Okwudiri Anasiudu

University of Port Harcourt · Department of English Studies

Afropolitanism has become a very contentious keyword in the lexicon of current African cultural and literary studies. This is evident in several essays written on it which emerged in the 21st century. Two streams of Afropolitanism serve as take-off points for the debate and essays on the concept. The first is the perspective on the New African dias...

This paper explores the representation of tragedy in Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman and J. P. Clark's Song of a Goat within the framework of African ethnophilosophy. The paper argues that tragedy is a universal concept but varies in meaning across different indigenous cosmologies. The study identifies a research gap in the lack of con...

This article examines Ryan Coogler's film Black Panther (2018) and the critical conversations it raises, which are problematized by its perceived failure to accurately represent Black diasporic experiences, the racist vitriol against it and its concern with commercial success. The present article deepens and advances this conversation by focusing o...

The stark condition of the Niger Delta region is a factual reality, and Helon Habila's Oil on Water has been read by several critics as a plausible reflection of this reality, glossing over the novel's fictive nature and the aesthetic choices of its configuration. This paper argues that what is perceived as plausibility in the representation of rea...

This paper examines selected African novels on the new African diaspora. It sheds light on the Afropolitan identity and the rhetoric on Afro-diasporic Otherness in a cultural contact situation as an underlying thematic thrust in the novels. It adopts a qualitative research method, using content analysis as its research design. These novels are sele...

Within the vast landscape of Nigerian literature, evolving into three principal literary genres, the critical study of poetry has been somewhat neglected, especially when contrasted with the substantial analysis devoted to drama and novels. This is partially attributed to the language used in poetry, its nature which is steep in semantic indirectio...

The oral literature in Africa has not been taken seriously. The implication in that assertion is a fear of its death as many scholars in Africa have given it less attention. To address the gap and deepen the conversation, this study explored Nkem Okoh's Preface to Oral Literature shedding light on its perspective on the ongoing discussions about or...

Conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) and cultural linguistics (CL), which form the chief theoretical anchor for this study, express the role of language, culture and cognition in the construal and expression of human experiences. The approaches posit that the metaphorical use of language by an individual or group is shaped by their ideological orientat...

This study uncovers how language is deployed in the service of a writer's reconstruction and configuration of Otherness through a detailed close-reading of Bessie Head's Maru. This is because of the paucity of scholarship on the ways language is deployed in the fabrication of Otherness in Head's Maru.The position of this study is that language is i...

This paper explores Odia Ofeimun's two poetry collections: A Feast of Return and Under African Skies. The aim is to underscore Ofeimun's deployment of the folkloric tradition, invo-cative poetry and mytho-historicity as aesthetic designs in the re-invention of modern Africa. The objective is to demonstrate how the foregoing aesthetic designs foregr...

Article information The representation of the struggles of contemporary African women from low-income/middle-class families, and their attempt at breaking free from the hold of such struggles have not gained much attention in the criticism of recent African novels. To bridge this research gap, this study interrogates Helon Habila's Travellers; NoVi...

Literature reproduces social realities. These realities are furnished through ideas and form in the service of a society and every of its moments and events in history. Drawing from the foregoing proposition, this study explores the connection between literature, idea, and the feminist consciousness in Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Pap...

This paper explores Nnimmo Bassey’s poetry collection: We Thought it Was Oil but It Was Blood. It interrogates the aesthetic imagination and language use in the construction of the poem as a text, and the social meaning wrapped in such imagination and language use. This paper draws insight from postcolonial ecocriticism and critical functional ling...

Working within Selasi and Mbembe’s tenets of Afropolitanism and Guatarri and Deleuze (1987) concept of a rhizome, this paper interrogates and contextualizes the Afropolitan identity as a rhizome. The aim is to deepen the conversation and debate on Afropolitanism as a new way of mapping the African cultural identity in synch with the world while off...

With insight from culture contact theory and a qualitative content-based descriptive and analytical approach, this paper explores seven selected novels on African diaspora. The aim is to account for the representation of culture intersection in a culture contact situation between the African culture and foreign cultures. This study situates such cu...

Ikenna Kamalu’s book Stylistics: Theory and Practice is a contemporary handbook on modern stylistics. It demonstrates how practitioners of stylistics can effectively identify language patterns and peculiarities of discourse within a given linguistic framework. It opens with a discussion on the subject of language, representation and ideation in dis...

Literature is one of the arenas of discourse where the meaning potential of language can be explored. Interestingly, literary language is more figurative than denotative. One of the functions of language in literary discourse is to represent reality. The reality literature represents varies, depending on the historical time and social events a writ...

This paper interrogates culture, diaspora, and Afropolitanism within the concept of globalisation. While these concepts are not recent, the aim of this study is to offer fresh insight to the debate on the foregoing and a new way of making sense of these concepts, particularly the intersection of cultures, in the wake of contemporary globalisation....

The mobility trope is a key aesthetic feature in Afropolitan fiction and it crystalizes as the act of travelling which has become an important subject-matter in postnationalist African fictions by women such as Chimamanda Adichie, Noviolet Bulawayo or Chika Unigwe as a way of intervention on the debate of the Afropolitan female quest for existentia...

The ubiquity of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is evident in the volume of criticisms about him. An enterprising domain of scholarship which this novel can yield meaningfulness among other intellectual dimensional perspectives by critics, is the implication of its translation into more than fifty world languages which has secured its global acce...

At the heart of the novel are speech patterns or voices which play out in its plot sequence. These manifest in terms of perspectives-views, or modes-which are sometimes at variance or conflicting. The relationship between these perspectives or voices is frequently challenged as prevailing voices assume newer outlook or form. This has been explained...

This essay examined the concept of tragedy through the views of classical Greek writers, Elizabethan writers, Nigerian contemporary writers, and other renowned contemporary writers. The examination adopted a comparative and historicist approach. William Shakespeare's definition of tragedy, which is rooted in the Aristotelean concept of tragedy, pro...

The national narrative captures the struggles and the experiences of ethnic nationalities in specific historical moments. This paper attempts to explore Adichie"s Half of A Yellow Sun as a narrative that reveals the agonies and traumatic experiences of the Igbo ethnic nation in Nigeria. The choice of Adichie"s Half of A Yellow Sun is that it is a n...

Tanure Ojaide's poetic vision, which draws substantially from eco-aesthetics and the cultural resource of the Niger Delta such as the Udje oral/traditional poetry of the Urhobo, can be effectively interpreted through signs. These signs have intricate signifying patterns with varied communicative functions which are complex and inversed. The term co...

Words or signs as linguistic materials mobilised by writers for the construal of human experiences or worldviews are not innocent. By not being innocent, we mean that they are not devoid of external meaning. The Saussurean model from which other models of contemporary linguistic analysis of signs and structures emanate from, attests to this asserti...

The Aristotelean classical tradition of literature has underscored the importance of language in achieving the formal properties of poetry as evident in the Poetics in terms of object, matter and manner. However, it fails to account for the interrelationship between form and social meaning. Contemporary scholarship within the systemic functional mo...