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In Conversation with Bessie Head shows how reading the novels and letters of Botswana's most influential writer, Bessie Head, fosters an ongoing conversation between reader and writer and is in fact a very personal undertaking. Each chapter tackles two parallel threads, the first regarding Mary S. Lederer's own history of reading Head-from her first purchase of Maru, through completing a Ph.D. on Head's trilogy, through living in Botswana and connecting with various aspects of Head's life, to examining how reading Head has affected her own development as a human being. This history then ties each chapter into discussion of how Head develops her own vision of the “brotherhood of man.” Alongside critically informed discussion, Head's vision is examined through the prism of specific questions. Why is madness not a useful concept for understanding Head's ideas? Why did Head say she was not a feminist, and what is the significance of “male” and “female” in her novels? What is the relationship between individual, race, and community? How can the nature of God be a clear expression of love but also an indistinct force for both good and evil? Head's novels present opportunities for personal growth, and through these “conversations” with her, we become different readers.
In this fast-paced, semi-autobiographical novel, Head exposes the complicated life of Elizabeth, whose reality is intermingled with nightmarish dreams and hallucinations. Like the author, Elizabeth was conceived out-of-wedlock; her mother was white and her father black—a union outlawed in apartheid South Africa. Elizabeth eventually leaves with her young son to live in Botswana, a country less oppressed by colonial domination, where she finds stability for herself and her son by working on an experimental farm. As readers grow to know Elizabeth, they experience the inner chaos that threatens her stability, and her constant struggle to emerge from the torment of her dreams. There she is plagued by two men, Sello and Dan, who represent complex notions of politics, sex, religion, individuality, and the blurred line between good and evil. Elizabeth’s troubling but amazing roller-coaster ride ends in an unfettered discovery.
Collected interviews with the Nobel Prize winner in which she describes herself as an African American writer and that show her to be an artist whose creativity is intimately linked with her African American experience
Read worldwide for her wisdom, authenticity, and skillful prose, South African–born Bessie Head (1937–1986) offers a moving and magical tale of an orphaned girl, Margaret Cadmore, who goes to teach in a remote village in Botswana where her own people are kept as slaves. Her presence polarizes a community that does not see her people as human, and condemns her to the lonely life of an outcast. In the love story and intrigue that follows, Head brilliantly combines a portrait of loneliness with a rich affirmation of the mystery and spirituality of life. The core of this otherworldly, rhapsodic work is a plot about racial injustice and prejudice with a lesson in how traditional intolerance may render whole sections of a society untouchable.
'Ugandan literature can boast of an international superstar in Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi' Economist An award-winning debut that vividly reimagines Uganda’s troubled history through the cursed bloodline of the Kintu clan In this epic tale of fate, fortune and legacy, Jennifer Makumbi vibrantly brings to life this corner of Africa and this colourful family as she reimagines the history of Uganda through the cursed bloodline of the Kintu clan. The year is 1750. Kintu Kidda sets out for the capital to pledge allegiance to the new leader of the Buganda kingdom. Along the way he unleashes a curse that will plague his family for generations. Blending oral tradition, myth, folktale and history, Makumbi weaves together the stories of Kintu’s descendants as they seek to break free from the burden of their past to produce a majestic tale of clan and country – a modern classic.
Social theory and social theorizing about Africa has largely ignored African literature. However, because writers are some of the continent’s finest social thinkers, they have produced – and continue to produce – works which constitute potential sources for the analysis of social thought, and for constructing social theory, in and beyond the continent. This comprehensive collection examines the relationship between African literature and African social thought. It explores the evolution and aesthetics of social thought in African fiction, and African writers’ conceptions of power and authority, legitimacy, history and modernity, gender and sexuality, culture, epistemology, globalization, and change and continuity in Africa. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies.
In Conversation with Bessie Head shows how reading the novels and letters of Botswana's most influential writer, Bessie Head, fosters an ongoing conversation between reader and writer and is in fact a very personal undertaking. Each chapter tackles two parallel threads, the first regarding Mary S. Lederer's own history of reading Head-from her first purchase of Maru, through completing a Ph.D. on Head's trilogy, through living in Botswana and connecting with various aspects of Head's life, to examining how reading Head has affected her own development as a human being. This history then ties each chapter into discussion of how Head develops her own vision of the “brotherhood of man.” Alongside critically informed discussion, Head's vision is examined through the prism of specific questions. Why is madness not a useful concept for understanding Head's ideas? Why did Head say she was not a feminist, and what is the significance of “male” and “female” in her novels? What is the relationship between individual, race, and community? How can the nature of God be a clear expression of love but also an indistinct force for both good and evil? Head's novels present opportunities for personal growth, and through these “conversations” with her, we become different readers.
Everything Is Sampled examines the shifting modes of production and circulation of African artistic forms since the 1980s, focusing on digital culture as the most currently decisive setting for these changes. Drawing on works of cinema, literature, music, and visual art, Akin Adesokan. addresses two main questions. First, given the various changes that the institutions producing African arts and letters have undergone in the past four decades, how have the representational impulses in these forms fared in comparison with those at work in pervasively digital cultures? Second, how might a long view of these artistic forms across media and in different settings affect our understanding of what counts as art, as text, as authorship? Immersed in digital culture, African artists today are acutely aware of the media-saturated circumstances in which they work and actively bridge them by making ethical choices to shape those circumstances. Through an innovative development and analysis of five modes of creative practice—curation, composition, adaptation, platform, and remix—Everything Is Sampled offers an absorbingly complex yet nuanced approach to appreciating the work of several generations of African writers, directors, and artists. No longer content to just fill a spot in the relay between the conception and distribution of a work, these artists are now also quick to view and reconfigure their works through different modes of creative practice.
Vol. 1- , spring 1970- , include "A Bibliography of American doctoral dissertations on African literature," compiled by Nancy J. Schmidt.