Rethinking African Cultural Production
154 pages
English

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154 pages
English

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Description

Frieda Ekotto, Kenneth W. Harrow, and an international group of scholars set forth new understandings of the conditions of contemporary African cultural production in this forward-looking volume. Arguing that it is impossible to understand African cultural productions without knowledge of the structures of production, distribution, and reception that surround them, the essays grapple with the shifting notion of what "African" means when many African authors and filmmakers no longer live or work in Africa. While the arts continue to flourish in Africa, addressing questions about marginalization, what is center and what periphery, what traditional or conservative, and what progressive or modern requires an expansive view of creative production.


Introduction: Rethinking African Cultural Production Frieda Ekotto and Ken Harrow

1. The Critical Present: Where Is "African Literature"? Eileen Julien
2. African Writers Challenge Conventions of Postcolonial Literary History Olabode Ibironke
3. Provocations: African Societies and Theories of Creativity Moradewun Adejunmobi
4. In Praise of the Alphabet Patrice Nganang
5. African Cultural Studies: Of Travels, Accents, and Epistemologies Tejumola Olaniyan
6. Le Freak, C'est Critical and Chic: North African Scholars and the Conditions of Cultural Production in Post 9/11 U.S. Academia Lamia Benyoussef
7. Reading 'Beur' Film Production Otherwise: The Poetics of the Human and the Transcultural Safoi Babana-Hampton
8. Revealing the Past, Conceptualizing the Future on Screen: The Social, Political and Economic Challenges of Contemporary Filmmaking in Morocco Valérie K. Orlando
9. Theorizing New African Dramaturgies in France Mária Minich Brewer
10. Island Geography as Creole Biography: Shenaz Patel's Mauritian Literary Production
Magali Compan

List of Contributors
Index

Sujets

Informations

Publié par
Date de parution 29 mai 2015
Nombre de lectures 3
EAN13 9780253016034
Langue English
Poids de l'ouvrage 2 Mo

