Buch, Englisch, 218 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 666 g
Trauma, Resilience, and Creativity
Buch, Englisch, 218 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 666 g
ISBN: 978-1-84701-417-7
Verlag: James Currey
The ethnically and linguistically diverse nation of Sierra Leone boasts a rich cultural legacy and, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, has built an internationally recognized literary canon despite the ravages caused by a brutal civil war and then the Ebola and Covid pandemics. While acknowledging the country's literary and creative heritage dating back to the mid-twentieth century, this book interrogates a number of prominent themes and critical perspectives on Sierra Leone's contemporary literature.
Drawing from body studies, post-colonial theory, spatial theory, trauma theory, ecocriticism, history, and cultural studies, scholars and writers from West Africa and the United States tease out the beginnings, ecology, and dynamism of a bona fide national literature. They do so through a careful examination of such themes as social oppression and class distinction, dystopia, ethnocentricity, homophobia, misogyny and gender disparities, anthropocentrism, self-discovery, social transformation, identity, social degradation, genocide, and trauma, while also theorizing constructs such as home, migration, displacement, community, and return. Throughout, contributors argue for a better appreciation of a vibrant national literature by Sierra Leoneans themselves as well as its place in and contribution to world literature more generally.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Fachgebiete
Weitere Infos & Material
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Section I: The Creative Imagination: Language, History, and Culture
1. Unacknowledged Creative Loops: Orature, Literature and Society in Sierra Leone's Contemporary History - Mohamed Gibril Sesay
2. The Past Flows: Water as a Metaphor for Nostalgia in Ahmed Koroma's The Moon Rises Over Isale Eko - Oumar Farouk Sesay
3. English Language Learning and Intelligibility: Idiomaticity, Sierra Leonean English and Sierra Leonean Fiction - Momodu Turay
4. The Female Condition in the Novels of Aminatta Forna - Saidu Bangura
Section II: Legacies of War and Pandemic: Literature as Witness to Violence, Trauma, and Resilience
5. Syl Cheney-Coker's Stone Child and Other Poems: a Graphic Exploration of War Trauma - Eustace Palmer
6. Space, Trauma, and Healing in Delia Jarrett-Macauley's Moses, Citizen and Me - Oumar Chérif Diop
7. Learning How to Smile Again: Ebola, Resilience, and Sierra Leonean Fiction - Joya Uraizee
8. War and Social Degradation in Oumar Farouk Sesay's Landscape of Memories - Elizabeth Kamara
Section III: Visions of the Future: New Genres, Aesthetics, and Epistemologies
9. "A Window to Society": The Human Condition in the Context of Interspecies Relations in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and Aminatta Forna's The Window Seat - Ernest Cole
10. Namina Forna's The Gilded Ones: An Afrocentric Vision of the Beloved Community - Mohamed Kamara
11. Smartphone Literature in Today's Sierra Leone: Assessing Claims of Continuity with Traditional Fireside Folktales - Stephen Ney
12. The Intersection of Life and History in Eldred Jones' The Freetown Bond: A Life under Two Flags - Samuel Kamara
13. Relatability, Spaces, Symbols and Legends: Fiction as a Mirror Image for Social Transformation in Walon-Jalloh's 'Dharmendra Died' - Gibrilla Kargbo
Index
