Localising the global: the use of a postmodernist aesthetic in the fiction of Alain Mabanckou
- Authors: Ngulube, Innocent Akilimale
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: Mabanckou, Alain, 1966- , Mabanckou, Alain, 1966- -- Blue, white, red , Mabanckou, Alain, 1966- -- African psycho , Mabanckou, Alain, 1966- -- Broken glass , Mabanckou, Alain, 1966- -- Memoirs of a porcupine , Mabanckou, Alain, 1966- -- The Lights of Pointe-Noire , Mabanckou, Alain, 1966- -- Tomorrow I'll be twenty , Mabanckou, Alain, 1966- Black bazaar , Postcolonialism in literature , African fiction (French) -- History and criticism , Postmodernism (Literature)
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/167153 , vital:41442
- Description: This thesis explores the use of a postmodernist aesth etic in Alain Mabanckou’s oeuvre, namely Blue White Red, African Psycho, Broken Glass, Memoirs of a Porcupine, Black Bazaar, Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty, The Lights of Pointe-Noire, and Black Moses. In particular, I show how and why this Afrodiasporic author localises strategies associated with Western postmodernist writing in an African postcolonial context. My central argument is that if postmodernism is a critique of modernity in the West, then it must also be a respon se to enforced modernity in the African postcolonial context. In mounting this argument, I conduct a close reading of Mabanckou’s novels from within the theoretical frameworks of postmodernism and postcolonialism. I demonstrate that Mabanckou’s writing adu mbrates the possibility of a postcolonial postmodernism. Since he is a French-Congolese citizen, his writing evinces aesthetic glocalisation. That is, as a postcolonial writer, he conceives of, and inflects, postmodernism differently from a Western writer, for his experiences of and responses to modernity differ from the latter’s. Far from replicating a politics of disillusionment and despair that informs, even characterises, Western postmodernist fiction, Mabanckou invests hi s African postcolonial writing with a politics of decolonis ation which problematises the effects of enforced modernity. Postmodernism, in other words, accords Mabanckou an ambivalent position from which he interrogates both Western modernity and its African version. Significantly, in this regard, Mabanckou’s writing presents both an extension of and a departure from the pioneering influence of the first generation of African writers such as Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Wole Soyinka.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2020
- Authors: Ngulube, Innocent Akilimale
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: Mabanckou, Alain, 1966- , Mabanckou, Alain, 1966- -- Blue, white, red , Mabanckou, Alain, 1966- -- African psycho , Mabanckou, Alain, 1966- -- Broken glass , Mabanckou, Alain, 1966- -- Memoirs of a porcupine , Mabanckou, Alain, 1966- -- The Lights of Pointe-Noire , Mabanckou, Alain, 1966- -- Tomorrow I'll be twenty , Mabanckou, Alain, 1966- Black bazaar , Postcolonialism in literature , African fiction (French) -- History and criticism , Postmodernism (Literature)
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/167153 , vital:41442
- Description: This thesis explores the use of a postmodernist aesth etic in Alain Mabanckou’s oeuvre, namely Blue White Red, African Psycho, Broken Glass, Memoirs of a Porcupine, Black Bazaar, Tomorrow I’ll Be Twenty, The Lights of Pointe-Noire, and Black Moses. In particular, I show how and why this Afrodiasporic author localises strategies associated with Western postmodernist writing in an African postcolonial context. My central argument is that if postmodernism is a critique of modernity in the West, then it must also be a respon se to enforced modernity in the African postcolonial context. In mounting this argument, I conduct a close reading of Mabanckou’s novels from within the theoretical frameworks of postmodernism and postcolonialism. I demonstrate that Mabanckou’s writing adu mbrates the possibility of a postcolonial postmodernism. Since he is a French-Congolese citizen, his writing evinces aesthetic glocalisation. That is, as a postcolonial writer, he conceives of, and inflects, postmodernism differently from a Western writer, for his experiences of and responses to modernity differ from the latter’s. Far from replicating a politics of disillusionment and despair that informs, even characterises, Western postmodernist fiction, Mabanckou invests hi s African postcolonial writing with a politics of decolonis ation which problematises the effects of enforced modernity. Postmodernism, in other words, accords Mabanckou an ambivalent position from which he interrogates both Western modernity and its African version. Significantly, in this regard, Mabanckou’s writing presents both an extension of and a departure from the pioneering influence of the first generation of African writers such as Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Wole Soyinka.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2020
Performing whiteness; representing otherness : Hugh Tracey and African music
- Authors: Coetzee, Paulette June
- Date: 2015
- Subjects: Tracey, Hugh , Music -- Africa , International Library of African Music , Ethnomusicology -- Africa , Ethnomusicologists -- South Africa
