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CFP 2010: NP~JAL~CS: Lyrical Traditions
~Across Borders ~New Black and African
Writing
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2010 Journal of African Literature : ACROSS BORDERS ACROSS BORDERS
This edition of 2010 JAL is a further quest through an all-expansive African heritage in and beyond regional or national groupings. It is built upon the framework of Black cultural nationalism as a consistent element of African-centred modernity. Across Borders is consequently an attempt to commit the process of African integration in postcoloniality and postmodernity to the exploration of perspectives on black identities in contemporary writings beyond the borders of Africa and across the Atlantic. We are interested in theories and critical perspectives on creative works which reveal how the continued and currently celebrated influence of Western civilization on Africa occasions a discontinuity in forms of life throughout the continent and now demands remedial visions and counteractive propositions to the cycle of abuses and fragmentation of the continent. Literary researchers and theoretical exponents in their studies of new and existing literatures must be knowledgeable about how the African experience of modernity associated with a Western paradigm is fraught with corruption and tensions at various political, social, economic and psychological levels of African communal and individual existence, and its possible remediation through an imaginative articulation of the greater unity and higher prospects in the diversities, hybridity and fusions that are embedded in the external and subjective realities of the black world. We are therefore interested in truly original perspectives which pride in past achievements, can interpret the present, and also adumbrate the future in fidelity to African cultural endowments, rational vigour and sense of positive destiny. We will welcome insightful, original and critically informed expose on modern African novelists, poets, dramatists and critiques of African and Black literature through whom an African consciousness and awareness direct their creative investigation of Black humanity in the tradition of restoration and repair to the consequences of colonialism, westernisation, corruption and intellectual degeneration of Africa and her peoples.
Selected Reading: Irele, Abiola. The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora. NY: Oxford UP. 2001. M�Baye, Babacar. �Colonisation and African Modernity in Cheikh Hamidou Kane's Ambiguous Adventure.� Journal of African Literature and Culture. JALC (ALJ) 2006. Ce, Chin. � �Happily After�: Revisioning African writing.� Bards and Tyrants: Essays in Contemporary African Writing. AI: Handel Books, 2008.
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2010 Journal of New Poetry : LYRICAL TRADITIONS LYRICAL TRADITIONS
The 2010 concentration on Lyrical Traditions in Poetry is a continuation of past year aspects of the study of poetry and music but one in which all the elements of lyrical composition are channelled in a didactic and aesthetic movement to artistic competence, literary entertainment and the purposeful elevation of intellect for greater communal benefits. This lyrical tradition of African Verse draws from oral as well as western educational sources and constitutes, in fact, the totality of African experience in elevated linguistic utterance, poetry or musical renditions. It has strong musical and performance overtones, centres heavily on public, as against private, domains of artistic communication and invokes the ancient psychic and psychological spiritual processes of African art. In addition to literary and cultural influences, and the mutual interactions of poetry, song and performance, critics should examine the sense of loss or achievement that catalyzes contemporary poetic expressions from Africa. Further, the psychological conception of art and neurosis may be further exemplified in the dirge and oratorical praise traditions of modern African poetry. Situating the creative art as a by-product of depression, occasioned by the interrogation of the ties and purpose of existence with which we question the stability of meaning, and celebrate either loftiness or banality of expression is a welcome tangent that is expected to call into question how much of contemporary rage, or sublimation, is etched upon the craft of the present generation of African artists. For this year therefore, we expect a more critical scholarship as against merely descriptive or tabulated observations on some linguistic or thematic codes. As scholars of tradition argue, the creative genius in African literary tradition is greatly indebted to his immediate environment or larger society. Here the artiste�s participation in the African environment and history should be the signpost of many critical oeuvres for this edition. Finally, contributions that strive to assess the artiste's ability to effect some variations on this body of existing traditional sources at his disposal and credit the African society that provides the linguistic and literary traditions in terms of a common language or dialect and the range of imagery available to the artists and their craft will be accorded positive consideration.
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2010
NEW BLACK AND AFRICAN WRITING
Vol.2:
Contemporary perspectives on writings
from Africa and African Diaspora are tributaries of the frontier spirit of
Black Renaissance informing past, present and continuing perspectives on
black and African traditions in literature. King and Ogungbesan not only
affirm this tradition in A Celebration of black and African Writing which
provides a fillip to the cultural fellowship and sense of oneness within
black world literatures but also note how the �phenomenal flowering of
black writing� in the fifties and sixties of African political self
determination saw writers turning from �the older problems of colonialism
towards the new issues resulting from political independence.�
This trend has continued in new writings of late twenty-first century and
early millennium which tend to hybridized individualities and their
concern with the internal contradictions of modern African nationalities
and black world experience. Thus something had happened from the twilight
of the century through the dawn of the millennium. There had emerged a new
tenor in African and black writing led by an avant garde of younger
energies envisioning and rewriting postcolonial power relations in their
various national and cultural environments. In addition, conflicts of
citizenship, gender relations and oppressive strictures of the minority
within a racially structured majority have trailed the new discourse. This
emerging body of writings is grounded on historical understanding of the
cultural and social need for black emancipation but introrsely directed to
the reconnaissance of past with present and fluid future prospects. This ,
in a capsule, is the phenomenon of growing postmodernist traditions in
which the challenges of globalization and international cooperation give
new meanings and relations to universalism, ethnicity, terrorism and the
question of power as it affects our planet. All these are corroborated by
the relevant historical forces which lie at the heart of the emerging
literary dialogues from Africa and the Black world which is the objective
of this supplement. It is thereby apparent that this critical omnibus of
new writings is not just intended to encapsulate the proud zest of Pan
African idealism and racial concern for legacies that seem lost in
postmodernist concerns with differences and revisions, but its anchorage
on continental heritage in the inclusivist tradition of its forbears is at
the core of its artistic relevance.
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