anglophone literature - aidoo

7/27/2019 Anglophone Literature - Aidoo

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Course Objectives

Course Requirements

The course consists of a series of seminars discussing different issues about Anglophone/

African literature in general and Aidoo’s novel in particular. Students need to finish the readings

required for the course, and enrich classroom discussions by presentations and contributions.

Course Outline

Week 1: Introducing Anglophone Literature: Anglophone/Commonwealth/Postcolonial literature.Week 2: The socio-political context: Ama Ata Aidoo, Nationalism and the Colonial Legacy.

Week 3: Visions of “a Black-eyed Squint:” Our Sister Killjoy as a Transgressive Travel Narrative

Weeks 4 and 5: Part I:

- “Things Are Working out towards their Dazzling Conclusions…:” Sissie’s Early Moment

of Racial Recognition.

- Race issues: the self/other, black/white, Africa/Europe dichotomy in Our Sister Killjoy

Week 6: Part II: Subverting the German Colonial Narrative.

Week 7: Part II: Dissecting the Imperial Mind: Sissie’s and Marija’s Failed Encounter.

Week 8: Part II: Exploring the Colonial Landscape: Germany as a Contact Zone.

Week 9: Part III: Discovering the “Colonial Home:” The Ghanaian Community and the Reality

of Oppression.

Week 10: Part IV: Aidoo’s Critique of Neocolonialism: Uncovering the Politics of Exile. (The

figure of the ‘been-to’)

Week 11: Part IV: “A Love Letter:” The Inescapable Moment of Racial Recognition.

Further Reading:

Samantrai, Ranu. “Caught at the Confluence of History: Ama Ata Aidoo’s Necessary

Nationalism.” Research in African Literatures 26. 2 (Summer 1995): 140-157. Print.

Hoeller, Hildegard. “Ama Ata Aidoo’s ‘Heart of Darkness.’” Research in African Literatures, 35.

1 (Spring 2004): 130-147. Print.

Owusu, Kofi. “Canons under Siege: Blackness, Femaleness, and Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our

SisterKilljoy.” Callaloo 13. 2 (Spring 1990): 341-363. Print.

George, Rosemary Marangoly et al. “‘A New Tail to an Old Tale’: An Interview with Ama Ata

Aidoo.” N ovel: A Forum on Fiction 26. 3. African Literature Issue (Spring 1993): 297-308.

Print.

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Problems of Nomenclature

Anglophone or Commonwealth or Postcolonial Literature(s)

According to the most literal definition, Anglophone literature is simply literature

written in English; but the term is used in this context to refer to literature written in English

outside of Great Britain and America. It includes the literature of West and South Africa,

India, and the Caribbean. Commonwealth Literature is literature produced by countries thatwere part of the Commonwealth of Nations,1 Ghana being one of them.

• Post-Colonial Literature

Not all literature is post colonial and it is important to understand what the term refers

to. There are three possible meanings of the term post-colonial and all should be considered.

a) The term post-colonial refers to formerly colonised 3rd world peoples who have gained

some political – though not economic- independence from Empire.

b) It refers to white settler cultures, such as Australia, New Zealand and South Africa,

who have an ambivalent position in relation to imperial authority.c) Seen in linguistic and literary terms, post-colonialism is “a specific form of discursive

resistance to colonialist power set in train the moment that colonialist culture acts

upon the body and space of its Others.”2

The term may also be used to cover “all the culture affected by the imperial process

from the moment of colonisation to the present day. A further point is that these literatures

emerged ‘out of the experience of colonisation and asserted themselves by foregrounding the

tension with the imperial power,” thereby “emphasising their differences from the

assumptions of the imperial centre. It is this which makes them distinctly post-colonial.” 3

• Some Aspects of Post-Colonial Texts:

The Question of Language

Language is a pivotal focus for post-colonial writers as the very choice of language

becomes a political act. One task for the post-colonial writer has been to find an authentic

language to separate the experience of the colonised from the coloniser. Hence, the post-

colonial writer focuses on the problematic nature of language which becomes bound up with

identity and power relationships of colonial discourse and control. Bill Ashcroft establishes

the link between feminism and post-colonialism pointing out that both women and post-

colonial peoples speak from the margins of language but that language can be reformed by theuse of distinctive words, sounds, rhythms and images to create a particular voice and

language. The writer tries to create an alternative voice, a different kind of language. It is in

this reshaping and refashioning of the official/patriarchal language that the ‘silenced’ voice

can be heard.

1 The Commonwealth of Nations, formerly known as the British Commonwealth, is an intergovernment body of

fifty-four independent member states. All but two (Mozambique and Rwanda) of these countries were formerly

part of the British Empire, out of which it developed. They comprise one third of the world’s population and arein all six continents. There are 19 African states who are currently members of the Commonwealth of Nations.2

Stephen Slemon and Helen Tiffin, eds. After Europe: Critical Theory and Post-Colonial Writing (DangarooPress, 1989) xx.3 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial

Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989) 2.

