African Memoirs and Cultural Representations

Narrating Traditions

By (author) Toyin Falola

Publication date:

14 February 2023

Publisher

Anthem Press

Dimensions:

229x153mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781839987731

Traditions and cultures represent a set of persisting or prevailing beliefs, social practices, oral, linguistic, and values that define an individual’s way of life. In other words, in memoir writing, the emphasis is often to propagate a unilateral need or embrace of self-identity. However, the dominant narrative and method of analysis in this study holds the notion and privileges that tradition and cultures imbibed by memoirists are sometimes subverted, refashioned, or reworked due to the strand of experiences or realities they encounter in different spaces as their narration develops. Thus, memoirists embrace indifference and open-mindedness, which is also greatly explored in the context of autobiography.

List of Figures; Dedication; Acknowledgments; Preface; Chapter One Mirror Effect: Narrating the Self through, Traditions and Cultures; Chapter Two The Universal and the Particular in African Memoirs; Chapter Three The Portraiture of Womanhood in Emmanuel, Babatunde’s An African Journey through Celibate, Priesthood to Married Life; Chapter Four Politics, Philosophical Representation, and Culture in Cherno Njie’s Sweat Is Invisible in the Rain; Chapter Five The Yoruba Worldview, Meanings, and Ideals of Life in Michael Afolayan’s Fate of Our Mothers; Chapter Six The Indelibility of Igbo Tradition (Home) in Kalu Ogbaa’s Carrying my Father’s Torch; Chapter Seven Experiences, Reflections, and Refractions on the Cusp in A. B. Assensoh’s A Matter of Sharing; Chapter Eight Toward a Spatial and Identity Synthesis: Regional Peculiarities in African Memoirs; Bibliography; Index

“African Memoirs and Cultural Representations presents an encyclopedic repository containing transitions of African multidimensional identities—personal, political, social, and cultural. From the politics of memory, to the nuances of everyday life, the universal and particular converge in this philosophical reflection and creative synthesis of the African memoir by Toyin Falola”—Prof Mobolanle E Sotunsa, Professor of African Oral Literature and Gender Studies, Babcock University, Nigeria.