Oral Literary Performance in Africa

This book delivers an admirably comprehensive and rigorous analysis of African oral literatures and performance. Gathering insights from distinguished scholars in the field, the book provides a range of contemporary interdisciplinary perspectives in the study of oral literature and its transformations in everyday life, fiction, poetry, popular culture, and postcolonial politics. Topics discussed include folklore and folklife; oral performance and masculinities; intermediated orality, modern transformations, and globalisation; orality and mass media; spoken word and imaginative writing. The book also addresses research methodologies and the thematic and theoretical trajectories of scholars of African oral literatures, looking back to the trailblazing legacies of Ruth Finnegan, Harold Scheub, and Isidore Okpewho. Ambitious in scope and incisive in its analysis, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of African literatures and oral performance as well as to general readers interested in the dynamics of cultural production.

Nduka Otiono is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Supervisor at the Institute of African Studies, Carleton University. He is the author and co-editor of several books of creative writing and academic research including Polyvocal Bob Dylan: Music, Performance, Literature (2019) and Wreaths for a Wayfarer (2020). Chiji Ak-ma is Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Literatures with joint appointments in the Department of English and the Department of Global Interdisciplinary Studies at Villanova University. He is the author Folklore in New World Black Fiction: Writing and the Oral Traditional Aesthetics (2007).

Introduction: A Heritage of African Oral Literary Performance Studies Part I: Recapturing Tradition: The Oral Performance in Transition 1. Elfrieda Binga's "Berseba": Constructing History and Identity in a Rural Namibian Village 2. "The Crocodile's Wife": Content and Communication Strategy in A Tale of Transformations 3. 'The aged, the infirm and the effeminate': Rhetorical Strategies in Election Rally Songs from Nigeria and Lesotho 4. Orality, Masculinities and Narrative Strategies in The Arabian Nights Part II: The Word Made Flesh: Intermediated Orality and Modern Transformations 5. Translation of African Oral Narrative-performances to the Written Word 6. Asiyefunzwa na Wazazi na Mzuka: Swahili Supernatural Homiletics in an Age of Promiscuity 7. History, Mofolo's Chaka, and the Postcolonial "Bastard" 8. Globalisation of Sango: Soyinka's Mythic Adaptation of Oedipus at Colonus Part III: Orality at Crossroads: Folklife, Modernity, and Globalisation 9. African Verbal Arts Online: Intermediality and "Technauriture" 10. Writer-Reader Interaction in Newspaper Serial Writing in Tanzania: The Transformation of an Oral Storytelling Mode 11. The Manipulation of Verbal Folklore Genres in Mass Media Communication 12. Go Fetisa Lekoalo/Beyond Literature: Orality, Poetry and Music in Post-apartheid Spoken Word Poetry Part IV: The Scholar as Artist: Isidore Okpewho and African Oral Performance Studies 13. Isidore Okpewho - An Intellectual Portrait 14. In Praise of Counter-Hegemony: Isidore Okpewho and the Alternative Discourse in African (Oral) Literature 15. Isidore Okpewho: Scholarship, Imaginative Writing, and the Assertion of the African Sensibility 16. Choosing Two Sides Equally: An Interview with Isidore Okpewho