Mod post: theme suggestions

[damned_colonial]

Please suggest themes you'd like to see covered here! Cut and paste the following into a comment:

ETA: please put your theme in the subject of your comment!

Theme:
Are you prepared to run it? Yes/No
Suggested books, if you have them already:


What does it mean to run the theme?

1. At least one month in advance, you'll let everyone know about the theme and your suggested reading for it. You need to suggest at least 3 works of fiction.
2. On the first of the month, you will post a welcome/introduction/kickoff for the theme.
3. Throughout the month, you'll take an active part in discussion of the theme.

You do not have to be an expert on the theme to run it. You just need to have an interest in it.

Comments

Re: Colonial-era Africa

[al_zorra]

Kipling's "Just So Stories."

Sir Henry Rider Haggard wrote many fictions located in colonial Africa, including SHE (which might even go in the Egypt column, along with The Egyptian and oh so many others, but particularly King Solomon's Mines. Additionally both of these have movies -- like the Tarzan books.

There's quite a bit of colonial era adventure fiction from that era.

Not to mention Olive Schreiber and Isak Dinesen, plus quite a few post-colonial writers have set detective series in colonial Africa, particularly Kenya.

There is so much fiction about Africa!

Love, C

Re: Colonial-era Africa

[damned_colonial]

Got recs for the detective series?

Re: Colonial-era Africa

[badgerbag]

judge dee or ti! (Celebrated Cases is the translated one and the rest are fiction by a westerner)

and judge bao.
Judge Bao has made it all the way into Marvel comics!

Re: Colonial-era Africa

[vehemently]

I'm not sure any of the Just-so Stories qualify as historical. The ones that purport to take place in Africa (and I can only think of two or three in the whole book) are distinctly ahistorical, being mythical tales of how natural phenomena came to be.

Kim might be an interesting work of Kipling's to discuss, in a unit on the British in India, although strictly speaking it is not historical. (I mean, it's old, but he wasn't writing an historical novel when he wrote it.)

Re: Colonial-era Africa

[al_zorra]

I see what you mean about Just So Stories.

What about Maryse Condé's Segu</> and Children of Segu? (Mali and other parts of West Africa.

The Healers - AyiKwei Armah (Ghana and the Asant Empire mid 1800's)

The African - Harold Courlander (the novel Alex Haley plagerized for parts of Roots

The Dahomeyan - Frank Yerby (who also plagerized for this novel parts of Courlander's African.

Whitethorn - Bryce Courtenay (Boer War)

There are so many set in Southern Africa in particular; for instance Zulu Dawn and Zulu - Cy Endfield, the first is both a novel and a movie.

Love, C.