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"Gikandi, Simon"
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Slavery and the culture of taste
It would be easy to assume that, in the eighteenth century, slavery and the culture of taste--the world of politeness, manners, and aesthetics--existed as separate and unequal domains, unrelated in the spheres of social life. But to the contrary, Slavery and the Culture of Taste demonstrates that these two areas of modernity were surprisingly entwined. Ranging across Britain, the antebellum South, and the West Indies, and examining vast archives, including portraits, period paintings, personal narratives, and diaries, Simon Gikandi illustrates how the violence and ugliness of enslavement actually shaped theories of taste, notions of beauty, and practices of high culture, and how slavery's impurity informed and haunted the rarified customs of the time.
eBook
In Memory of the Doyen of African Literature
The recent death of Abiola Irele, the distinguished Nigerian literary scholar, at the age of eighty-one, represents a major loss to the fraternity of African letters, and marks the end of an era in the institution of literary criticism in Africa. In 1989, following the crisis generated by structural adjustment policies that led to massive cutbacks in funding for higher education across Africa, Irele ended up in the United States, teaching first at Ohio State University and later at Harvard University. Who else could vividly recall Maria Callas, the famed Italian Soprano, performing at the Paris Opera House in 1964, or provide a dramatic account of being admonished by Senghor for not wearing the right tail coat at a state function in Dakar?
Journal Article
Orality and the Writing Lesson: The Work of Vernacular Intellectuals
Setting off from Eileen Julien’s work on orality and the African novel, this essay takes the question of the relation between writing and oral expressions a step further by exploring how, in the hands of “vernacular” intellectuals, the oral became inseparable from writing. Writing enabled orality to enter the colonial public sphere; conversely, writing needed orality to assert its Africanness.
Journal Article
Rethinking the Archive of Enslavement
Gould went even further, arguing that the orientation of the canon of African American letters to the antebellum period tended \"to produce critical vocabularies of race and racism that are read backward, so to speak, onto eighteenth-century writing and culture\" (322). [...]they immediately lost courage when military assistance arrived from Martinique.
Journal Article
The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English Since 1945
The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English Since 1945 challenges the conventional belief that the English-language literary traditions of East Africa are restricted to the former British colonies of Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. Instead, these traditions stretch far into such neighboring countries as Somalia and Ethiopia. Simon Gikandi and Evan Mwangi assemble a truly inclusive list of major writers and trends. They begin with a chronology of key historical events and an overview of the emergence and transformation of literary culture in the region. Then they provide an alphabetical list of major writers and brief descriptions of their concerns and achievements. Some of the writers discussed include the Kenyan novelists Grace Ogot and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Ugandan poet and essayist Taban Lo Liyong, Ethiopian playwright and poet Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin, Tanzanian novelist and diplomat Peter Palangyo, Ethiopian novelist Berhane Mariam Sahle-Sellassie, and the novelist M. G. Vassanji, who portrays the Indian diaspora in Africa, Europe, and North America. Separate entries within this list describe thematic concerns, such as colonialism, decolonization, the black aesthetic, and the language question; the growth of genres like autobiography and popular literature; important movements like cultural nationalism and feminism; and the impact of major forces such as AIDS/HIV, Christian missions, and urbanization. Comprehensive and richly detailed, this guide offers a fresh perspective on the role of East Africa in the development of African and world literature in English and a new understanding of the historical, cultural, and geopolitical boundaries of the region.
eBook
Arrow of God: The Novel and the Problem of Modern Time
Although Arrow of God appears to be set at the moment of the encounter between an African community and British colonial interests, its historical setting is imprecise and perhaps insignificant. What the novel signals constantly, however, is its preoccupation with the present and the difficulties Africans seem to encounter as they search for a vocabulary to explain and translate the time of decolonization—a historical event without determinate signs. The novel is set in a particular place—Umuaro—and it establishes what appears to be the semiotics of Igbo culture that is its immediate point of reference, but it does not seem to function within a historical framework in which the passage from one age to the next can be read either as a problem or possibility. Rather than present the problematic of colonialism and the act of colonization as the opposition between two temporalities—past and present—the novel is often bogged down in a present that it cannot name. I will argue that what makes Arrow of God stand out as a monumental postcolonial novel is its engagement with the temporality of a belated colonialism and its attention to the lives of subjects stranded in time as it were, produced in an interregnum, functioning in what Hannah Arendt once described as a “scission or rupture in what is no longer simply an after or a before.”
Journal Article
Provincializing English
Sometimes the global linguistic map appears to be a simple division between those with English and those without it. In the reaches of the former British Empire, a swath of the globe stretching from Vancouver east to the Malay Peninsula, English has come to be seen as an advantage in the competitive world of global politics and trade; in the emerging powers of East Asia, most notably China and South Korea, the consumption of global English is evident in the huge sale of books on English as a second language; in parts of the world traditionally cut off from English, including eastern Europe, the mastery of the language marks the moment of arrival. Here, Gikandi examines why of all the major languages of the world, English causes the most anxiety.
Journal Article
Introduction: Another Way in the World
For Abiola Irele, friend, mentor,
maître.
Language for me is the soul of the text. I love the Arabic language, and I adore writing in it. It is the linguistic mold that I want to fill my personal stories and culture in, distinguished from that of Arabs.
—Stella Gaitano
I Will Start with Two Stories About This Thing Called Literature and the world it claims to name and possess.
The first takes place in Shillong, in the northeast corner of India, a place far removed from the Indian heartland, closer to Bangladesh, Burma, and China than to New Delhi. The setting is the Shillong campus of the English and Foreign Languages University, where I have come to teach a seminar to junior academics and graduate students on decolonization as a theoretical problem. My students and I will embark on a two-week systematic rereading of the philosophical claims made for decolonization in the writings of canonical postcolonial writers, from Mahatma Gandhi's writing on nonviolence to Aimé Césaire's and Léopold Sédar Senghor's on negritude to Frantz Fanon's on the pitfalls of national consciousness to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's and Trinh T. Minh-Ha's on the figure of woman in difference. Although my students are attentive, their relation to these texts is ambivalent: they recognize the importance of these texts to understanding the making of the modern world, yet colonialism, as a world-historical event, occurred too long ago to be part of their lived experience. Their ambivalence is compounded by the fact that the urgency with which the authors of decolonization write, the sense that they are operating at the end of time—the time of Europe—belongs to a moment that no longer resonates with people struggling to survive in a more complex, globalized world. It is hard for my students to make the connection between Senghor's negritude and his incarceration in a Nazi prison camp in Poitiers during World War II or to see that event, the imprisonment of an African fighting for France, as connected to a paradigmatic break in the discourse of empire.
Journal Article
Reading at the Limits
Understanding what made Europe different was an important step in displacing its logic. Now, in the US, there were texts--canonical texts--that belonged to a civilization that went under the name Western. Here, Gikandi examines what would happen if the European text was read at the point where the book \"overflows and cracks its meaning.\"
Journal Article