The intention of this second volume of ASNEL Papers is to counter orthodox post-colonial emphases on “alterity”, “subversion”, and “counter-discourse” with another set of concepts: fusion, syncretism, hybridity, creolisation, cross-fertilisation, cross-cultural identity, diaspora. Topics covered include: gender and identity; syncretic aesthetics in Nigerian and South African performing arts; “hyphenated identities” in diasporic fiction; reversals of colonial mimicry in Ugandan fiction; cultural reflexivity in the Victorian juvenile novel; the persistence of colonial traits in Zimbabwean war fiction; syncretic strategies of resistance in African prison memoirs; indigene life-histories and intercultural authorship; neo-essentialism in post-colonial critiques of the Rushdie Affair; US multiculturalism and political praxis; creolisation in Surinam; cultural complexities in the Caribbean epic; literary representations of the Haitian Revolution.
Authors treated within broader frameworks include Margaret Atwood, R.M. Ballantyne, Marie-Claire Blais. Alejo Carpentier, Roch Carrier, Aimé Césaire, Michelle Cliff, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Edouard Glissant, Andrew Hacker, Eddy L. Harris, Wilson Harris, Bessie Head, C.L.R. James, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jayanta Mahapatra, Paule Marshall, A.K. Mehrotra, Timothy Mo, Bharati Mukherjee, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Akiki Nyabongo, Eugene O’Neill, Molefe Pheto, Salman Rushdie, Wole Soyinka, Ted Trindell, and Derek Walcott. There are also poems by David Woods and Afua Cooper.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements.
Illustrations.
Introduction.
SYNCRETISM(S).
Christopher BALME: Inventive Syncretism. The Concept of the Syncretic in Intercultural Discourse.
Bode SOWANDE: Syncretic Aesthetics in Modern Nigerian Theatre.
Flora VEIT-WILD: Festivals of Laughter. Syncretism in Southern Africa.
Uwe SCHÄFER: “Both/And” and/or “Either/Or”. Syncretism and Imagination in the Novels of Wilson Harris and Bessie Head.
Joseph SWANN: The Abstraction of Language. Jayanta Mahapatra and A.K. Mehrotra as Indian “Postmodernists”.
Peter O. STUMMER: Cross-Over Difficulties. Recent Problems in Cross-Cultural/Trans-National Communication.
NEGOTIATING NEW IDENTIES.
Bernhard MELCHIOR: “Expertise in Cross-Cultural Mediation”. West Indian-American Writing in the Eighties.
Margaret KEULEN: “Bringing together all the various strands”. Cultural Roots in Paule Marshall’s Literary Oeuvre.
Shirley GEOK-LIN LIM: Race, National Identity, and the Subject in Timothy Mo’s Novels.
Sämi LUDWIG: “Cultural Identity as Spouse”. Limitations and Possibilities of a Metaphor in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The
Woman Warrior and Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine.
Walter G?-BEL: Bharati Mukherjee. Expatriation, Americanality and Literary Form.
Roman KURTZ: All the Polarities. A Golden Age Revisited.
AFRICAN NARRATIONS AND NARRATIONS OF AFRICA.
Detlev GOHRBANDT: Mapping or Constructing Africa. Notes on R.M. Ballantyne’s Juvenile Fiction.
Tobias D?-RING: The Fissures of Fusion. Akiki Nyabongo’s Africa Answers Back (1936) and What It May Teach Us.
Thomas BRÜCKNER: Across the Borders. Orality Old and New in the African Novel.
Wolfgang HOCHBRUCK: Armed Conflict and Cultural Encounters. Zimbabwean War Fiction.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND CULTURAL PLURALITY.
Armando E. JANNETTA: Dialogic Constructions of the Self in Métis Life-Histories.
Werner SEDLAK: Prison Memoirs by African Writers (Ngugi, Pheto, Soyinka). The Cultural Unity and Complexity of Resistance.
CULTURAL FUSION AND CULTURAL POLITICS.
Frank SCHULZE-ENGLER: Riding the Crisis. The Satanic Verses and the Silences of Literary Theory.
Berndt OSTENDORF: Inclusion, Exclusion, and the Politics of Cultural Difference.
Petronella BREINBURG: Culture, Fusion, and Language. The Case of Surinam.
David WOODS: Epitaph.
GENDER AND POST-COLONIALISM.
Heike HÄRTING: The Profusion of Meanings and the Female Experience of Colonisation. Inscriptions of the Body as Site of Difference
in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s. Nervous Conditions and Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman.
Carola TORTI, Karin KILB, Mark STEIN: Groping for Coherence. Patriarchal Constraints and Female Resistance in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s
Nervous Conditions.
Afua COOPER: I Don’t Care If Your Nanny Was Black.
DEREK WALCOTT.
John J. FIGUEROA: The Sea Still Going On. Derek Walcott’s Omeros.
Gordon COLLIER: The “Noble Ruins” of Art and the Haitian Revolution. Carpentier, Césaire, Glissant, James, O’Neill, Walcott and
Others.