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Sto caricando le informazioni... Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowingdi Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
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A masterful writer working in many genres, Ngugi wa Thiong'o entered the East African literary scene in 1962 with the performance of his first major play, The Black Hermit, at the National Theatre in Uganda. In 1977 he was imprisoned after his most controversial work, Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), produced in Nairobi, sharply criticized the injustices of Kenyan society and unequivocally championed the causes of ordinary citizens. Following his release, Ngugi decided to write only in his native Gikuyu, communicating with Kenyans in one of the many languages of their daily lives, and today he is known as one of the most outspoken intellectuals working in postcolonial theory and the global postcolonial movement. In this volume, Ngugi wa Thiong'o summarizes and develops a cross-section of the issues he has grappled with in his work, which deploys a strategy of imagery, language, folklore, and character to "decolonize the mind." Ngugi confronts the politics of language in African writing; the problem of linguistic imperialism and literature's ability to resist it; the difficult balance between orality, or "orature," and writing, or "literature"; the tension between national and world literature; and the role of the literary curriculum in both reaffirming and undermining the dominance of the Western canon. Throughout, he engages a range of philosophers and theorists writing on power and postcolonial creativity, including Hegel, Marx, Lévi-Strauss, and Aimé Césaire. Yet his explorations remain grounded in his own experiences with literature (and orature) and reworks the difficult dialectics of theory into richly evocative prose. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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And his ideas are interesting, if not entirely novel. Initially, he focuses on the relationship between the "English master" and the "colonial bondsman," and makes the point that the "bondsman" always knows a lot about the "master," while the "master" knows next to nothing about the "bondsman." More interesting, perhaps, is his discussion of the education of the "bondsman" and how African and other writers educated in the European system have been able both to view some of the European classics in different ways (e.g., Shakespeare not just as an example of the height of English culture but also as a writer whose works depicted people in different relationships with power) and to take aspects of European literature and use them in their own works (e.g., titles of books such as Achebe's Things Fall Apart or his own Weep Not Child, or styles or themes; he cites Ousmane's God's Bits of Wood, which I've read, having "affinities" with Zola's Germinal, which I hope to read soon).
In the later lectures, he discusses how we define and understand the term "postcolonial" as different cultures can be postcolonial at different times and in different ways, and more generally how we can read literature from a variety of perspectives as well as from the perspective of the writer and his or her times, and he focuses on the vitality and significance of orature, which includes not just story-telling but song, and he adds in dance and music. In one section I found particularly interesting, he talks about how orature reflects a world view that "assumes the normality of the connection between nature, nurture, supernatural, and supernurtural" and that this derives in some cases from the language itself, giving the example of some words in Gĩkũyũ. I certainly felt when I read Matigari that Ngũgĩ was using the tradition of story-telling, with each version of the tale a little different, in this work.
All in all, I found some interesting ideas in this book, in between the theoretical parts. It was marred, shockingly for a book published by Columbia University Press, by some outrageous typos: "Virgina Wolfe," "As You Like" instead of "As You Like It" for the Shakespearean play, etc.