites. Although there are sometimes divergences among these patterns of thought, the salient point ofconvergence is their acknowledgement of coloniality as a problem haunting the world today, and of the task of decolonization/ decoloniality as unfinished. There is, however, a tendency among certain scholars to trace the genealogy of decolonial thinking, ignoring the various contributions to decolonial thinking from other sites. This article attempts to fill this crucial gap by accounting, specifically, for an African literary genealogy of decolonial thinking through the lens of the concept of “generations.” The ideas of generations and turns in literary studies in particular, and African Studies in general, are complicated by the overlapping ideologicaldispositions of the writers.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Literary Turn in African Studies

Acheampong¹

2022

The Thinker

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Literature, Law, and Rhetorical Performance in the Anticolonial Atlantic By Anne W. Gulick The Ohio State University Press, 2016, xi, 258 pp.

Onah

2020

Postcolon. Lit. inq

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with Truth is a reminder of the power but ultimately fallacy of memory, or rather put more forgivingly, the unreliability of memory. The complexities of remembering (and consequently forgetting) are the gray zones that narrative nonfiction trespasses. A great example of this is the much-contested work of Jacob Dlamini, Native Nostalgia, that Twiddle thoroughly engages with. This is an important text in post-apartheid South Africa dealing with the question of memory and nostalgia, wherein to the dismay of many Black South Africans, Dlamini speaks of Black joy even during apartheid. Dlamini is accused of making light of apartheid, but as Twidle argues, Native Nostalgia was not popular because it does "not easily fit received narrative templates premised on progressive and closure, and cannot be resolved into the binary of 'victims' and 'perpetrators' as formulated by the TRC Final Report" (49). What is at stake here with Experiments with Truth, as what is at stake with narrative nonfiction in post-TRC South Africa, is "debates about historiography, knowledge production, and the ethics of representation" (20). In post-apartheid South Africa, whether it is debates about language and accents, about memory and remembering, about whiteness and privilege, about middle-class blackness and access, about who can write about whom and under what conditions-South Africans are grappling with anxieties produced by a society under momentous transition. Ultimately, Twidle and the nonfiction works he critically engages points us to "post-apartheid intellectual possibility" (139). That through the critical reading of post-TRC texts, we should endeavor to engage the ways that history is shifting, to confront our culpability in the present, and how we imagine the South Africa to come. In other words, we must be wary of the metanarratives of the past, like that of "victims" and "perpetrators," and how they shape (and often limit) our engagements with the present.

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Decolonial Temporalities in Tsitsi Dangarembga's <em>The Book of Not</em>

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

A Literary Turn in African Studies

A Literary Turn in African Studies

Literature, Law, and Rhetorical Performance in the Anticolonial Atlantic By Anne W. Gulick The Ohio State University Press, 2016, xi, 258 pp.

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