Africa

The Travel Writer as Cultural Icon and Literary Predecessor: Negotiating the African Legacy of S. K. Pottekkat

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Meera B.

Assistant Professor, Department of English, Amrita School of Arts and Sciences, Amrita Viswa Vidyapeetham, Kochi Campus. ORCID: 0000-0002-8395-9051. Email: meerab8526@gmail.com.  

 Volume 12, Number 3, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.24

Abstract

S. K. Pottekkat has been the most influential travel writer in Malayalam for many generations of Malayali readers. His travels in Africa in the year 1949-50, recorded in five travelogues beginning with the mid-twentieth century Kappirikalude Nattil, have inspired generations of Malayalis to follow suit and pursue the African dream. This is much more pronounced in the case of well-known Malayali writers whose attempts to write about Africa have inevitably involved a “writing back” to Pottekkat. In this paper, I analyze the African travelogues of two such writers – Tatapuram Sukumaran’s African Poorvadeshangalil in 1986 about his trip to Tanzania and Paul Zacharia’s Oru African Yatra(2005) about his travels from South Africa to Egypt in 2000. Sukumaran is hailed by the Malayali diaspora as the first Malayali writer after Pottekkat to visit the country while the writer-journalist Zacharia is on a self-proclaimed mission “to seek out the present-day form of that Africa which Pottekkat found 54 years ago”. Unsurprisingly, the major part of his journeys is undertaken through the well-trodden paths taken by Pottekkat who himself was inspired by the celebrated travel accounts of Livingstone and Stanley. In this paper, I intend to explore how these two writers writing about Africa in the humungous literary shadow of Pottekkat negotiate his African legacy in the Malayali literary imaginary. How far does the “anxiety of influence” of Pottekkat’s picture of Africa, which was colonial and Eurocentric, impinge on these writers who are trying to represent postcolonial Africa for a different audience in a different time? What are the strategies they adopt to create a distinct voice? These questions, in turn, lead to larger questions about how each tenderfoot traveller’s gaze is mediated by the verisimilar lens of existing discourses as well as by the horizon of expectations of his/her reading public brought up on these canonical narratives.

Keywords: Pottekkat, Sukumaran, Zacharia, Malayali travel writing, Africa, anxiety of influence

The Prodigal Sons of Africa Proselytized to Christianity: Cultural Renegades and Apostates in Achebe’s Novels

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Virender Pal

Department of English, University College Kurukshetra. ORCID: 0000-0003-3569-1289. Email: p2vicky@gmail.com

 Volume 10, Number 2, 2018 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v10n2.15

Received January  11, 2017; Revised March 15, 2018; Accepted March 25, 2018; Published May 07, 2018.

Abstract

In the postcolonial world the literary writers and postcolonial theorists have made immense contributions to piercing through the veil of the policies of colonialism. While the theories of the theorists written by Colonialism remain and are read and understood by a privileged few, literature is read by people across all the cultures and nationalities. Chinua Achebe is one of the most important name among such writers who have contributed immensely to postcolonial studies. His novels show that colonialism was an enterprise to plunder the natural resources of the enslaved countries in the name of spreading the light of civilization. This spreading of light of civilization lead to the annihilation of local cultures as the local cultures were systematically obliterated and replaced with the alien white culture. His first novel Things Fall Apart was written as a reply to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The novel asserted that Africa was civilized before the arrival of the whites. In No Longer at Ease (1960) he studies the impact of sustained colonial rule on his people. The current paper is a study of Chinua Achebe’s novel No Longer at Ease and Things Fall Apart. The novesl shows that the indigenous culture and religion was the best for the Africans. The imposition of an alien culture has created intractable problems for the Nigerians and the remedy lies only in going back to the roots, to the Ibo “commonsense.”

Keywords: colonialism, Christianity, Ibo, Africa, corruption.

