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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Discourses of arrested modernization: African literary theory in the 1980s
Author:Schulze-Engler, FrankISNI
Year:1993
Periodical:Matatu: Journal for African Culture and Society
Volume:10
Pages:9-26
Language:English
Geographic term:Africa
Subjects:literary criticism
literature
External link:https://doi.org/10.1163/18757421-90000003
Abstract:Instead of 'arrested decolonization', a term used by Biodun Jeyifo (1990) to suggest that continuing imperialist domination is the fundamental reason for the crisis currently afflicting Africa, the present author prefers the term 'arrested modernization'. This perspective allows for an analysis of the specific modernities that have come into existence in the postcolonial context and that have shaped literature as well as literary theory. In the 1980s, while the growing interest of academics in poststructuralism, deconstruction and postcolonialism shifted the concerns of general literary theory away from sociological questions into the terrain of discourse analysis and the self-referentiality of language, African literary theory became more and more 'applied theory'. This article analyses three important groups of such 'applied theory' that have developed during the 1980s, and which in one way or another focus on the relationship between literature and contemporary postcolonial reality in Africa. These three approaches are the cultural nationalism approach, of which Chinweizu has become the best-known exponent; the Marxist-oriented approach; and the approach found in Wole Soyinka's essay collection 'Art, dialogue and outrage' (1988), which exemplifies the wide variety of ideologically often less conspicuous, though by no means less relevant theoretical perspectives that have been developed during the last decade. Notes, ref.
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