Search results for ""Author Brenda Cooper""

Brenda Cooper examines the work of the new generation of African writers who have placed migration as central to their writing. There is a new interest among publishers in New York and London in books by writers of African origin. These authors have often grown up or passed their early adult years out of Africa. The Orange Prize for Fiction was awarded inLondon 2007 to Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, and the Caine Prize for African Writing has introduced new writers such as Leila Aboulela, Biyi Bandele and Chimamanda Adichie herself to agents and publishers. This examination of the extraordinary work which has recently appeared is therefore very timely. Migration is a central theme of much African fiction written in English. Here, Brenda Cooper tracks the journeys undertakenby a new generation of African writers, their protagonists and the solid objects that populate their fiction, to depict the material realities of their multiple worlds and languages. The book explores the uses to which the Englishlanguage is put in order to understand these worlds. It demonstrates how these writers have contested the dominance of colonising metaphors. The writers' challenge is to find an English that can effectively express their many lives, languages and identities. BRENDA COOPER is Director of the Centre for African Studies and a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Cape Town. Southern Africa(South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Lesotho and Swaziland): University of KwaZulu-Natal Press (PB]

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Brenda Cooper examines the work of the new generation of African writers who have placed migration as central to their writing

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Proposes a dynamic new approach to the production of knowledge on Africa, one that is global, multiple and heterogeneous, elucidating this through both discursive theoretical chapters and case histories. Knowledge production is a highly political and politicized practice. This book questions the way in which knowledge of and about Africa is produced and how this influences development policy and practice. Rebutting both Euro-and Afrocentric production of knowledge, this collection proposes a multiple, global and dynamic Africa-centredness in which scholars use whatever concepts and research tools are most appropriate to the different African contextsin which they work. In the first part of the book key conceptual themes are raised and the epistemological foundations are laid through questions of gender, literature and popular music. Contributors in the second part apply andtest these tools and concepts, examining the pressures on doctoral students in a South African university, the crisis in knowledge about declining marine fish populations, perplexities around why certain ICT provisions fail, or how some Zimbabwean students, despite being beset by poverty, succeed. The light thrown on the mechanics of how knowledge comes into being, and in whose interests, illuminates one of the key issues in African Studies. Brenda Cooper is an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Manchester. She was for many years the Director of the Centre for African Studies and a Professor in the English department at the University of Cape Town, where she is now Emeritus Professor. Robert Morrell is Coordinator of the Programme for the Enhancement of Research Capacity at the University of Cape Town.

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Transgressing Boundaries includes some of the most interesting debates informing cultural politics in South Africa today. To do so, it brings together renowned contributors from Africa, North America and the United Kingdom. The book questions the boundaries between the academic disciplines by incorporating literary studies with anthropology, history, archaeology, art and gender studies. Through the various contributions, the complex interface between history and its representation is contested. Transgressing Boundaries illustrates both the autonomy of different fields of study, as well as the richness of the dialogue and the interface.

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This issue of African Literature Today focuses on new novels by emerging as well as established African novelists. This is a seminal work that discusses the validity of the perception that the new generation of African novelists is remarkably different in vision, style, and worldview from the older generation. The contention is that the oldergeneration novelists who were too close to the colonial period in Africa had invariably made culture-conflict and little else their dominant thematic concern while the younger generation novelists are more versatile in their thematic preoccupations, and are more global in their vision and style. Do the facts in the novels justify and validate these claims? The 13 papers in this volume have been carefully selected to consider these issues. Brenda Cooper a renowned literary scholar from Cape Town writes on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus, while Charles Nnolim writes about Adichie's more recent novel Half of a Yellow Sun; Omar Sougou of Universite GastonBerger, Senegal discusses 'ambivalent inscriptions' in Buchi Emecheta's later novels; Clement Okafor of the University of Maryland, addresses the theme of 'racial memory' in Isidore Okpewho's Call Me By My Rightful Name, juxtaposed between the world of the old and the realities of the present. Joseph McLaren, Hofstra University, New York, discusses Ngugi's latest novel, Wizard of the Crow, while Machiko Oike, Hiroshima University, Japan looksat a new theme in African adolescent literature, 'youth in an era of HIV/AIDS'. There is abundant evidence of the contrasts and diversities which characterize the African novel not only geographically, but also ideologically andgenerationally. ERNEST EMENYONU is Professor of the Department of Africana Studies University of Michigan-Flint. Nigeria: HEBN

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