By Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra Reading Deji Bryce Olukotun’s After the Flare (2017) and Lesley Nneka Arimah’s “What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky” (2017) alongside Emmanuel Dongala’s “Jazz et vin de palme” (“Jazz and Palm Wine,” 1970), this essay begins Read More …
Category: Recent JALA Articles
Queer(ing) freedom: rewriting coming-out narratives in contemporary Maghrebian literary production
By Gibson Ncube This article analyses how contemporary writers of Maghrebian descent make use of autofiction to make visible queer desires and sexualities which exist in a perpetual state of marginalization. Using autofiction, a genre of literary expression which has Read More …
Blackness blurred: (un)belonging, kinship, and métissage in Marie NDiaye’s Ladivine
By Polo B. Moji This article examines elusive freedom and black (un)belonging in France through the work of Marie NDiaye, a prize-winning playwright and author, whose controversial denunciation of the “monstrosity” of President Nicholas Sarkozy’s France in 2009 coincided with Read More …
Of freedom and literature in Africa and the diaspora
By Phyllis Clark Taoua & Grace A. Musila This introduction to a special issue on freedom presents a set of original essays that reflect critically on the idea of freedom in relation to specific literary texts from Africa and the Read More …
“Daughterly texts”: fathers and their daughters in Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun
By Emmanuel Ngwira This article analyzes how the relationship between fathers and daughters is portrayed in Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. The paper observes that in these Read More …
Traumatic memory, autobiography and history in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s memoirs and A Grain of Wheat
By Syned Mthatiwa The publication of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s childhood memoirs, Dreams in a Time of War and In the House of the Interpreter, gave his readers a glimpse of his troubled past as a young boy growing up in Read More …
Bearing witness and documenting suffering in two Moroccan prison memoirs: Tazmamart: Cell 10 and from Skhirat to Tazmamart: a round trip ticket to hell
By Elham T. Hussein This paper compares and contrasts two Moroccan prison memoirs: Tazmamart: Cell 10 and From Skhirat to Tazmamart: A Round Trip Ticket to Hell by Ahmed Marzouki and Mohamed Raiss respectively. The memoirs under discussion can be Read More …
Lake lore: a study of lacustrine artistic representations in the Malawian imaginary
By Ken Junior Lipenga Lake Malawi, with its flora and fauna, exists as a pervasive presence in the collective creative imaginary of Malawian artists. This is evident through the presence of the lake as a feature in poetry, painting, and Read More …