Search results for ""Author Simon Gikandi""

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. Gikandi focuses on the ways that the enslavement of Africans and the profits derived from this exploitation enabled the moment of taste in European - mainly British - life, leading to a transformation of bourgeois ideas regarding freedom and selfhood. He explores how these connections played out in the immense fortunes made in the West Indies sugar colonies, supporting the lavish lives of English barons and altering the ideals that defined middle-class subjects. Discussing how the ownership of slaves turned the American planter class into a new aristocracy, Gikandi engages with the slaves' own response to the strange interplay of modern notions of freedom and the realities of bondage, and he emphasizes the aesthetic and cultural processes developed by slaves to create spaces of freedom outside the regimen of enforced labor and truncated leisure. Through a close look at the eighteenth century's many remarkable documents and artworks, Slavery and the Culture of Taste sets forth the tensions and contradictions entangling a brutal practice and the distinctions of civility.

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In Simon Gikandi’s view, Caribbean literature and postcolonial literature more generally negotiate an uneasy relationship with the concepts of modernism and modernity—a relationship in which the Caribbean writer, unable to escape a history encoded by Europe, accepts the challenge of rewriting it. Drawing on contemporary deconstructionist theory, Gikandi looks at how such Caribbean writers as George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, Alejo Carpentier, C. L. R. James, Paule Marshall, Merle Hodge, Zee Edgell, and Michelle Cliff have attempted to confront European modernism.

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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.

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One of few books translated into English from Sesotho, In My Heart introduces a long-neglected voice to global readership.Elsewhere Texts, edited by Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak and Hosam Aboul-Ela, presents radical new engagements with non-European literary cultures. This volume, the latest in this ambitious series, is a brilliant collection of essays originally written in Sesotho by Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng. Often confined to the role of “native informants” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, writers working in African languages laid the foundation for the politics and poetics of decolonization and are legendary among their own communities of readers, though their work remains little known elsewhere. In My Heart belongs to this tradition of colonial renegades. Writing in the 1950s during the cataclysmic events of apartheid that were transforming life in South Africa, Mofokeng offers a series of meditations that provide his readers with a Sesotho worldview outside the categories authorized by colonial knowledge. In My Heart, expertly translated by Nhlanhla Maake, introduces a significant African thinker’s influential work to a global readership.

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