AfricaBib 
bibliographic database
| Previous page | New search |
The free AfricaBib App for Android is available here
 Periodical article |
 Leiden University catalogue |
 WorldCat |
| Title: | Ama Ata Aidoo's orphan ghosts: African literature and aesthetic postmodernity |
| Author: | Migraine-George, Thérèse |
| Year: | 2003 |
| Periodical: | Research in African Literatures |
| Volume: | 34 |
| Issue: | 4 |
| Pages: | 83-95 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Ghana |
| Subjects: | literature drama |
| About person: | Christina Ama Ata Aidoo (1942-) |
| External link: | http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/research_in_african_literatures/v034/34.4migraine-george.pdf |
| Abstract: | Négritude and aesthetic postmodernity are both concerned with issues of identity, alienation and disenchantment in a context of shifting personal and communal bearings as well as groundbreaking literary innovations and creative energies. In his preface to 'The art of Ama Ata Aidoo: polylectics and reading against neocolonialism,' (1994) Vincent Odamtten writes that his 'polylectic reading' of the Ghanaian writer 'demands that the critic not only acknowledge the importance of the undergirding orature but attempt to conjoin that aesthetic to the whole critical enterprise'. In the spirit of Odamtten's reading, the present author focuses on Aidoo's plays 'The dilemma of a ghost' and 'Anowa' (4th ed., 1991) to show how Aidoo, already in the early 1960s and 1970s, was tackling issues relevant both to the specific conditions of African literature and to various aesthetic and ideological aspects of literary postmodernity: homelessness, exile, the loss of personal and communal bearings 'in the context of shifting social, political, and ethical standards'. Bibliogr., notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract] |
