Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Complicity and Responsibility in Contemporary African Writing: The Postcolony Revisited

Complicity and Responsibility in Contemporary African Writing: The Postcolony Revisited

Niemi, Minna Johanna

Hardcover

Series: African Governance

Literary CriticismFiction AnthologiesGeneral Sociology

ISBN10: 0367139693
ISBN13: 9780367139698
Publisher: Routledge
Published: May 4 2021
Pages: 204
Weight: 1.05
Height: 0.50 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

This book investigates the many ways in which contemporary African fiction has reflected on themes of responsibility and complicity during the postcolonial period.

Covering the authors Ayi Kwei Armah, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nuruddin Farah, Michiel Heyns, and J. M. Coetzee, the book places each writer's novels in their cultural and literary context in order to investigate similarities and differences between fictional approaches to individual complicity in politically unstable situations. In doing so, the study focuses on these texts' representations of discomforting experiences of being implicated in harm done to others in order to show that it is precisely during times of political crisis that questions of moral responsibility and implicatedness in compromised conduct become more pronounced. The study also challenges longstanding western amnesia concerning responsibility for historical and present-day violence in African countries and juxtaposes this denial of responsibility with the western literary readership's consumption of narratives of African suffering. The study instead proposes new reading habits based on an awareness of readerly complicity and responsibility.

Drawing insights from across political philosophy and literary theory, this book will be of interest to researchers of African literature, postcolonial studies, and peace and conflict studies.

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