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Extrait

RETHINKING AFRICAN CULTURAL PRODUCTION
RETHINKING AFRICAN CULTURAL PRODUCTION
Edited by Frieda Ekotto
and Kenneth W. Harrow
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2015 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-01597-6 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-01600-3 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-01603-4 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Rethinking African Cultural Production / Frieda Ekotto and Kenneth W. Harrow
1 The Critical Present: Where Is African Literature ? / Eileen Julien
2 African Writers Challenge Conventions of Postcolonial Literary History / Olabode Ibironke
3 Provocations: African Societies and Theories of Creativity / Moradewun Adejunmobi
4 In Praise of the Alphabet / Patrice Nganang
5 African Cultural Studies: Of Travels, Accents, and Epistemologies / Tejumola Olaniyan
6 Le Freak, C est Critical and Chic: North African Scholars and the Conditions of Cultural Production in Post-9/11 U.S. Academia / Lamia Benyoussef
7 Reading Beur Film Production Otherwise: The Poetics of the Human and the Transcultural / Safoi Babana-Hampton
8 Revealing the Past, Conceptualizing the Future On-Screen: The Social, Political, and Economic Challenges of Contemporary Filmmaking in Morocco / Val rie K. Orlando
9 Thresholds of New African Dramaturgies in France Today / M ria Minich Brewer
10 Island Geography as Creole Biography: Shenaz Patel s Mauritian Literary Production / Magali Compan
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
T HIS COLLECTION WOULD not have been possible without the assistance of many units and people at Michigan State University, whose collaboration in the initial symposium has resulted in this book. These include the College of Arts and Letters and James Pritchett of the African Studies Center, whose support for so many projects has been unstinting and whose leadership has been inspiring.
I (Frieda) would also like to thank the many units at the University of Michigan, in particular the Department of Comparative Literature. I am grateful to Yopie Prins for her generous support and encouragement. Finally, I would like to offer thanks to Patrick Tonks for his keen and astute attention to the many details of the symposium and to Emily Goedde for her ongoing support of my work. It is always a great pleasure to work closely with them and the many other graduate students whom I have the honor to teach.
RETHINKING AFRICAN CULTURAL PRODUCTION
Introduction
Rethinking African Cultural Production
Frieda Ekotto and Kenneth W. Harrow
T HE ORIGINS OF this collection lie in a joint conference held at Michigan State University and the University of Michigan in October 2010. At that conference we proposed to explore conditions of African cultural production, interrogating the extent to which African literature and cinema are being produced increasingly by writers and filmmakers who live abroad. Although the continent continues to be a site of robust creative forces, there are also considerable limitations that often lead to a marginalization of African artists works on the global stage. Migration of cultural capital in an age of globalization tends to flow more in some directions than in others. Publishers whose titles reach global markets typically focus on the metropolitan centers of the global north. More and more frequently we have found that many of the African authors and filmmakers whose works we study and teach do not live in Africa: some live abroad, and some travel between Africa and elsewhere. Only a percentage of those whose works are widely diffused as world literature or world cinema live solely in Africa. This shift has created issues that earlier scholarship did not address.
As we see it, yesterday s struggles for national liberation have passed. Movements against neocolonialism have passed. Pan-Africanism, Negritude, and many other artistic, cultural, literary, and philosophical movements have passed. We are immersed in shifting paradigms that are subsumed under vague headings such as postcolonialism or globalization. This collection considers this new phase of African cultural production and juxtaposes work produced outside of Africa with work from the continent. It also broadly addresses ways to present the notion of indigenous cultural production, like that of the alphabet created by the sultan of Bamum, and ways in which contemporary patterns of globalization can be read in new technologies and apparatuses.
In this volume, scholars engage with this new era of cultural production in various ways. Magali Compan asks, How does a home geography or place affect an author s writing and authorship? What are the relationships among location, a sense of place, and one s identity formation, not only as a writer but as an individual or a member of a community? What influence, if any, does place exert on one s identity? How do sites of production and histories together generate authorship and identity, francophone or otherwise? In signaling the different conditions for those working on the continent from those who are abroad, and usually in the west, Tejumola Olaniyan comments, Artists in all media, though many could do with more and better training to sharpen their native talents, are working prodigiously to shape form and meaning out of their demanding specific contexts and the intricate ways those contexts interact with the world. But when it comes to critical production, the situation seems less positive: The conditions for the training of intellectuals and cultural critics are far less than adequate and . . . an overall healthy development of cultural creativity, the type that continually breaches accepted boundaries and invents new forms and suggests new meanings, depends on a robust interaction between talented artists and discerning critics, between the creative and the critical imagination. The notion of a divide has fostered a range of responses, some of which denigrate African cultural or critical production as secondary or as providing raw materials for the West to digest and explicate. At the limit, this replicates the capitalist structures of colonialism, now updated in global flows. Lamia Benyoussef argues that the view of Africans writing abroad with greater latitude to produce experimental or sexually explicit materials reflects patronizing European constructions that infantilize . . . African writers as suppliers of raw materials (plays, films and novels) for Western metropolitan consumption, that is, literary criticism and theory. Such a position wrongly assumes that only the African author in Europe or North America has the freedom to be creative, avant-gardist, and inclusive of others, as if creativity or morality could crop up only on Western soil.
The differences between metropolitan-based authors and critics and those located on the continent multiply when we consider the passages between north and south as well as between African urban centers. Nonetheless, conditions of production today represent a new configuration, and we need to understand their implications. Part of what the authors consider in the following essays is how conditions of movement have created a gulf between those who can travel and those who cannot, a gulf that has become both greater than ever before and yet also more permeable. This is due to both politics and economics. Western nations have largely created insurmountable physical and financial barriers to the poor and disenfranchised while permitting those who qualify to pass borders in both directions more easily. The latter now fly with great comfort and speed, reducing voyages that used to be enormous undertakings to quick hops from continent to continent, while the former often live in legal limbo, if not purgatory, with few rights and fewer resources.
In addition, the distance between those who travel abroad and those who do not is increasingly demonstrated both by differing perspectives on the world and in the genres and mediums of the works themselves. This leads us to our particular concern for this volume, which is to consider whether current critical approaches are adequate to the task of assessing work produced by authors who live in different geographic and cultural milieus. The new conditions of globalization have generated possibilities for subject positions that cannot be simply defined by terms such as exile, hybrid, creole, or diasporic. As such, we would like to suggest that earlier critical approaches do not take into account the diversity and differences of current cultural production. They do not, and perhaps cannot, take into account situational differences, which are tied to choices of style and subject matter and, ultimately, to ideologies. We need to interrogate what we now understand to be African literature and cinema, and, more importantly, we need to reevaluate and to rearticulate new ep

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