Defining New Idioms And Alternative Forms Of Expression

This first volume of ASNEL Papers gathers together a broad range of reflections on, and presentations of, the social and expressive underpinnings of post-colonial literary cultures, concentrating on aspects of orality, social structure and hybridity, the role of women in cultural production, performative and media representations (theatre, film, advertising) and their institutional forms, and the linguistic basis of literature (including questions of multilingualism, pidgins and creoles, and translation). Some of the present studies adopt a diachronic approach, as in essays devoted to European colonial influences on African literatures, the populist colonial roots of Australian drama, and the intersection of exogenous and autochthonous languages in the cultural development and identity formation of Cameroon, Tanzania and the Swahili-speaking regions of Africa. Broadly synchronic perspectives (which nevertheless take cognizance of developmental determinants) range over dominant genres — poetry, short fiction and the novel, children's literature, theatre, film - and cover indigene literatures (Australian Aboriginal, Maori, First Nations) and regional creativity in West, East and South Africa, the Caribbean, India and the South-East Asian diaspora, and the settler colonies of Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Authors treated within broader frameworks include Chinua Achebe, 'Biyi Bandele-Thomas, Bole Butake, Shashi Deshpande, Louis Esson, Lorna Goodison, Patricia Grace, Bland Holt, Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera, Kazuo Ishiguro, Rita Kleinhart, Hanif Kureishi, Werewere Liking, Timothy Mo, V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, and Ruby Slipperjack. There are self-testimonies from the writers Geoff Goodfellow, Darrelyn Gunzburg and Don Mattera, poems by David Dabydeen, Geoff Goodfellow and Olive Senior. Of particular value to this collection are the perspectives offered by African, Caribbean and Eastern European contributors.

This book is concerned with, in the main, the whole question of the transformation of the identities of the different peoples of postcolonial Africa. Even so, it is clear that the issues raised would resonate clearly in similar contexts in other parts of the world. Long Dreams in Short Chapters is a remarkable achievement, a brilliant and magisterial remapping of the African text in its literary, cultural, and political dimensions. Author Wumi Raji's globalist and transnational sensitivities make this book an effortless unpacking of the complexities of the African literary process and it is a landmark contribution to African thought.

This book is intended as a textbook for advanced undergraduate or graduate students in the field of bilingualism and language choice. It reports on a sociolinguistic study of the language choice patterns of the minority Ikwerre ethnic group of Port Harcourt City, Nigeria. Further, it aims primarily to present a systematic and coherent account of the extent and patterning of Ikwerre-NPE bilingualism within the Ikwerre community, focusing on: the means by which people in this community deploy two different codes in their day-to-day communicative interactions and the social and attitudinal motivations for language choice at both the group and individual level. To satisfy these objectives this study has taken into account the pre-existing linguistic, socio-economic and macro-sociological distinctiveness of the Ikwerre community. Thus, it has investigated prevailing local attitudes towards Ikwerre and NPE by incorporating matched guise tests to deepen our understanding of the processes of language choice and shift operating in the community. This was done to demonstrate that contemporary local linguistic attitudes working together with personal network ties would offer fuller and more adequate explanations of why members of the Port Harcourt Ikwerre community select either Ikwerre and/or NPE in their normal every day interactions. From the observations and findings made in this study I propose an account of the language choice patterns attested in my Port Harcourt Ikwerre community data that is based on establishing a broad typology which can be directly related to the bilingualism continuum. This framework should be equally applicable to similar bilingual settings around the world, which, like Port Harcourt, have experienced rapid metropolitan growth as a result of radical socio-economic change in their recent history. Finally, it is my hope that in the course of reading this book the reader can come to a place where their understanding and appreciation of the effects of languages in contact in non-Western communities is enriched with the illustrative material in this book.

Translation as Reparation showcases postcolonial Africa by offering African European-language literature as a case study for postcolonial translation theory, and proposes a new perspective for postcolonial literary criticism informed by theories of translation. The book focuses on translingualism and interculturality in African Europhone literature, highlighting the role of oral culture and artistry in the writing of fiction. The fictionalizing of African orature in postcolonial literature is viewed in terms of translation and an intercultural writing practice which challenge the canons of colonial linguistic propriety through the subversion of social and linguistic conventions. The study opens up pathways for developing new insights into the ethics of translation, as it raises issues related to the politics of language, ideology, identity, accented writing and translation. It confirms the place of translation theory in literary criticism and affirms the importance of translation in the circulation of texts, particularly those from minority cultures, in the global marketplace. Grounded in a multidisciplinary approach, the book will be of interest to students and scholars in a variety of fields, including translation studies, African literature and culture, sociolinguistics and multilingualism, postcolonial and intercultural studies.

