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

Colonial-era Africa

[damned_colonial]

Theme: Colonial-era Africa
Prepared to run it: not my period/area, but don't mind doing it
Suggested books:

Joseph Conrad, "Heart of Darkness"
C. S. Forester, "The African Queen"

Re: Colonial-era Africa

[cofax7]

Okay, for this I think we really need some African writers. I've been getting a little antsy looking at what we're talking about here, and thinking we need some stuff from a subaltern position (that's what it's called, yes?). Also, I think veejane should be prodded to suggest some things.

Re: Colonial-era Africa

[damned_colonial]

Absolutely. I went digging around a bit but it's not my area so much. These look promising, though:

http://www.amazon.com/Chaka-African-Writers-Thomas-Mofolo/dp/0435902296
A fictionalised account of Chaka Zulu, pub. 1925.

http://www.amazon.com/Things-Fall-Apart-Chinua-Achebe/dp/0385474547
"One of Chinua Achebe's many achievements in his acclaimed first novel, Things Fall Apart, is his relentlessly unsentimental rendering of Nigerian tribal life before and after the coming of colonialism. First published in 1958, just two years before Nigeria declared independence from Great Britain, the book eschews the obvious temptation of depicting pre-colonial life as a kind of Eden. Instead, Achebe sketches a world in which violence, war, and suffering exist, but are balanced by a strong sense of tradition, ritual, and social coherence."

Some lists of African books:

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/africa/cuvl/Afbks.html
http://library.jccc.net/guides/literature/africannovel.html

I don't know veejane, but it doesn't look like she's on DW, or at least not under that name.

Re: Colonial-era Africa

[cofax7]

Vee was on that panel you attended. *g*

And yes, Achebe is worth reading--Things Fall Apart was, IIRC, written as an explicit response to Conrad.

Re: Colonial-era Africa

[damned_colonial]

Ah, excellent! Putting the pieces together, yay. Would you like to invite her over?

Re: Colonial-era Africa

[vehemently]

*waves*

Re: Colonial-era Africa

[vehemently]

Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe.
Weep Not, Child, Ngugi wa Thiong'o (James Ngugi).

I'd advocate for at least one Wole Soyinka play, maybe "Death and the King's Horseman."

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.