Oppressive Sameness and the Novels We Need: Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Challenge to Postcolonial Readerly Desires in the Twenty-First Century

Gulick, Anne W.

doi:10.1080/13696815.2019.1704699

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 3 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Although the reader navigates their way from British colonial rule in Zimbabwe into the (period after the) attainment of independence, we look for significant transitions in the lives of the characters in the novels in vain. Instead, an "oppressive sameness" (Gulick, 2020) pervades the life of Dangarembga's main character, ever-questioning the "post-ness" of postcoloniality 9 by foregrounding continuities rather than ruptures between the supposedly colonial and postcolonial era. This point is foreshadowed in the titles of the novels.…”

Section: Second-generation Writingmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Literary Turn in African Studies

Acheampong¹

2022

The Thinker

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Section: Second-generation Writingmentioning

confidence: 99%