Orientalism refers to the imitation of aspects of Eastern cultures in the West, and was devised in order to have authority over the Orient. The concept of Re-Orientalism maintains the divide between the Orient and the West. However, where Orientalism is based on how the West constructs the East, Re-Orientalism is grounded on how the cultural East comes to terms with an orientalised East. This book explores various new forms, objects and modes of circulation that sustain this renovated form of Orientalism in South Asian culture. The contributors identify and engage with recent debates about postcolonial South Asian identity politics, discussing a range of different texts and films such as The White Tiger, Bride & Prejudice and Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love. Providing new theoretical insights from the areas of literature, film studies and cultural and discourse analysis, this book is an stimulating read for students and scholars interested in South Asian culture, postcolonial studies and identity politics.

Due to the large-scale global transformations of the 20th century, migration literature has become a vibrant genre over the last decades. In these novels, issues of transcultural identity and belonging naturally feature prominently. This study takes a closer look at the ways in which the idea of family informs processes of identity construction. It explores changing roles and meanings of the diasporic family as well as intergenerational family relations in a migration setting in order to identify the specific challenges, problems, and possibilities that arise in this context. This book builds on insights from different fields of family research (e.g. sociology, psychology, communication studies, memory studies) to provide a conceptual framework for the investigation of synchronic and diachronic family constellations and connections. The approach developed in this study not only sheds new light on contemporary British migration literature but can also prove fruitful for analyses of families in literature more generally. By highlighting the relevance and multifaceted nature of doing family, this study also offers new perspectives for transcultural memory studies.

The terms 'creole' and 'creolization' have witnessed a number of significant semantic changes in the course of their history. Originating in the vocabulary associated with colonial expansion in the Americas it had been successively narrowed down to the field of black American culture or of particular linguistic phenomena. Recently 'creole' has expanded again to cover the broad area of cultural contact and transformation characterizing the processes of globalization initiated by the colonial migrations of past centuries. The present volume is intended to illustrate these various stages either by historical and/or theoretical discussion of the concept or through selected case studies. The authors are established scholars from the areas of literature, linguistics and cultural studies; they all share a lively and committed interest in the Caribbean area - certainly not the only or even oldest realm in which processes of creolization have shaped human societies, but one that offers, by virtue of its history of colonialization and cross-cultural contact, its most pertinent example. The collection, beyond its theoretical interest, thus also constitutes an important survey of Caribbean studies in Europe and the Americas. As well as searching overview essays, there are - sociolinguistic contributions on the linguistic geography of 'criollo' in Spanish America, the Limonese creole speakers of Costa Rica, 'creole' language and identity in the Netherlands Antilles and the affinities between Papiamentu and Chinese in Curaçao - ethnohistorical examinations of such topics as creole transgression in the Dominican/Haitian borderland, the Haitian Mandingo and African fundamentalism, creolization and identity in West-Central Jamaica, Afro-Nicaraguans and national identity, and the Creole heritage of Haiti - studies of religion and folk culture, including voodoo and creolization in New York City, the creolization of the "Mami Wata" water spirit, and signifyin(g) processes in New World Anancy tales - a group of essays focusing on the thought of Édouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, and the Créolité writers and case-studies of artistic expression, including creole identities in Caribbean women's writing, Port-au-Prince in the Haitian novel, Cynthia McLeod and Astrid Roemer and Surinamese fiction, Afro-Cuban artistic expression, and metacreolization in the fiction of Robert Antoni and Nalo Hopkinson.

Creole languages are characteristically associated with a negative image. How has this prestige been formed? And is it as static as the diglossic situation in many anglo-creolophone societies seems to suggest? This volume examines socio-historical and epistemological factors in the prestige formation of Caribbean English-Lexicon Creoles and subjects their classification as a (socio)linguistic type to scrutiny and critical debate. In its analysis of rich empirical data this study also demonstrates that the uses, functions and negotiations of Creole within particular social and linguistic practices have shifted considerably. Rather than limiting its scope to one "national" speech community, the discussion focusses on changes of the social meaning of Creole in various discursive fields, such as inter generational changes of Creole use in the London Diaspora, diachronic changes of Creole representation in written texts, and diachronic changes of Creole representation in translation. The study employs a discourse analytical approach drawing on linguistic models as well as Foucauldian theory.