Suchergebnisse

Francis Moto is a Malawian writer who has published poetry both in vernacular (Chichewa) and in English. His poetry in English appears in a collection titled Gazing at the Setting Sun published in 1994, the year Malawians voted Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda and his Malawi Congress Party (MCP) out of power. Besides recording the suffering of Malawians during the autocratic leadership of the first post-independence president, Dr Banda, and remembering the author's childhood experiences, the poetry also celebrates Malawi's political transformation from one party rule to multiparty democracy in the early 1990s. In the poems, Moto also looks to the future with a sense of hope for a better society where human rights and the rule of law will be respected. This article analyses Moto's poems with the aim of celebrating his successes as a poet. This is done by focusing on his more successful poems in terms of style. It is argued in this article that the success of some of Moto's poems in Gazing at the Setting Sun depends on his allusions to and evocations of dictatorship and political change in Malawi. These evocations and allusions depend on his imagery and choice of words and expressions. In the analysis of the poems, close reading with a particular focus on style is done. The discussion is in two parts. The first part discusses Moto's poems that allude to the dictatorial reign of Dr Banda in Malawi and the second part provides a discussion of Moto's imagery in relation to his evocation of political change.

James David Rubadiri (1930-2018), poet, playwright, novelist, academic, diplomat, and political activist, is no stranger to many literary scholars in Africa and beyond. His popularity is not a result of his thespian skills—he acted Othello once—or skills in fiction writing (although he did try his hand at novel writing, producing No Bride Price), but mainly a result of his teaching and his skills in poetry. Although he is famous as a poet, his poetic harvest is rather minimal—his only collection, An African Thunderstorm and Other Poems, boasts only twenty-three poems. What the poems lack in numbers, they more than compensate for in the energy and beauty that they radiate, beauty that has seen most of them translated and anthologised around the world over the years. It is also this energy, the beauty of composition, and their tackling of relevant themes, which have made his poems the staple of many poetry classes in Africa and beyond. In this paper I analyse Rubadiri's poems that appear in the collection An African Thunderstorm and Other Poems. I argue that the success of Rubadiri's poetry is primarily based on his evocation of the dramatic, which is in turn reliant on his economic use of language, his descriptive skills, and his use of vivid and evocative images. These aspects do not only render the poetry enduring and memorable, but they also make the poems and the action in them spring to life, cementing the legacy of the poet as one of the accomplished poets of his generation in Africa. The discussion in this paper is divided into three parts. The first part examines how Rubadiri infuses a sense of the dramatic in poems that address issues of colonisation and blackness, the second part discusses how the poet evokes drama in poems about neocolonialism and postcolonial disenchantment, and the final section shows how Rubadiri's use of imagery and diction in poems about African life and the environment give the poems a vividness, sense of immediacy and a dramatic quality.Keywords: Rubadiri, Malawian poetry, style, language, evocative imagery, Africa,colonialism

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Introduction -- PART I Post-Identity Politics -- Chapter One Interview with Cassils -- Chapter Two From SF -- Chapter Three From Nomadic Theory (2011) -- Chapter Four From Towards a New Class of Being -- Chapter Five A Feminist Genealogy of Posthuman Aesthetics in the Visual Arts (2016) -- Chapter Six Animality and Blackness (2020) -- Chapter Seven Asserting Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace -- Chapter Eight From Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America (2017) -- Chapter Nine Witnessing Animals -- Chapter Ten Video Dog Star -- Chapter Eleven Interview with Garry Marvin -- Chapter Twelve From Plant Thinking -- Chapter Thirteen A Program for Plants (2016) -- Chapter Fourteen No Manifesto (1965, 2008) -- PART II Material Dimensions -- Chapter Fifteen Interview with Nandipha Mntambo -- Chapter Sixteen Locating Me in Order to See You (2007) -- Chapter Seventeen From The Rendered Material of Film Stock (2009) -- Chapter Eighteen Interview with Heide Hatry -- Chapter Nineteen On Some Limits of Materiality in Art History (2008) -- Chapter Twenty Elephants in the Room -- Chapter Twenty-One From Second Skins -- Chapter Twenty-Two Hunting and Gathering as Ways of Perceiving the Environment (2012) -- Chapter Twenty-Three Super-natural Futures -- Chapter Twenty-Four Rhythms of Relation -- Chapter Twenty-Five Proliferation, Extinction, and an Anthropocene Aesthetic (2017) -- Chapter Twenty-Six Interview with Graham Harman -- Chapter Twenty-Seven From Dark Ecology (2016) -- Chapter Twenty-Eight From What Is the Measure of Nothingness? -- PART III Registering Interconnectedness -- Chapter Twenty-Nine Interview with Kathy High -- Chapter Thirty From Writing Machines (2002) -- Chapter Thirty-One From Unexpress the Expressible (2012) -- Chapter Thirty-Two Introduction to Nocturnal Fabulations -- Chapter Thirty-Three Posthuman Performance (2010) -- Chapter Thirty-Four Critical Relationality -- Chapter Thirty-Five Ecosex ManiFesto (2011) -- Chapter Thirty-Six Interview with Jane Bennett -- Chapter Thirty-Seven Interview with Pauline Oliveros -- Chapter Thirty-Eight Animals, Nostalgia and Zimbawe's Rural Landscape in the Poetry of Chenjerai Hove and Musaemura Zimunya (2016) -- Chapter Thirty-Nine Waiting for Gaia -- Chapter Forty Interview with Newton Harrison -- Chapter Forty-One Seeds = Future (2013) -- PART IV Emerging Ecologies -- Chapter Forty-Two Interview with Katherine McKittrick: (2021) -- Chapter Forty-Three Interview with Doo-Sung-Yoo -- Chapter Forty-Four Interview with Kelly Jazvac -- Chapter Forty-Five A Questionnaire on Materialisms -- Chapter Forty-Six Art as Remembrance and Trace in Post-Conflict Latin America (2016) -- Chapter Forty-Seven Interview With Manuela Rossini -- Chapter Forty-Eight African Afro-futurism -- Chapter Forty-Nine Whose Anthropocene? A Response (2016) -- Chapter Fifty Unruly Edges -- Chapter Fifty-One The Rise of Cheap Nature (2016) -- Chapter Fifty-Two From Forensic Architecture -- Chapter Fifty-Three Letters to Dear Climate (2017) -- Coda -- LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS -- INDEX