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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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