Understanding the World through the Memoir

Beschreibung

This paper examines narrative ways of moving into the world and making worlds move into the local through the memoirs by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (2010) Dreams in a Time of War and Binyavanga Wainaina (2011) One Day I Will Write About This Place. I read these two texts as coming-of-age stories that seek to understand and explain Kenya through linking individual biography, collective experience and national history. They focalise the Kenyan experience from different standpoints: one reflects social and political networks from a position of material scarcity in a rural Gikuyu community during the anti-colonial war, while the other represents the perspective of a new African middle-class in independent Kenya facing the increasingly authoritarian rule of the Daniel arap Moi-regime.
As I will argue, both texts engage into questions of connectedness, control and exclusion through the topos of news. How does news come into the community and how does it shape the way the narrated self looks onto the world? In Dreams in a Time of War it is through his portrayal of a student and his particular way of merging and sharing information from all sources available that Ngũgĩ creates a de-hierarchized model for linking the local, national and the global. In Wainaina’s text news does not need to be literally picked up from shreds of newspapers used to wrap up foods; it flows in with a new consumer culture which becomes decisive for situating the self in the world.

Zeitraum	14 Juni 2017 → 17 Juni 2017
Ereignistitel	ALA 2017: Annual Conference of the African Literature Association: Africa and the World: Literature, Politics, and Global Geographies
Veranstaltungstyp	Konferenz
Ort	New Haven, USA / Vereinigte Staaten, ConnecticutAuf Karte anzeigen