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2327 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1016502
- Description: This thesis provides a critical study of texts associated with Hugh Tracey (1903–1977). Tracey is well-known for his work in African music studies, particularly for his major contribution to the recorded archive of musical sound in sub-Saharan Africa and his founding of the International Library of African Music (ILAM) in 1954. My reading of him is informed by a postcolonial perspective, whiteness studies and African scholarship on ways in which constructions of African identity and tradition have been shaped by the colonial archive. In my view, Tracey was part of a mid-twentieth century movement which sought to marshal positive representations of traditional African culture in the interest of maintaining and strengthening colonial rule. While his recording project may have fostered inclusion through creating spaces for indigenous musicians to be heard, it also functioned to promote racist exclusion in the manner of its production, distribution and claims to expertise. Moreover, his initial strategy for ILAM’s sustainability targeted colonial government and industry as primary clients, with the promise that promoting traditional music as a means of entertainment and self-expression for black subjects and workers would ease administration and reduce conflict. I believe that it is important to acknowledge and interrogate the problematic racial attitudes and practices associated with the history of Tracey’s archive – not to undermine its significance in any way but to allow it to be better understood and used more productively in the future.
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- Date Issued: 2015
- Authors: Coetzee, Paulette June
- Date: 2015
- Subjects: Tracey, Hugh , Music -- Africa , International Library of African Music , Ethnomusicology -- Africa , Ethnomusicologists -- South Africa
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2327 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1016502
- Description: This thesis provides a critical study of texts associated with Hugh Tracey (1903–1977). Tracey is well-known for his work in African music studies, particularly for his major contribution to the recorded archive of musical sound in sub-Saharan Africa and his founding of the International Library of African Music (ILAM) in 1954. My reading of him is informed by a postcolonial perspective, whiteness studies and African scholarship on ways in which constructions of African identity and tradition have been shaped by the colonial archive. In my view, Tracey was part of a mid-twentieth century movement which sought to marshal positive representations of traditional African culture in the interest of maintaining and strengthening colonial rule. While his recording project may have fostered inclusion through creating spaces for indigenous musicians to be heard, it also functioned to promote racist exclusion in the manner of its production, distribution and claims to expertise. Moreover, his initial strategy for ILAM’s sustainability targeted colonial government and industry as primary clients, with the promise that promoting traditional music as a means of entertainment and self-expression for black subjects and workers would ease administration and reduce conflict. I believe that it is important to acknowledge and interrogate the problematic racial attitudes and practices associated with the history of Tracey’s archive – not to undermine its significance in any way but to allow it to be better understood and used more productively in the future.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2015
“The stranger at home” : representations of home and hospitality in three South African post-transitional novels
- Authors: Dass, Minesh
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: South African fiction (English) -- History and criticism , Wicomb, Zoë -- Criticism and interpretation , Shukri, Ishtiyaq, 1968- -- Criticism and interpretation , Vladislavić, Ivan, 1957- -- Criticism and interpretation , Home in literature , Hospitality in literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2325 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1016355
- Description: This thesis examines the representation of home and hospitality in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light, Ishtiyaq Shukri’s The Silent Minaret, and Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative. It attempts to trace the un-homeliness of the central characters and to account for their feelings of discomfort. As such, it argues that the home is incapable of being inviolable because the invasion of the public is always a possibility. The implication is that master narratives such as race, history and politics are always entering the space one constructs as private. That said, this study also argues that the home and those things with which it is most closely associated, such as belonging, comfort and safety, may actually hide a form of violence. By this I mean that in the desire for homeliness, one may exclude others from one’s home. Consequently, this argument draws on Jacques Derrida’s writings on the aporia of conditional and unconditional hospitality to investigate what ethical possibilities might, somewhat unexpectedly, be created by the un-homely home. The study is therefore an exploration of the potentials that inhere in a certain kind of un-homeliness, the most important of which is the chance to respond ethically to the alterity of the other. In sum, there is a necessity to extend hospitality beyond condition and beyond limit, and this ethical imperative is at odds with the desire for comfort and safety. The way in which post-transitional novels explore these issues of hospitality and home is the primary focus of this study.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2014