Exploring Dickens through a Director’s Lens: a Study of the Cinematic Presentation of A Tale of Two Cities

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Gatha Sharma, Shiv Nadar University, Gautam Budh Nagar, Uttar Pradesh

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 An interesting thing always noticed by avid movie-buffs is when one watches a movie made on a novel, automatically one starts identifying characters of the novel with the actors who have played those characters. Actors give new identity and life to the characters hitherto without any proper face or shape, enclosed in the black alphabets and yellow pages of the books. This paper is an attempt to see how the complex art of Charles Dickens find expression through cinema. A Tale of Two Cities is one of the two historical novels written by Charles Dickens. Attempting historical fiction is a tough task. Author has to shift back mentally to those ages and keep track of not only historical but also political, social, economic and spiritual environment of those times. Historically, A Tale of Two Cities has tried to capture extremely volatile years of French Revolution. Impacts of French Revolution were far-reaching and had been felt for many decades afterwards by Europe and later became an inspiration to many freedom movements in Asia, Africa and Russia. Praise to Charles Dickens for attempting such a story and also to all those directors who tried to portray such a razzmatazz on the big screen. Keep Reading

Theatre(s) of Resistance: Those ‘Other’ Performances in Simulation

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Sambuddha Ghosh, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

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 Abstract

The word “performance”[i] is one laden with immense—if sometimes only theoretical or even metaphysical—possibilities which stretch the known boundaries of conventional representation. “Performances” can be mimetic, and in certain cases, ones based on simulation. Ideologically motivated theatre for activism is too common for our own times, but the ramifications of present global power relations demand ephemeral forms of protest, opposition and self-expression. This article attempts to present a relatively uncharted terrain of performance studies: the Virtual Theatre, its Siblings and undertakes an enquiry into the ethos of simulated performance and the implications thereof that challenge essentialist conceptions of the Self and Personality. In addition, it also tries to unearth the hidden possibilities of such types of performance which might prove to be influential forms of ‘affirmative action’ for the future,  in trying to arrest the unrestricted growth of forces that assist globalization and its resulting cultural legacy. Keep Reading

What is Performance Studies?

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Richard Schechner

Tisch School of the Arts, New York University

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Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and open to new possibilities, no one can actually grasp its totality or press all its vastness and variety into a single writing book. My points of departure are my own teaching, research, artistic practice, and life experiences.

Performances are actions. As a discipline, performance studies takes actions very seriously in four ways. First, behavior is the “object of study” of performance studies. Although performance studies scholars use the “archive” extensively – what’s in books, photographs, the archaeological record, historical remains, etc. – their dedicated focus is on the “repertory,” namely, what people do in the activity of their doing it. Second, artistic practice is a big part of the performance studies project. A number of performance studies scholars are also practicing artists working in the avant-garde, in community-based performance, and elsewhere; others have mastered a variety of non-Western and Western traditional forms. The relationship between studying performance and doing performance is integral. Third, fieldwork as “participant observation” is a much-prized method adapted from anthropology and put to new uses. In anthropological fieldwork, participant observation is a way of learning about cultures other than that of the field-worker. In anthropology, for the most part, the “home culture” is Western, the “other” non-Western. But in performance studies, the “other” may be a part of one’s own culture (non-Western or Western), or even an aspect of one’s own behavior. That positions the performance studies fieldworker at a Brechtian distance, allowing for criticism, irony, and personal commentary as well as sympathetic participation. In this active way, one performs fieldwork. Taking a critical distance from the objects of study and self invites revision, the recognition that social circumstances– including knowledge itself – are not fixed, but subject to the “rehearsal process” of testing and revising. Fourth, it follows that performance studies is actively involved in social practices and advocacies. Many who practice performance studies do not aspire to ideological neutrality. In fact, a basic theoretical claim is that no approach or position is “neutral”. There is no such thing as unbiased. The challenge is to become as aware as possible of one’s own stances in relation to the positions of others – and then take steps to maintain or change positions. Keep Reading

“Humans as Voices of God and Tradition?” Rethinking the Subjugation of the African Woman in Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter

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Stephen O. Solanke, Ajayi Crowther University, Nigeria

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Abstract

Over the eons, man has posed asspeaking for and on behalf of God and Tradition. His assumed positions on social issues, therefore, are regarded as infallibles. Polygamy as one of the issues is advantageous for male. This paper discusses, through a sociological consideration of Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter and the effects of polygamy, that a positive consideration be cast on the issue in the modern African world. Women need not be abandoned, children need not be cast aside, and men’s lives need not become loveless as much as the society need not be shackled with frustrated marriages and destroyed lives. The African world, faced with the negative effects laid on the table in this paper, should sociologically re-adjust itself into the modern world of love-giving, acceptance and sharing. Keep Reading

Revolutionary Roads: Violence versus Non-violence: A comparative study of The Battle of Algiers (1966) and Gandhi (1982)

