This dissertation examines the impact of sound on the African literary imagination since the 1970s. I posit the sonority of postcolonial African writing in order to draw out the relatively ignored but remarkably rich stylistic innovations and political interventions oriented around sound. While the orality–textuality debate in African literary studies...
After spending most of her flight back to Ghana writing a letter to her estranged lover, Sissie, Ama Ata Aidoo’s protagonist in Our Sister Killjoy, observes the actions of her fellow passengers and reads the atmosphere onboard the airplane as that of “another human market-place.” Sissie’s statement transports into her...
The objective of this dissertation is to examine the mutually constitutive relationship between historiography, collective memory, and cultural narratives in the representation of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) in present-day France and Algeria. Taking the turn of the twenty-first century as its point of departure, this study analyzes modern...
Viral Verses investigates the influence of social media publication on the relationship between poetry and community formation in southeastern Africa. As more artists in the global South reach wider audiences through online publication, poetic form has shifted to reflect social media’s aesthetic norms, embracing urgency, contemporaneity, and populism. Digital media...