- Authors: Dass, Minesh
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: South African fiction (English) -- History and criticism , Wicomb, Zoë -- Criticism and interpretation , Shukri, Ishtiyaq, 1968- -- Criticism and interpretation , Vladislavić, Ivan, 1957- -- Criticism and interpretation , Home in literature , Hospitality in literature
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2325 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1016355
- Description: This thesis examines the representation of home and hospitality in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light, Ishtiyaq Shukri’s The Silent Minaret, and Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative. It attempts to trace the un-homeliness of the central characters and to account for their feelings of discomfort. As such, it argues that the home is incapable of being inviolable because the invasion of the public is always a possibility. The implication is that master narratives such as race, history and politics are always entering the space one constructs as private. That said, this study also argues that the home and those things with which it is most closely associated, such as belonging, comfort and safety, may actually hide a form of violence. By this I mean that in the desire for homeliness, one may exclude others from one’s home. Consequently, this argument draws on Jacques Derrida’s writings on the aporia of conditional and unconditional hospitality to investigate what ethical possibilities might, somewhat unexpectedly, be created by the un-homely home. The study is therefore an exploration of the potentials that inhere in a certain kind of un-homeliness, the most important of which is the chance to respond ethically to the alterity of the other. In sum, there is a necessity to extend hospitality beyond condition and beyond limit, and this ethical imperative is at odds with the desire for comfort and safety. The way in which post-transitional novels explore these issues of hospitality and home is the primary focus of this study.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2014
My other - my self: post-Cartesian ontological possibilities in the fiction of J M Coetzee
- Authors: Mfune, Damazio Laston
- Date: 2011
- Subjects: Coetzee, J. M., 1940- -- Criticism and interpretation Self in literature Identity (Psychology) in literature Consciousness in literature Intersubjectivity in literature Ontology in literature Metaphysics in literature South African fiction (English) -- 20th century -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2246 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002289
- Description: The central argument of my study is that, among other matters, in his works, J.M. Coetzee could be said to demonstrate that the known Self is an embodied being and is not autonomous. With regard to the latter contention, Coetzee intimates that any two Subjects are implicated in each other’s subjectivities in a reciprocal process that involves what Derek Attridge has called “irruptions of otherness” (2005: xii) into the Subject’s subjectivity. These irruptions, which happen during the encounter, lead to a double loss of autonomy for each Subject and this phenomenon renders the relationship between Subjects non-dichotomus or non-binaric. In other words, the Subject does not produce the contents of his or her consciousness in a sui generis and ex nihilo fashion, and his or her ontological indebtedness to the Other constitutes his or her first loss of autonomy. As for those Others that do possess consciousness, the Subject is implicated in their consciousness and this constitutes the Subject’s second loss of autonomy. These losses counter the near solipsistic Nagelian neo-Cartesianism and paves the way for imagining both intra- and inter-species “intersubjectivity”. It is my view that this double loss of autonomy accounts for the sympathetic and empathetic imagination that we encounter in Coetzee’s fiction. Following Coetzee’s intimations of intersubjectivity through irruptions of otherness, what I see as my contribution to studies on this author’s work through this study is the link I have established between the physicalist strain within the philosophy of mind (whose central thesis is that consciousness is an embodied phenomenon) and a modified Kantian “metaphysics”, especially Immanuel Kant’s conception of concepts as comprising form and content. I have deployed this conception in demonstrating the Subject’s ontological indebtedness to external sources of the