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Vikash Kumar

Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi India

Considered one of the finest realist films ever which reconstitutes perfectly the revolution by the people of Algeria, The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo Gillo, La Bataille d’Alger, Igor Film/ Casbah Films, Italy, 1966) presents us an image of a world of anger and agony. The making of The Battle of Algiers possibly heralded the birth of Algerian cinema as it was the first film made just after their independence. In fact, this cinematographic masterpiece reveals to its viewers a plethora of images depicting the Algerian people in their quest for independence. Made in the year 1966, by Gillo Pontecorvo and based on the personal experiences of Yacef Saddi, Military Head of the FLN (Front de liberation National/ National Liberation Front) who also collaborated on the script of the film, The Battle of Algiers, interestingly, was directed with the aim to highlight the invisible aspects and unheard voices of this violent revolution by the people of Algeria as well as the counter measures taken by the colonial power to suppress the movement. Keep Reading

Gender Dialectics of Yoruba Drum Poetry

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Azeez Akinwumi SESAN, Al -Hikmah University, Ilorin

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Abstract

The analytical and dialectical nature of Yoruba oral art with the inclusion of drum poetry facilitates its unending discourses. In the past and contemporary African society, gender issues have attracted critical attentions of scholars and researchers using different subject areas. In the past Yoruba societies, women were acknowledged as the performers of oral art, particularly in the genres of poetry and prose but with the exemption of drum poetry. It is on this understanding that this paper examines the impact of gender dialectics on the discourse of Yoruba drum poetry. The paper draws inferences from Ifa literary corpus for mythico-historical origin of Yoruba drums. Data are gathered through primary source (field investigations) and secondary sources (books, journals and periodicals).As a verbal art, Yoruba drum poetry has some masculinity attached to it and until recently, women are passive participants in drum poetry performance. It is established that gender dialectics has made a score as there are now the emergence of female professional drummers. Keep Reading

Mary Magdalene or Virgin Mary: Nationalism and the Concept of Woman in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power

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Sayyed Rahim Moosavinia, Seyyede Maryam Hosseini & Shahid Chamran

University of Ahvaz, Iran

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Abstract

Foucault believes that people live in systems of power different from one era to another. He applies the term “power archives” to demonstrate that those inside an institute cannot be aware of the subtle ways of power imposed on them. Likewise, it would be oversimplification to think that with the apparent end of colonialism, the colonized subjects will be free from subjugating contexts. In the case of women, the situation is even worse since they are repressed by both the colonialist and the post-colonial nationalist. “Under the anxiety of the influence” of the former colonial father, the once-belittled colonial men turn to support their females in terms of their body and soul, and in this way define them inside a strictly demarcated roles of good wives, mothers, and households or vicious prostitutes. Bessie Head in her semi-autobiographical masterpiece subtly examines this idea and through her coloured protagonist, Elizabeth, attempts to re-deconstruct this notion. Keep Reading

In the World of Men: Tagore’s Arrival in the Spiritual Domain of Nationalism

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Banibrata Goswami, Panchakot Mahavidyalaya, India

Abstract

Rabindranath Tagore was born in a family which, on one hand, inherited a legacy of rich Indian culture, and on the other, did not hesitate to welcome the modernism, freshly arrived from Europe through waves of Enlightenment. He was sent early to England to imbibe the gifts of modern science and rationalism that could lead him to a standard and secured career. But even though the discipline of work, love for liberalism and quest after scientific truth and technological perfection there impressed him much, in its over all effect the West’s efforts of de-humanization disappointed Tagore and disillusioned him as well. This led him finally to the realization and reconstruction of the motherland that is India. He came to meet the common man and his everyday sorrows and tears in rural Bengal, in Silaidaha, Patisar and Sazadpur where he was given the duty to look after the family estate. The raw and rough smell of the soil, the whirl of the waves in river Padma, the play of seasons on the strings of nature lent him a unique insight. He learnt to weave his words offering a perfect slide show of mutual reciprocation of man and nature, accompanied by a hitherto unheard melody of folk tune that glorifies the struggles of that life and thereby consolidating it gradually to a consciousness out of which a nation is born. The present essay intends to seek and understand the secrets of that story, which, though lacking miserably in sound and fury, strives towards a steady self emergence and emancipation paving the way for political freedom. Keep Reading