Politics of the Postcolonial Text: Africa and its Diasporas
James Tar Tsaaior (ed.)
Pan-African University, Lagos
In their very historical constitution and derivation, politics is the essential and governing character of postcolonial cultures. In the same way, politics defines and gives energy to the postcolonial text. The political complexion of the postcolonial text registers itself in the fact that it is a counter-hegemonic text to the colonial text which is predatory. It is in this schema that the postcolonial text, in its essential political aspirations, participates in the production and circulation of cultural knowledge that is historically particular and ideologically positioned. These regimes of knowledge simultaneously interrogate and revise totalizing and absolutist modes of epistemologies and their accompanying hermeneutics which are decidedly prejudiced and uncharitable to that of Others.
Through this strategy, the postcolonial text, inevitably, imposes on itself the project of recuperating and reconstituting the social and cultural histories of the postcolony as part of the knowledge infrastructure with which to assert its energies and cultural self-presence. This process of self-retrieval and self-renewal is symbolically significant and is central to the thematic concern of this book. Firstly, it represents an acknowledgement of a loss, lack or limitation and the determination to embark on a journey to recover or remedy the lack. Secondly, it calls for the re-articulation and reaffirmation of cultural verities that can galvanise the affected society on the path of self-knowledge as a basis for the re-vindication of its self-identity.
The essays that constitute this book approximate a narrative mosaic on which is etched tributary topical concerns which find their confluence in the integrity of the postcolonial text as a political and cultural event for the secretion of meanings central to African and Black identity through the continuum of history. The political dimension of this textual project congeals in the fact that it unveils and participates in the amalgam of issues that have been definitive of the Black cultural condition.
Contents:
James Tar TSAAIOR: Introduction: Of Origins, Politics and the Place of the Postcolonial Text in Black History/Culture
Ikenna KAMALU: Metaphor, Nationhood and the Rhetoric of Postcolonial Politics in Ben Okri’s Novels
Henri ORIPELOYE: Urhobo Myth and Oral Rhetoric as Constitutive Sites in Tanure Ojaide’s Poetry
Anke BARTELS: Failing to Contain the World: The Politics of Space in Rebecca Njau’s Ripples in the Pool
Philip Onoriode AGHOGHOVWIA: Globalisation and Cultural Identity Discourse in the Exilic Poetry of Tanure Ojaide and Odia Ofeimun
Gboyega KOLAWOLE & Sule E. EGYA: History and the Politics of Representation in the Postcolonial African Text
Ogaga OKUYADE: Threnody in the Postcolonial Text: The Example of New Nigerian Poetry
Andrew Ame ABA: A Post-colonial Reading of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Anthills of the Savannah
James Tar TSAAIOR: Aesthetics, Politics and Recent Nigerian Popular Music as Counter-Narratives
Sunny AWHEFEADA: Myth, History and the Identity of Africa: The Autobiographical Context of Alex Haley’s Roots
David Ekanem UDOINWANG: History, (Re)Memory and Cultural Self-Presencing: The Politics of Postcolonial Becoming in the Caribbean Novel
James Tar TSAAIOR: (Re-)Configuring Black Musical Genealogies: The Diaspora and Africa
Dr. Tsaaior is the current Head, Department of Mass Media and Writing at SMC, the Director of Academic Planning, Pan-African University and a member of the University Senate.
ISBN 9783862880140. LINCOM Textual Analyses 03. 228pp. 2010.
