Research Articles (English Studies)

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https://hdl.handle.net/10566/213

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The classics, African literature, and the critics
(Institute for the Study of English in Africa Rhodes University, 2017) Field, Roger
Faced with the criticism that myth and epic poetry have no place in contemporary South African literature departments, there is no point in defending the material on the grounds of intrinsic worth. No text can claim this privilege. Instead, students and lecturers alike may find value and relevance for these works if they explore a range of aesthetic, conceptual, cultural, and political issues that close readings may precipitate. After analysing a fictional demonstration of how not to teach The Odyssey, the article surveys a range of writers and cultural critics who identify as African or African-American, and whose work comments directly and indirectly on the history of the meaning, purpose and value of selected ancient and classical Greek texts. This spectrum stretches from defensive cultural nationalism to an open-ended combination of the cosmopolitan and the vernacular. The article concludes that a combination of resistance and appropriation is the best way to make new and local these canonical texts.
Eros and Self-Realization: Zora Neale Hurston�s Janie and Flora Nwapa�s Efuru
(The Pennsylvania State University, 2020) Moolla, Fiona. F
A 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 goddess
Flirtations with eros from a black-eyed squint: romantic love in the oeuvre of ama ata aidoo
(Indiana University Press, 2024) Moolla, Fatima Fiona
What’s love got to do with it? Everything—suggests Ama Ata Aidoo, whose oeuvre, virtually without exception, foregrounds romantic love as part of a woman’s well-being, obstacles to which constitute a decidedly feminist concern. Throughout Aidoo’s career, her fiction highlights romantic love as the human relationship that has the greatest potential to achieve social justice, since it often transgresses boundaries of ethnicity, race, class, and various social taboos. At a personal level, union through love represents a reconciliation of broader political differences. In this sense, as in a range of others to be considered, the personal is shown to be political. Romantic love in Aidoo’s project, furthermore, has the catalytic potential to transform and bring into congruence disjunct social relations, which, in a postcolonial context, disproportionately impact the lives of African women. The earliest recognition of the significance of eros in Aidoo’s meditation was an unconscious one, where she echoed the dominant assumption of the African literary scene at the time, which saw love as a trivial personal concern. In a provocative self-critique, Aidoo reverses her earlier position when she acknowledges her own preoccupation with love across her career. A careful study of Aidoo’s work suggests, however, that despite its power, romantic love finally is beset by obstacles to its realization, which leave social barriers in place and patriarchal structures untransformed. This black-eyed squint clearly does not see the world through rose-tinted glasses.
Introduction: Reinscribing Nuruddin Farah in African literature
(Tydskrif vir Letterkunde Association, 2020) Moolla, Fatima Fiona
The commissioning of a theme issue on the work of Farah in a South African literary journal therefore is noteworthy both in African continental and world literature contexts. Commemorating Farah�s career in Tydskrif vir Letterkunde may be seen as an attempt at a reconsideration of Farah�s position in African literature, and an acknowledgement of the possible reconfiguration of Farah as a South African writer, in addition to his position as a �Somali� diasporic writer.
The polygynous household in Lola Shoneyin�s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi�s Wives: a haven in a heartless world
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017) Moolla, F. Fiona
Despite Lola Shoneyin�s public condemnation of the impediments to female autonomy, equality, freedom, dignity, and self-realisation inherent in polygamy, the polyvalent nature of her contemporary Nigerian novel, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi�s Wives, suggests the necessary material and moral complexity of any analysis of plural marriage in postcolonial Africa. Parodic play in this novel highlights how the apparently monstrous patriarch and the daily perversions of traditional marriage and household ideals represent the only security for both relatively advantaged and disadvantaged women in twenty-first-century Nigeria. I embed my literary analysis of the novel within a survey of history and religion to show how monogamy confirmed the moral superiority of the colonial and Christian missionary projects and justified their social interventions. To contextualise this study of the novel, I also use socio-anthropological literature that connects the global forces promoting romantic love as the sole foundation of monogamous marriage with, ironically, the global flows that create the punitive economic and social conditions to which plural marriage is an entirely rational response shaped by local cultural contexts.

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