The African Imagination - F. Abiola Irele - Oxford.
FRANCIS ABIOLA IRELE. 192 likes. Francis Abiola Irele is a Nigerian literary and cultural critic whose work is impressive in its engagement with the zone that straddles relationships between ideas.
The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora eBook: F. Abiola Irele: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store.
The African Imagination brings together a collection of Abiola Irele's essays that have appeared in various journals and books in the period from 1981 to 1995. The essays in this book thus present us with a fine selection of the author's critical and theoretical reflections since 1981, when his earlier book, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology, was first published by Heinemann.
The essay’s main argument is that tragedy, as a literary form, and the tragic, as a philosophical concept, are fundamental to Wynter’s project of creating forms of counterpoieses. Engaging Wynter’s interlocution with tragedy is crucial for comprehending how she is able to transform loss into a condition of possibility, primarily for the writing of what she calls “traumatic time.”.
What Abiola Irele’s statement implies is that even when you are writing about your own theories of performance as an African scholar, it is the Western academy that evaluates and validates the usefulness, efficiency and accuracy of your theories using its own Western parameters, languages, methodologies and critical yardsticks all of which are culturally situated and determined.
This essay examines the idea of an African literary canon through the creative works of. or what Abiola Irele describes as “the African imagination.” To Chinweizu, Madubuike, and Jemie, modern African literature has to be. made that definition of a people’s literature limited and outmoded in a postcolonial.
F. Abiola Irele This collection of essays by one of Africa's leading scholars examines African literary traditions in the broad sense, and places the work of individual authors in context. Here F. Abiola Irele presents probing critical readings of the works of Chinua Achebe, Kamau Brathwaite, Amadou Hapae Ba, and Amadou Kourouma, among others.