Rogers Asempasah

University of Cape Coast | UCC · Department of English

This article reads Abubakar Ibrahim's short story "The Book of Remembered Things" as an anti-jihadist narrative that meditates on the traumatic effects of violent jihadism on the postcolonial Muslim domestic space and a counternarrative to the dominant body of Western fictional responses to the 9/11 terror attacks. Situated at the intersection of S...

Strategic narratives have emerged as sites of theoretical reflection and objects of inquiry in war and security studies and in international relations and diplomacy, but their potential to offer a nuanced analysis of campaign songs has been conspicuously absent. Drawing on the theory of strategic narratives and employing a thematic analysis of the...

Drawing on Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogism of the word, especially double-voiced discourse, this paper examines Darko’s subtle inscription of Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth in her novel Beyond the Horizon (1995). Specifically, the paper examines "horror" and the novel’s title as double-voiced discourse or dialogi...

This paper discusses the ways in which Ama Ata Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) can help us rethink Ghana’s annual ‘Year of Return’ celebrations. Drawing on hooks’ notion of ‘homeplace’, Ahmed’s theorization of ‘strange encounter,’ and Sharpe’s rumination on Black being ‘in the wake’ or afterlife of slavery, this paper reflects on how Aidoo’s...

African literature has suffered a great deal of scathing criticism, especially from western critics and scholars, who believe that Black African writers and critics have repeatedly focused on trite themes and subject matters of colonial/postcolonial nature at the expense of the global environmental crises. This paper then, which is partly a respons...

The coronavirus pandemic has exposed Africa’s precarious position within the global system. Once again, Africa is looking to the West for salvation in the form of vaccines and loans. Beyond the economic crisis, however, perhaps the most telling impact of the pandemic is not death but the shame of being postcolonial — a shame that arises from the pa...

El-Saadawi’s God Dies by the Nile and Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus have been widely and independently explored from varied perspectives. Such liberated critique is however surprising since the two texts can be found to have ethical and political confluence – the motif of the death of God. Drawing on the notion of travelling theory, this paper argues t...

This essay reframes Opoku-Agyemang’s Cape Coast Castle: A Collection of Poems (1996) around coloniality of power and Derrida’s ethic of learning to live finally. Focusing on form or rhetorical structure, we argue that Opoku-Agyemang’s poems on Cape Coast Castle and the slave trade suggest that the possibility of grievability and giving voice to the...

This paper explores the link between exile and national redemption in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003). Although exile constitutes the dominant interpretive concept as it relates to the scandalous and the breaking of a vicious cycle of violence and hopelessness in both novels, the connection...

This essay explores the centrality of beginning in Okri’s The Famished Road. Beginning is explored not as a narratological category but a dominant trope in anticolonial nationalists’ discourses of nation formation and the transition to liberation. I argue that Okri’s exploration of beginning can be read in critical dialogue with Fanon and can be fr...

Framed by the emerging emphasis in postcolonialism on terror and narratives of terror, this paper argues that Waiting for Barbarians (1980; hereafter Barbarians) can be read as a counter-discourse of resistance to Dracula's (1898) representation of "war on terror" which revolves around the relationship between empire and its embattled subjects. To...