African Languages, Literatures, and Postcolonial Modernity

Download or read book African Languages, Literatures, and Postcolonial Modernity written by Samba Camara and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2024-01-26 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a fresh look into the “languages of postcolonial modernity” in Africa and, to a lesser degree, its diaspora. It foregrounds the notion of postcolonial modernity in reference to modernization as experienced in the postcolony and its contemporary legacies, and investigates how African languages and literatures, both as means of communication and as instruments of cultural agency, have embodied and mediated modernity. Each chapter grapples with the literary or linguistic dimensions of postcolonial modernity as portrayed in African novels, film, poetry or popular music or as embodied in African and Afro-diasporic languages and dialects. The chapters also reveal how literature and language, respectively, document and embody discourses, phenomena, histories, ideologies, and beliefs that resulted from the legacies of colonialism.