Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams

Download or read book Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams written by Ngugi wa Thiong'o and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 1998-04-02 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams explores the relationship between art and political power in society, taking as its starting point the experience of writers in contemporary Africa, where they are often seen as the enemy of the postcolonial state. This study, in turn, raises the wider issues of the relationship between the state of art and the art of the state, particularly in their struggle for the control of performance space in territorial, temporal, social, and even psychic contexts. Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, calls for the alliance of art and people power, freedom and dignity against the encroachments of modern states. Art, he argues, needs to be active, engaged, insistent on being what it has always been, the embodiment of dreams for a truly human world.