1st Edition

Routledge Handbook of Minority Discourses in African Literature

Edited By Tanure Ojaide, Joyce Ashuntantang Copyright 2020
    432 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    432 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    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.