African and Maghreb Literature by Charlotte Baker, Lancaster University
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African and Maghreb Literature By Charlotte Baker, Lancaster University 1. Francophone Sub-Saharan African Literature Overviews of Francophone postcolonial literature and theory comprising material on sub-Saharan African literature include: John McLeod, The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies, London, Routledge, 2007, 252 pp., a useful overview of the colonial histories and cultural production of Britain, France, Spain and Portugal; Patrick Corcoran, The Cambridge Introduction to Francophone Literature, CUP, 2007, 266 pp., an incisive introductory text which provides a clear synopsis of the Francophone world and sections on the Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania, Canada, and the Caribbean. Authors discussed include Henri Lopes, Ahmadou Kourouma, Sony Labou Tansi and Ken Bugul; Prem Poddar, Rajeev S. Patke and Lars Jensen, A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures: Continental Europe and Its Empires, Edinburgh U.P., 688 pp., a substantial text that includes wide-ranging discussion of France and its colonies, including lists of histories and key literary works, and sections on the Algerian War, anti-colonialism, decolonization, narratives and fictions of Empire, Négritude, neo-colonialism, race and ethnicity, sub-Saharan Africa and women’s histories. Comparative studies of African literature include: Tejumola Olaniyan and Ato Quayson, African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, Oxford, Blackwell, 2007, 792 pp., an extensive anthology of critical work which is organized around topics including feminist criticism, postmodernism, and Marxist theory to reflect the chronological development of African literary criticism. Bernard Mouralis, L’Illusion de l’altérité. Études de littérature africaine, Champion, 2007, 764 pp., includes chapters on Tierno Monénembo, Tchicaya U Tam’Si, Hampâté Bâ and Yambo Ouologuem, among others. Other comparative work includes: Crossing Places: New Research in African Studies, ed. Charlotte Baker and Zoë Norridge, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars, 2007, 143 pp., D. Murphy, ‘Birth of a nation? The origins of Senegalese literature in French’, RAfL, 39.1:48–69; K. Martial Frindethie, The Black Renaissance in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures, Jefferson, McFarland, 215 pp., and Postcolonial Violence, Culture and Identity in Francophone Africa and the Antilles, ed. Lorna Milne, Oxford, Lang, 2007, 233 pp., African and Maghreb Literature 247 a study of the representation of violence by writers, film-makers, and photographers in Francophone contexts. Gender is the focus of various studies, including: Debra Popkin, Francophone Women Coming of Age: Memoirs of Childhood and Adoles cence from France, Africa, Quebec and the Caribbean, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars, 2007, 120 pp., which examines issues relating to female experience in male-dominated Francophone cultures such as religion, tradition, parental conflict, and sibling rivalry; Cole, Africa, which considers the evolving meaning of gender in African contexts; and Mildred Mortimer, Writing from the Hearth: Public, Domestic, and Imaginative Space in Francophone Women’s Fiction of Africa and the Caribbean, Lanham, Lexington, 2007, 224 pp. RAfL, 38, focuses on oral literature, and includes articles on folk literature, poetry, praise songs, the novel form, and radio broadcasts, among others. David Murphy and Patrick Williams, Postcolonial African Cinema: Ten Directors, MUP, 272 pp., explores the lives and works of a cross-section of postcolonial African film-makers from the 1950s to the present. M. and W. provide an overview of each director’s work, and a particular reading of one or more films in which the authors situate African cinema in relation to important critical and theoretical debates. 2. Individual Francophone Sub-Saharan Authors Bâ. W. Njoya, ‘On Mariama Bâ’s novels, stereotypes and silence’, CSSAAME, 27.2:450–62, argues that the popularity of B.’s novel rides on stereotypes of African cultures, tracing these images to the imperial framework and locating them in the criticism of her work. G. E. Worugji and E. D. Simon, ‘The theme of marriage in Dear Ramatoulaye as a response to Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter’, Lwati, 5, 2007:192–203, often poorly expressed, but with a valid argument, explores Ndubuisi Umunnakwe’s masculinist response to Bâ’s Une si longue lettre, while Eileen Julien discusses B.’s work comparatively in ‘When a man loves a woman: gender and national identity in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the Horseman and Mariama Bâ’s Scarlet Song’, Cole, Africa, 205–22. Hampâté Bâ. K. Aggarwal, ‘Anthropology and autobiography in Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s writings’, FPS, 6.2:73–91, stresses the importance of locating Malian writer Hampâté Bâ’s work within the context of French Africanism and examines the writer’s refusal to define colonialism in binary terms or to ignore the importance of the colonial encounter as a historical phenomenon that has had a significant impact on the course of human civilization..