Imagining a dialectical African modernity: Achebe's ontological hopes, Sembene's machines, Mda's epistemological redness

Myambo, Melissa Tandiwe

doi:10.1080/02589001.2014.979608

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 3 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…. [towards] ‘ontological healing’” (Myambo, 2014: 460). Consequently, storytelling in the AOTS Framework works through the dialectical where there is a travelling away from the old self toward written forms/techniques in storytelling but also a travelling back to a past and selfhood that continue to be threatened.…”

Section: Oral Storytelling In Africamentioning

confidence: 99%

Developing African oral traditional storytelling as a framework for studying with African peoples

Osei-Tutu

2022

Qualitative Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Oral traditions have played and continue to play a critical role in the lives of African peoples albeit changes in context and usage. In this article, I discuss the development of what I term the African Oral Traditional Storytelling (AOTS) Framework as an ethical and culturally centered approach to studying with African peoples. Akin to narrative inquiry methodology, the AOTS Framework is developed as an alternative approach to studying or working with African peoples by centering African oral storytelling, African philosophies and worldviews, languages, and cultures as relevant and essential to understanding the experiences of African peoples. The collaborative philosophical underpinnings of the AOTS Framework rest on the communal and the collaborators’ engagement in the study not just as people who provide information but as co-creators in the narratives, meanings, and understandings that are brought to bear.

show abstract

Section: Oral Storytelling In Africamentioning

confidence: 99%

Developing African oral traditional storytelling as a framework for studying with African peoples

Osei-Tutu

2022

Qualitative Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Each of the books takes place in the 'traditional modernity' (Myambo, 2014) of an emerging market economy, but because the narrative universe largely consists of urbanised, globalised CTZs, the characters/narrators' narrative choices are often more determined by Western capitalist-modernity than the wider national context in which the majority population still practises (more rural) traditions. While white Western chick lit also deals with the modernity-tradition binary, it is not as significant as it is for chick lit from other regions (or for books by immigrant groups in the global North; see: Butler and Desai, 2008).…”

Section: Neoliberal Feminism and The Traditional-modern Woman Dialecticmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Euro-American chick lit is about middle-class, economically independent, self-sufficient women, and when the genre frontier migrates to the developing world, it constructs its fictional universe from a narrow selection of potential sites representing urban CTZs occupied by the upper echelons of society, like the five-star hotel, the country club and the air-conditioned office in the skyscraper. These are modern built forms that are themselves the result of imperialist frontier migrations over the last few centuries which created the palimpsestic 'traditional modernity' of today's globalising cities (see: Myambo, 2014).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The spatial politics of chick lit in Africa and Asia: sidestepping tradition and fem-washing global capitalism?

Myambo

2019

Feminist Theory

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article provides a spatial analysis of the types of microspaces, or Cultural Time Zones (CTZs), that constitute the narrative universes of chick lit from South Africa, China and India. I argue that although these books take place in ‘developing’ countries, their ‘First World’ spatial politics, and thus their political impact and cultural commentary, are both enabled and constrained by the settings of their narrative thrust. In the CTZ of the five-star hotel, or the elite spa, the books’ protagonists exemplify a popular notion of choice/neoliberal feminism. What, then, do they say about the possibility of feminism for confronting patriarchal traditions in CTZs like the ‘local’ neighbourhood? The three books analysed – Angela Makholwa’s Black Widow Society, Wei Hui’s Shanghai Baby and Anita Jain’s Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India – are set in the globalising cities of Johannesburg, Shanghai and Delhi in putatively ‘developing’ countries; however, the books’ female protagonists tend to inhabit a series of ‘global’, ‘First World’ CTZs, like the high-end shopping mall, the Western music-playing nightclub or the cappuccino-serving cafe. These CTZs are geographically distant from those of their Western chick lit counterparts, yet nonetheless not very far away if measured in cultural kilometres. The neoliberal, so-called feminist ‘choices’ available to these protagonists would not be possible in geographically proximate but culturally distant, ‘traditional’ CTZs. The key question this article asks is whether these narratives’ spatial settings, confined as they are to upper middle-class, ‘global’, ‘modern’ CTZs, produce a form of spatial politics that fem-washes global capitalism while failing to confront patriarchal and traditional structures which dominate in more ‘local’, ‘traditional’ CTZs.

show abstract

The writer as social thinker

Adebanwi

2014

Journal of Contemporary African Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Imagining a dialectical African modernity: Achebe's ontological hopes, Sembene's machines, Mda's epistemological redness

Cited by 5 publications

References 3 publications

Developing African oral traditional storytelling as a framework for studying with African peoples

Developing African oral traditional storytelling as a framework for studying with African peoples

The spatial politics of chick lit in Africa and Asia: sidestepping tradition and fem-washing global capitalism?

The writer as social thinker

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About