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The Question of Viewpoint or Perspective

One of the aims of a post-colonial text, then, is somehow to present a changed

viewpoint, a suppressed voice, a perspective that has not been shown before. By emphasising

a gap in perspective between a black and a white viewpoint, a first person narrator can express

another side of the story, without being silenced.

A further aspect of this shift in perspective lies in the very structure of the narrative

itself. The monologue, realist text is seen as perpetuating the process of colonising the reader,

so many post-colonial texts have attempted dialogic, using a multi-faceted shifting narration

with many textual voices to avoid the kind of narrative imperialism of the realist mode.

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The Socio-Political Context

Ama Ata Aidoo, Nationalism4 and the Colonial Legacy

Ama Ata Aidoo is an internationally recognized and acclaimed literary and intellectual

figure. She has published many plays, novels, collections of short stories and poems since her

first play The Dilemma of a Ghost in 1965. Ama Ata Aidoo was born Christina Ama Aidoo

on March 23, 1942. She was the daughter of royalty, a princess among the Fanti people of the

town of Abeadzi Kyiakor in the south central region of Ghana. Aidoo’s homeland, at the time

of her birth, was under the oppression of a resurgent neocolonialism as a result of British

aggression during the late 19th century. In the home of her parents, Chief Nana Yaw Fama

and Maame Abba, anti-colonial sentiment was an unavoidable emotion in the wake of the

murder of Aidoo’s grandfather by neocolonialists. Yet in spite of the murderous tragedy,

Fama acknowledged the superiority of Western education and sent his daughter to attend the

Wesley Girls High School in the southern seaport town of Cape Coast, Ghana. She went on to

study at the University of Ghana, beginning in 1961. In 1964, she graduated with honors,

earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in English.

She was born in 1945, into the family of a chief in the Fanti town of Abeadzi Kyiakor,

in the central region of Ghana (then called by its colonial name “The Gold Coast”), and grew

up in the royal household. Her privileged origins are reflected in her education and career: she

attended the Wesley Girls High School in Cape Coast, and was at the University of Ghana in

Legon from 1961-1964. During this time Aidoo worked in the University’s school of drama

and writers’ workshop and produced her first two plays and a collection of short stories. She

has continued to write professionally, and also has pursued a career teaching, reading and

lecturing at universities in West and East Africa and the United States. At times she has also

held influential educational and political positions, such as Minister of Education in Ghanaunder Jerry Rawlings’ Government in the early 1980s.

Aidoo’s fictional works are to varying degrees explicitly critical of the colonial history

of Ghana, and of what she refers to as its “neo-colonial” past and present. Ghana was formally

colonized by Britain in the late nineteenth century and was exploited for its resources and

labour under this political colonial regime until Independence in 1957. The hope for liberation

under Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party, a vocal force in the struggle against the British

and for “self-government,” was short lived, however, as the majority of people suffered the

same poverty and repression as before, and the wealthy Ghanaian elite as a class threw in their

lot with the ruling classes of the departing powers, rather than with the people. The economicinstability and dependence of Ghana (under formal colonialism and after Ghana developed an

economy heavily reliant on one export, cocoa, and thus dependent on imports for most

consumer goods) caused the government to rely on foreign aid, increasingly from the US,

which inevitably came with stringent requirements for preferential terms of trade and

domestic austerity measures. In turn the poverty and dramatic social inequalities within

Ghana have been “managed” by a succession of repressive military regimes, the most

infamous in terms of brutality and corruption being in the 1970s, a period that saw the

incarceration of many intellectuals.

4Nationalism is an ideology based on the premise that the individual’s loyalty and devotion to the nation-state

surpass other individual or group interests.

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Like many of her contemporaries, Aidoo was greatly affected by the disillusionment

that followed independence, as it became apparent that the national liberation struggle had

failed to live up to that which had been expected of it. Since her first play was published in

1965, Aidoo has written one other play, two novels, a collection of short stories and two

collections of poetry as well as numerous essays on African literature and the status of women

in African society. As well as being a writer and a critic, she has also pursued a career ineducation, teaching and lecturing in various parts of Africa as well as the United States. She

has also been involved in Ghanaian politics and was in the early 1980s the Minister of

Education in Ghana under the Jerry Rawlings government.

In her works, Aidoo more frequently focuses on the cultural dynamics of

neocolonialism. Many of her works attack the continuing weight of colonial ideology in

devaluing things African. The women in No Sweetness Here, for example, have to battle with

“Western ideals of femininity” and the lure of largely inaccessible American consumer goods.

Our Sister Killjoy is concerned primarily with the alienation of the African educated class;

Sissy, the main character, has to resist the dominant ideological currents that devalue Africaand African people.

Aidoo is known as an important feminist writer. Her stories, novels and plays feature

strong female protagonists who encounter institutionalized and personal sexism on a day to

day level. In her non-fictional writings Aidoo also explicitly combats rigid and oppressive

social constructions of gender and their consequences for ordinary women.

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anglophone literature - aidoo

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