1st Edition
Routledge Handbook of Minority Discourses in African Literature
This handbook provides a critical overview of literature dealing with groups of people or regions that suffer marginalization within Africa.
The contributors examine a multiplicity of minority discourses expressed in African literature, including those who are culturally, socially, politically, religiously, economically, and sexually marginalized in literary and artistic creations. Chapters and sections of the book are structured to identify major areas of minority articulation of their condition and strategies deployed against the repression, persecution, oppression, suppression, domination, and tyranny of the majority or dominant group.
Bringing together diverse perspectives to give a holistic representation of the African reality, this handbook is an important read for scholars and students of comparative and postcolonial literature and African studies.
PART I : Background
1 Introduction
Tanure Ojaide and Joyce Ashuntantang
2 The theory and aesthetics of minority discourses in African literature
Tanure Ojaide
PART II: Political and racial forms of marginalization
3 Amazigh/Berber literature and "literary space": a contested minority situation in (North) African literatures
Daniela Merolla
4 Negotiating the global literary market: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short fiction
Maximus Feldner
5 Anglophone Cameroon literature: writing from the margins of the margin
Joyce Ashuntantang
6 Niger Delta and its minority condition in Nigerian writing
Obari Gomba
7 Jola verbal arts of Casamance, Senegal, and The Gambia: a question in search of a literature
Tijan M. Sallah
PART III: Culture and language
8 Negating hegemony: linguistic and rhetorical formations as discursive praxis of resistance in Yulisa Amadu Maddy’s Obasai and Other Plays
Ernest Cole
9 Of pidgin, Nigerian Pidgin poetry, and minority discourses: the pidgin poems of Ezenwa-Ohaeto
Chike Okoye
10 Three moments of minor Afrikaans literary expression
Hein Willemse
11 Swahili literature as a minority discourse in African literatures
Mwenda Mbatiah
12 Becoming-minoritarian: constructions of coloured identities in creative writing projects at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa
F.F. Moolla
PART IV: Patriarchal domination, gender, sexuality, and other sociocultural "minorities"
13 A reflection on gender and sexuality as transnational archive of African modernity
Frieda Ekotto
14 "Who do you think you are, woman?" Wangari Maathai answers the patriarchal state in Unbowed
Gichingiri Ndigrigi
15 Representation of women in udje, an Urhobo men’s-only oral poetic performance genre
Enajite Ojaruega
16 Voices from the margin: female protagonists navigating power geometries
Oumar Cherif Diop
17 Responding from the fringe: women, Islam, and patriarchy in Nigerian Muslim women’s novels
Saeedat Bola Aliyu
PART V: Intranational, national, and international marginalization/conflict
18 The odds against Eritrean literature
Charles Cantalupo
19 Minority discourses and the construction of illicit versions of Zimbabwean nation-ness in Ndebele fiction in English
Maurice Taonezvi Vambe
20 The muse of history and the literature of the Nigeria-Biafra War
Maik Nwosu
PART VI: Literature and disability
21 Children with disabilities as negotiators of social responsibility: a critical study of ‘redemption’ in Meshack Asare’s Sosu’s Call
Dike Okoro
22 Beyond ‘harmless lunacy’: African women writers (w)riting madness
Pamela J. Olubunmi Smith
23 Mental health, minority discourse and Tanure Ojaide’s short stories
Stephen E. Kekeghe
PART VII: Recent trends of marginalities: timely and timeless
24 Not yet season of blossom: writing Northern Nigeria into the global space
Sule Emmanuel Egya
25 Afropolitan literature as a minority discourse in contemporary African literature
Razinat T. Mohammed
26 Tanella Boni’s Matins de couvre-feu: environmentalism and ecocriticism in African literature
Honore Missihoun
27 Futuristic themes and science fiction in modern African literature
Dike Okoro
28 Writing the self: Indian women writers from South Africa
Rajendra Chetty
Biography
Joyce Ashuntantang is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Hartford, USA.
Tanure Ojaide is the Frank Porter Graham Professor of Africana studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA.