Drawing cultural evidence from literary writing and electronic media, this article focuses on how a "befitting" burial nurtures feelings that allow survivors to complete, as Freud would say, the work of mourning. The central question is posed thus: does the welfare of the deceased motivate acts and explanations of "fitting" as mourners insist? Phrasing the problem this way allows the following discussion to weave together the many elements of social life, including constantly evolving beliefs and cultural habits of acknowledging loss, that celebratory funerals distil. What is to be gained if, as West African death-ranking funeral practices suggest, a ripe death, or loss generally, is construed as a distinct kind of bequeathed achievement that only survivors can mark? Critical studies might realise that, although curating convivial motions is taxing, the fellow feelings generated during elaborate funerals loosen grief, and the goodness that comes with survivors not being alone mitigates the general anxiety of "what comes next" that ordinarily attaches to either loss or achievement. This article suggests that celebratory funerals iterate essential features of life-perpetuating strivings in palpable social forms.

(2021). Decolonization without a linguistic turn is like drinking sugar without tea: Ọlábíyìí Babalọlá Joseph Yáì. Journal of the African Literature Association: Vol. 15, Critical Masters Series: Eustace Palmer, pp. 308-320.

“Institutions of African Literature” was the theme of the 45th annual conference and meeting of the African Literature Association, held May 15–19, 2019, in Columbus, Ohio. Articles in this cluster...

This chapter will systematize the recurrence of disasters in Femi Osofisan's farcical novella, Kolera Kolej, and the machinations of destiny in Ola Rótìmí's tragic play, The Gods Are Not to Blame, by reading textual plot with terms derived from Yorùbá metalanguage of experience and events, viz., kété and ìṣẹ̀lẹ̀. While kété, an ideophone, is the term for "promptness" and "convention," ìṣẹ̀lẹ̀, a compound term for place and happenstance, denotes occurrence, usually relating to that which is unexpected or unplanned but, nevertheless, could be envisaged. The two terms are joined and further reorganized in the meta-narrative proverb "lẹ́yìn kété nibi ń ṣẹlẹ̀" (catastrophe breaks out in the wake of missed time). The punctual occurrence arrives on time, as scheduled, and as expected. The tardy (late or delayed) relates to the prompt, even in its deviation. The length of the experience of the disastrous relates to the amount of time expended on the restoration of the regime of the prompt. Yorùbá metalanguage of events collocates duration and location, two irreducible components of events as variants of the ideophone: instituted (emplaced), constitutions of experiences that could not be presented otherwise.

Chapter 22 Reading Yorùbá Literature Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́, Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́Search for more papers by this author Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́, Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́Search for more papers by this author Book Editor(s):Olakunle George, Olakunle GeorgeSearch for more papers by this author First published: 09 January 2021 https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119058199.ch22 AboutPDFPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShareShare a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Summary Patterns in the early history of literary writing in Yorùbá language are similar to that of other African languages whose first scripts were created by evangelizing missions. If one were to make an overarching statement about modern Yorùbá literature, it would be that the most important of the writers – with the encouragement of scholarly critics – pay keen attention to the verbal artistry of the very large and vibrant Yorùbá oral tradition. As the writers create relatively newer genres in fiction, poetry, and literary drama, they make efforts to make the historically newer forms compatible with the older traditions. Yorùbá literary drama consists of two main kinds: history and satire. D. O. Fágúnwá is the most famous Yorùbá fiction writer. His five novels were favorites both in the school system and among the larger reading public. A Companion to African Literatures RelatedInformation

The article addresses two aspects of postcolonial critique in Black Panther: first, its portrayal of the allure of grand statements in the cultivation of conspicuous and persistent self-regard in societies that wish to be recognizably independent, and second the centrality of repeatedly embodied material gestures and motions for the sustenance of enduring communal self-regard. These two prominent features of storytelling in the film, it will be argued, offer a powerful criticism of indifferent, ideology free, and barely disguised fatalism that has driven notions of freedom across the world since the collapse of the old Soviet Union. Storytelling in Black Panther enjoys global acclaim because it revivifies the life-affirming value of high stakes, unabashedly teleological grand narratives, even as it upholds the political valency of strident, non-oppositional difference.

The following cluster of articles on the intellectual legacies of Professor Francis Abiola Irele (1936-2017) started as contributions to a memorial seminar during the 44th annual meeting and confer...

This study locates and names as “contemplative vitalism” the nucleus of Abiola Irele's massive analyses of the complex trajectories of Africa-inflected 20th century intellectual history, particularly in literature and culture. The peculiar strain of the will to persist freely which the historical environment imposes on the African requires that the artist and thinker be bound involuntarily–vitally–to the surrounding that must be embraced critically. Shifts and turns in Irele's writing, as well as dominant viewpoints advanced in critiques published in the journals he edited, cohere around historicist explanations of pathways to critical, Africanist self-direction.

Biodun Jeyifo's newspaper column writing provokes a new understanding of leftist praxis in Nigeria in two ways: first, the frequent quotation of proverbs and apothegms brings an uncommon ideological perspective to African ordinary language analysis; second, the sayings are used in remarkably unprecedented manners to subtend the formulation of an activist ethics termed ìwàlẹ̀sìn (conducts of being manifest spirit).

Christopher Okigbo is at the center of this book that binds, with more than the bare fact of English as the writers’ common literary language, J.P. Clark Bekederemo, Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney, D...

