Browsing by Author "Moolla, Fiona. F"
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Item Dog sacrifice in Isidore Okpewho�s call me by my rightful name and the Works of Wole Soyinka: Ogun, race, identity and diaspora(Ranchi: Glocal Colloquies, 2016) Moolla, Fiona. FThis essay considers the ways in which the significance of blood sacrifice in the propitiation of the Yoruba god Ogun is transformed in the context of international literature which asserts an endogenous African modernity, and the specificity of black experience and identity. It focuses mainly on Isidore Okpewho�s 2004 novel, Call Me By My Rightful Name, compared with the role of Ogun in Wole Soyinka�s aesthetics, foregrounding key essays, drama and poetry. Okpewho�s novel presents the reality of the ancestral call among the Yoruba of the American and Caribbean diaspora, which synecdochically represents the call of an essentialized Africa. The central character, Otis Hampton, is a middle class basketball playing African- American college student who inexplicably begins to respond in uncontrollable ways to African drumming and involuntarily chants in a language he does not understand.Item Eros and Self-Realization: Zora Neale Hurston�s Janie and Flora Nwapa�s Efuru(The Pennsylvania State University, 2020) Moolla, Fiona. FA comparative analysis of Zora Neale Hurston�s Teir Eyes Were Watching God and Flora Nwapa�s Efuru suggests the importance of romantic love to the self actualization of the heroines of these novels, whose authors share similar biog raphies, concerns, and literary positions in the spheres of African American and African literatures respectively. For Hurston, eros paradoxically represents the ultimately unfulfilled possibility for self-realization that finally may be achieved only in and through the self. By contrast, for Nwapa, the focus shifts from the centrality of romantic love to the complex and contradictory place of childbear ing in female self-realization. However, finally, self-actualization is achieved with other women in identification with Mammywater, the powerful Igbo lake goddessItem In the heart of the country: The auto/biographies of Ayesha Dawood and Fatima Meer(University of Cape Town, 2020) Moolla, Fiona. FSouth African struggle auto/biography has been a male-dominated genre in which the political has correspondingly dominated the personal. These life narratives have presented the formation of relatively coherent, autonomous selfhoods constructing a stable narrative of anti-Apartheid political history. Male struggle auto/ biography hassince the 1980 s been counterbalanced by female auto/biography, existing in the margins of social and historical discourse. In the post-2000 period, a number of struggle auto/ biographies have been published which appear to shift the prevailing norms of the genre to highlight the relationality of subject constitution, in which the family has been presented as the most significant matrix of self-formation.Item Postnational paradoxes: Nuruddin Farah's recent novels and two life narratives in counterpoint(Indiana University Press, 2018) Moolla, Fiona. FNuruddin Farah�s most recent novel, Hiding in Plain Sight, provides an interesting fictional terrain within which to explore postcolonial postnationalism. This novel highlights the impacts of globalization and transnationalism on subject formation, personal and family relations, and opens up questions of sexuality in a postnational context. Connections between individual subject and nation formation have been considered across Farah�s career beginning with his first novel, From a Crooked Rib, that marked the double emergence of the autonomous individual and the nationstate, to, most notably, Maps, which completely deconstructs the �mythical� foundations of the Somali nation. Hiding in Plain Sight presents an idealized, postnational cosmopolitanism with no apparent collective affiliation that is presented as the automatic outcome of constitutive hybridity and global hyper-mobility.Item Travelling home: Diasporic dis-locations of space and place in Tendai Huchu's The Maestro, The Magistrate & The Mathematician(SAGE Publications, 2018) Moolla, Fiona. FThe Maestro, The Magistrate & The Mathematician, a novel by Zimbabwean diasporic writer Tendai Huchu, adds to a growing body of global immigrant fiction. Huchu�s novel concerning Zimbabwean �migr�s in the United Kingdom displays a heightened spatial consciousness that self-reflexively complicates the spatial tropes and trends of much migrant literature. The Maestro, The Magistrate & The Mathematician generates an unrelenting dialectic in which the national home, both for migrants and citizens, is often unhomely, while host spaces yield to various forms of place-making and belonging. City space, in this case the city of Edinburgh, is shown through the unique mobilities of the three protagonists to produce different senses of identity. However, the forms of identity that emerge ultimately succumb to the spatial implosion represented by the death (in contained spaces) of two of the principal characters, whose city perambulations are thus brought to a halt. The reader discovers, furthermore, that the third character is not the cartographer of his re-orienting mental map of the host city, but that his itinerary has been directed all along by a sinister, somewhat ubuesque Zimbabwean expatriate, to whom the third character, fooled by this regime spy�s clownish conduct, condescends and mistakenly patronizes.