African Pasts : Memory and History in African Literatures.

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AFRICAN PASTS: Memory and history in African literatures; Half Title Page; Title Page; Copyright; Dedication; Contents; Figures; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1 Figuring African history, memory and trauma; Memory and self; Trauma; 2 Purifying the language of the tribe: (pre)colonial memory; Precolonial history: Elechi Amadi; Oral narratives and the past: Tutuola and Okara; Memory and healing: the archetypal case of Ayi Kwei Armah; Loss or lack?; 3 Critical and traumatic realist pasts; Ngugi, history and memory; Other realisms; Traumatic realism and 'postmemory'; 4 Gender, memory, history.

Memory-work and the 'double yoke'Unfixing stereotypes of African womanhood; 'A great big void': Tsitsi Dangarembga and women's memory; Oppressive memories; 'A nothingness so strong that it was a presence': the violation of colonialism in Lindsey Collen's The Rape of Sita; Conclusion; 5 Imprisonment narratives: history through the eyes of hostages; 'Interstices of freedom': language and representation; The self in prison; The body under torture; The roles of history and memory; Chronotopes of incarceration.

6 Embedding memory, seizing history: South African resistance poetry in the 1970s and 1980sBlack consciousness and aesthetics; Memory and history in Soweto poetry; Language and memory; Oral influences, ancestors and; Conclusion; 7 On shifting ground: South African fiction in the interregnum; Monuments and memorials; The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in literary consciousness; Rewriting the Afrikaner past; Writing black history; Mandla Langa's fiction of memory; Getting beyond apartheid; 8 Intimations of the postmodern; Postmodernism in an African literary context.

History in Kojo Laing and J.M. CoetzeeM. G. Vassanji's textual pasts; Conclusion: what future postmodernism?; Works cited; Index.

Explores African literature in the post-colonial era, as a traumatic response to the effects of colonialism. Among other issues, it deals with literature in the era of apartheid, the early post-apartheid years in literature, postmodern African fiction and the response to colonialism in the work of writers imprisoned for their political beliefs.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

In English.

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