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Oral Forms of Nigerian Autobiography and Life Stories discusses the oral life stories and poems that Africans, particularly the Yoruba people, have told about the self and community over hundreds of years. Disproving the Eurocentric argument that Africans didn’t produce stories about themselves, the author showcases a vibrant literary tradition of oral autobiographies in Africa and the diaspora. The oral auto/biographies studied in this book show that stories and poems about individuals and their communities have always existed in various African societies and they were used to record, teach, and document history, culture, tradition, identity, and resistance. Genres covered in the book include the panegyric, witches’ and wizards’ narratives, the epithalamium tradition, the hunter’s chant, and Udje of the Urhobo. Providing an important showcase for oral narrative traditions this book will be of interest to students, scholars, and researchers in African and Africana studies, literature and auto/biographical studies.
This volume investigates alternative epistemological pathways by which knowledge production in Africa can proceed. The contributors, using different intellectual dynamics, explore the existing epistemological dominance of the West—from architecture to gender discourse, from environmental management to democratic governance—and offer distinct and unique arguments that challenge the denigration of the different and differing modes of knowing that the West considered “barbaric” and “primitive.” This volume therefore constitutes a minimal gesture that further contributes to the ongoing discourse on alternative modes of knowing in Africa.
The Palgrave Handbook of African Traditional Religion interrogates and presents robust and comprehensive contributions from interdisciplinary experts and scholars. Offering a range of perspectives and opinions through the prism of understanding the past about African Traditional religions and, more importantly, capturing their dynamics in the present and projecting their sustainability and relevance for the future, this volume is an essential resource for knowledge and understanding of African Traditional religions in the global space of religious traditions.
Traditions and cultures represent a set of persisting or prevailing beliefs, social practices, oral, linguistic, and values that define an individual’s way of life. In other words, in memoir writing, the emphasis is often to propagate a unilateral need or embrace of self-identity. However, the dominant narrative and method of analysis in this study holds the notion and privileges that tradition and cultures imbibed by memoirists are sometimes subverted, refashioned, or reworked due to the strand of experiences or realities they encounter in different spaces as their narration develops. Thus, memoirists embrace indifference and open-mindedness, which is also greatly explored in the context of autobiography.
Imagining Vernacular Histories is centered on the idea of engaging with indigenous African cosmologies that signal at pluriversality. In conversation with Toyin Falola’s reading of the African pluriverse and his exploration of the idea of “ritual archives,” the contributors to this volume rethink the historical archive in search of vernacular histories. Simultaneously, they recognize the contributions from various other disciplines in pluralizing the term vernacular. The book brings together a wide range of topics, such as reflections on African historiography; the relationship between memory, history and literature; gender relations; and the construction of historical archives. While ...
This handbook offers the most comprehensive, analytic, and multidisciplinary study of oral traditions and folklore in Africa and the African Diaspora to date. Preeminent scholars Akintunde Akinyemi and Toyin Falola assemble a team of leading and rising stars across African Studies research to retrieve and renew the scholarship of oral traditions and folklore in Africa and the Diaspora just as critical concerns about their survival are pushed to the forefront of the field. With five sections on the central themes within orality and folklore – including engagement ranging from popular culture to technology, methods to pedagogy – this handbook is an indispensable resource to scholars, students, and practitioners of oral traditions and folklore preservation alike. This definitive reference is the first to provide detailed, systematic discussion, and up-to-date analysis of African oral traditions and folklore.
Vol. 1- , spring 1970- , include "A Bibliography of American doctoral dissertations on African literature," compiled by Nancy J. Schmidt.
Contributors ranging from architects to linguists explore the cultural and spiritual dynamics of migrations in Africa and the African diaspora. The co-authored volume provides readers with fresh insights on African migration and the attendant implications, productions and generations of the historic experiences of those who were forcefully displaced and others who willfully relocated to other spaces of the world. The book seeks to: engage debates on multiple issues which underpin the provoking history of African migration and their attendant implications; provoke a rethinking of the sociology and politics of migrating souls and resistant spirits in the Americas, Europe and Africa, the restive yet resolute entities, scattered, still, metaphorically united in their quest for, and hold on to identity; engender fresh understanding and interpretations of cultural ethos of African native homelands and establish, where present, their replication in migrant communities in the diaspora; and tie African migration history with modernity thereby underscoring the points of their interactions, departures, and tangentially establishing remembrances.
"This volume is not a displacement of the late 1990s/early 2000s publications on folklore in Africa, in which African functional aesthetics gave way to Western formal aesthetics, but is a definitive source book of 50 original essays which provide a multidisciplinary study of the undercurrents of African and African Diaspora folklore and oral traditions - indeed a tour de force work in the currency and originality of its 'African voice and perspective." - Pamela J. Olubunmi Smith, Professor Emerita, University of Nebraska at Omaha, USA "This is a comprehensive, well-researched, and impressive volume that offers significant insights and perspectives into the dynamics of oral traditions and fol...