Africanist studies conventionally restrict considerations of space to its physical dimensions. affective representations in literary writing oppose the village to the city, imbuing the village with comprehensible, but rarely historicized, routines. Until disturbed by uninvited and troubling ideas, institutions, and individuals from unknowable distances and places, the village nourishes existential certainty and sustains spiritual balance. In contrast, the corrupting, bewildering city signals instabilities of all kinds, even in the social sciences. Across the disciplines, while organic production and genuinely reciprocal relations dominate in the village, the insatiable city absorbs without giving back and never offers spiritual renewal. The village half of the spatial dyad represents what is truly African, and folklore, or orality in general, holds Africa's romance together. Its schematic character notwithstanding, the predisposition toward construing space as little more than the thin cover of more vital substances that facilitate self-understanding has produced enduring parameters for interpreting African expressive forms. With convivial marketplaces and festivals, evil forests and sacred groves, village squares and humble homesteads, depictions of the village in novels set at the beginning of colonization have fixed, perhaps permanently, perceptions of the African cultural past in reader's imaginations, and efforts to read these narratives have generated useful, axiomatic insights about meanings of traditional, everyday African life and its ritualized calibrations of the movement of time, its reifications of the social compact, and its coded references to the society's cosmic bearings. he African city has not been that fortunate.

Previous articleNext article No AccessArticleFrom Orality to Visuality: Panegyric and Photography in Contemporary Lagos, NigeriaAdélékè Adéè̇óAdélékè Adéè̇óPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 38, Number 2Winter 2012 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/662745 Views: 108Total views on this site © 2012 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/12/3802-0001$10.00. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The paper proposes an intertextual reading of narrative and performance closure in four Nigerian end-of-era stories about colonial conquest (Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, Flora Nwapa's Efuru, and Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman), focusing mainly on the meaning of the use of suicide, or the resolution of its threat, as a strategy of ending conflicts created directly by the enforcement of colonial rule or indirectly by the effect of such new rule. The first subsection dissects the narrative positioning of the tenure of the protagonist's life in each text. The second analyzes the meaning that each incarnation of closure-by-suicide story reveals about the place of conquest in the evolution of historical consciousness in colonized communities.

Reviewed by: Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ (bio) Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa. By La Vinia Delois Jennings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 257 pp. $35.99. This book traces how two Kongo cosmological concepts, the Yowa cosmogram and Bandoki witchcraft, inhabit the North American world of Morrison's novels. The book analyzes the appearance of these Africa derived notions of matter, spirit, ethics, and morality in the ways Morrison's black American characters organize and manage physical and social space, human relations, temporality, self-consciousness, morality, and transcendence in general. The observed patterns, Jennings argues, indicate that "an aesthetic goal of Morrison's fiction is to dust off the survivals of West and Central Africa traditional civilizations that Christianity obscures in the Western hemisphere" (2). Within Yowa geospatial thinking, as in Morrison's stories, nightfall does not end the day, and death does not terminate life. The analysis erases all doubts about the validity of the "circled cross" (the geometric form of the Yowa cosgmography) in Morrison's marking of important spaces: Sula's Medallion, children's play in Song of Solomon, Jadine Childs's "mock-possession dance" in Tar Baby, the "quartered circle branded" under the breast of Sethe's mother in Beloved, ritual circles inside the nuns' coven in Paradise, and so forth. Eva Peace shows like a Kongo witch; Beloved shifts shape like one, and the stoic mien of Baby Suggs suggests that she belongs to that class [End Page 86] of humans who, regardless of physical or social laws, are believed to have the power of willing deeply felt desires into existence. Jennings argues convincingly that these women are best understood within an Africanist spiritual reality that New World black folks synthesized and sustained over centuries and not within the Western Christianity they were obliged to profess. Jennings's framing metaphor is predominantly spatial: New World African cosmology "operates largely below the threshold of modern African-American consciousness" (2) because the hegemonic order within which the enslaved and the racially oppressed lived necessitated that all forms of independent self-conception be subterranean. Jennings's main achievement is her attribution of the quirky ways of Morrison's characters to creolized Africanisms on space, well spent time, judicious conduct, and beauty. To the reader trained in "Euro-American" spirituality, Morrison's characters cannot but be very strange because the main tenets of Christianity to which they are outwardly devoted do not quite govern the narratively significant events they foment. How, for instance, does Eva Peace justify her deliberate incineration of her drug addict son? As countless critics have pondered, doesn't Sethe's relationship to Beloved imply some deep pathology? Morrison scholars often judge both women insane when in reality their acts make perfect sense within the moral complex—infraction, conscience, punishment, and so forth—that subtends internal communal relations among black folks on Bluestone Road, Cincinnati, Ohio, circa 1855, and Medallion, also in Ohio, but mid-twentieth century. Pursuing a deep archaeology of black being in the Americas, Jennings maps out the oblique directions through which cultural principles persist, with the most significant contents decoyed deeply inside the manifest forms. Of course, Jennings admits, knowing that Kongo's "geometric Yowa or cosmogram" is a device that structures space and time in Morrison's work "is not essential to the appreciation of her novels." After all, most of the characters in the heavily Christianized environment of the stories do not display a conscious awareness of the presence of the Yowa, even if it is obvious that many of their important motions trace out the crossed circle. Nonetheless, Jennings insists, ignorance of the presence of African spirituality in Morrison's novels "diminishes the aesthetic, cultural, historical, and political force of the artist and her artform" (5). How else can a reader grasp the import of Sixo's unique rituals, superstitions, and ultimate defiance in Beloved? Without fathoming the African sources of "the art of exercising unusual ambivalent powers" (24) that Morrison infuses into their behaviors and thoughts, one might classify her panoply of unusual characters as evil incarnated. Interpreted with the knowledge of the Kongo Bandoki in mind, [End...