Publication date:
18 August 2011Length of book:
248 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksDimensions:
240x165mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9780739164464
Intellectual exchange among African creative writers is the subject of this highly innovative and wide-ranging look at several forms of intertextuality on the continent. Focusing on the issue of the availability of old canonical texts of African literature as a creative resource, this study throws light on how African authors adapt, reinterpret, and redeploy existing texts in the formulation of new ones. Contemporary African writers are taking advantage of and extending the resources available in the existing native literary tradition. But the field of inter-ethnic/trans-national African literary inter-textual studies is a novel one in itself as the theme of African writers' debt to Euro-American authors has been the critical commonplace in African literature. Detailing the echoes and reverberations the voices of the past have generated, and the distinctive uses to which the writers are putting one another's works, the book demonstrates that the influence of local stock is significant: it is pervasive and widespread, and manifests itself in ways both random and systematic, but it is a ubiquitous presence in the African literary imagination.
Dr. Ogede's elegantly written book applauds intertextuality as a resourceful creative principle and a rewarding critical enterprise, and authoritatively applies its paradigm to his reading of contemporary African letters, thus proving his thesis that African writers deliberately re-write and revise one another's work as a strategy to frame a new brand of textual originality. His exciting study discusses writers that have made a breakthrough by writing back to established canons: Nigerian author, Flora Nwapa, answering back to Cyprian Ekwensi's Jagua Nana in her novel, One Is Enough; the Ghanaian writer, Ayi Kwei Armah, to Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People in his first novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born; and the South African writer, Bessie Head, offering her novel, Maru, as a revisionist version of Achebe's No Longer at Ease (even if unconsciously), while younger Nigerian poets, such as Chimalum Nwankwo and Okinba Launko, could hardly rid their creative minds of the haunting ghost of the celebrated Nigerian poet, Christopher Okigbo. Dr. Ogede offers intertextual creativity as a way forward for the prospective writer, now that African writing seems to have burnt out its energy in the interrogation of the West and the exploration of race. An eminently enthralling piece of scholarship.