content part of consciousness. And, through the Husserlian concept of intentionality, and Kant’s (1929: 27) observation that we cannot have appearances without something that appears, I have linked the Subject to the sources of his or her content and thereby also demonstrated that the Subject is not eternally separated or alienated from those sources. Instead, the Subject is not simply contiguous but coterminous and co-extensive, albeit in a mediated way, with the external sources of the content part of his or her consciousness. Thus, while accepting the thesis of the Other’s radical otherness, I modify the thesis of the Other’s radical exteriority. Ultimately, then, ontologically speaking, the Coetzeean project could be described as one of embodying and grounding the supposedly autonomous, solipsistic and freefloating/disembodied Cartesian Subject. This he does by alerting this Subject, first and foremost, to its embodiedness and, further to that, pointing out its ontological indebtedness to its Others and its implication in the Others’s consciousnesses and so prevent it from continuing with its imperialistic and ecological barbarities. However, ethically speaking, beyond the reciprocal ethics that arises from mutual ontological indebtedness and implication, it is the selflessness that characterises a cruciform logic that comes across as the epitome of Coetzeean ethics.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2011
- Authors: Mfune, Damazio Laston
- Date: 2011
- Subjects: Coetzee, J. M., 1940- -- Criticism and interpretation Self in literature Identity (Psychology) in literature Consciousness in literature Intersubjectivity in literature Ontology in literature Metaphysics in literature South African fiction (English) -- 20th century -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2246 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002289
- Description: The central argument of my study is that, among other matters, in his works, J.M. Coetzee could be said to demonstrate that the known Self is an embodied being and is not autonomous. With regard to the latter contention, Coetzee intimates that any two Subjects are implicated in each other’s subjectivities in a reciprocal process that involves what Derek Attridge has called “irruptions of otherness” (2005: xii) into the Subject’s subjectivity. These irruptions, which happen during the encounter, lead to a double loss of autonomy for each Subject and this phenomenon renders the relationship between Subjects non-dichotomus or non-binaric. In other words, the Subject does not produce the contents of his or her consciousness in a sui generis and ex nihilo fashion, and his or her ontological indebtedness to the Other constitutes his or her first loss of autonomy. As for those Others that do possess consciousness, the Subject is implicated in their consciousness and this constitutes the Subject’s second loss of autonomy. These losses counter the near solipsistic Nagelian neo-Cartesianism and paves the way for imagining both intra- and inter-species “intersubjectivity”. It is my view that this double loss of autonomy accounts for the sympathetic and empathetic imagination that we encounter in Coetzee’s fiction. Following Coetzee’s intimations of intersubjectivity through irruptions of otherness, what I see as my contribution to studies on this author’s work through this study is the link I have established between the physicalist strain within the philosophy of mind (whose central thesis is that consciousness is an embodied phenomenon) and a modified Kantian “metaphysics”, especially Immanuel Kant’s conception of concepts as comprising form and content. I have deployed this conception in demonstrating the Subject’s ontological indebtedness to external sources of the content part of consciousness. And, through the Husserlian concept of intentionality, and Kant’s (1929: 27) observation that we cannot have appearances without something that appears, I have linked the Subject to the sources of his or her content and thereby also demonstrated that the Subject is not eternally separated or alienated from those sources. Instead, the Subject is not simply contiguous but coterminous and co-extensive, albeit in a mediated way, with the external sources of the content part of his or her consciousness. Thus, while accepting the thesis of the Other’s radical otherness, I modify the thesis of the Other’s radical exteriority. Ultimately, then, ontologically speaking, the Coetzeean project could be described as one of embodying and grounding the supposedly autonomous, solipsistic and freefloating/disembodied Cartesian Subject. This he does by alerting this Subject, first and foremost, to its embodiedness and, further to that, pointing out its ontological indebtedness to its Others and its implication in the Others’s consciousnesses and so prevent it from continuing with its imperialistic and ecological barbarities. However, ethically speaking, beyond the reciprocal ethics that arises from mutual ontological indebtedness and implication, it is the selflessness that characterises a cruciform logic that comes across as the epitome of Coetzeean ethics.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2011
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