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| Title: | The Cultural Implications of an Evolution of Relationships: The Rise of Neo-African Literatures |
| Author: | Sellin, Eric |
| Year: | 1990 |
| Periodical: | Africana Journal |
| Volume: | 15 |
| Pages: | 127-140 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Africa |
| Subjects: | literature English language French language Portuguese language Literature, Mass Media and the Press |
| Abstract: | In this paper the author contends that the dynamics of linguistic colonization, influenced by the current variety of colonial activity, forges in the adopted tongue a literature which will undergo a generally predictable development. He considers some of the factors that are at play in this phenomenon and then describes the patterns of evolution manifest in several literatures. Factors which have had a direct effect on the configuration of the colonized writer's country, on his world view, and on his style of expression include distance from the metropole, capitalist paradigm, education, communication, colonial cadres for leadership development, liberation movements, adjustment period immediately following independence, self-image, structure of revolution, and time. These various factors all interact and relate linearly in Africa and they are reflected in the evolution of the literature written by Africans in European languages. In this literature, three stages can be discerned: a first stage of tentative efforts at expressing oneself in the metropolitan language; a second period in which there is a loosening of the idiom and writers become familiar with more recent metropolitan models and trends; and a third stage, when writers succeed in bending the foreign idiom in conformity with the African 'Weltanschauung'. Notes, ref. |