Simon Gikandi
Biographic Data
| ID | 3585758 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Simon Gikandi |
| GIVEN NAMES | Simon |
| FAMILY NAME | Gikandi |
| SIGNATURE | GIKANDI S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Princeton University |
| ORCID | 0009-0003-3722-3152 |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 50 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 158 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Dissolving Master Narratives: Decolonial Reconstellations, Volume Two
Dynamics of Deep Time and Deep Place: Decolonial Reconstellations, Volume One
The Press at Work: Five Snapshots
To understand the place and role of Gakaara Wanjaũ in the development of a print culture in Central Kenya, it is useful to start with a contrast between the story of the small press that he set up in the provincial town of Karatina in 1971 and the familiar, sometimes apocryphal stories of how the printing press arrived in Africa and the aura that surrounded it. In general, the arrival of the missionary printing press in Africa was seen as the tri…
Of Global Anglophone: A Response
This commentary identifies and discusses the three issues that have driven the turn to the term Global Anglophone in literary studies: the demand by institutions for tags that signal diversity of bodies and forms of knowledge; the desire for a new descriptive term for English literatures outside Britain and North America; and the need to rethink the long history of the discipline within the cultures of the British empire. The commentary focuses o…
A Questionnaire on Diaspora and the Modern
The twentieth century was deeply grooved with the trodden pathways of mass migrations. These journeys were propelled by violence and historical cataclysm: pogroms and genocides; natural and unnatural famines and disasters; land dispossession, regimes of apartheid and forced labor; revolution, war, and occupation; colonization and decolonization; and the realignments that followed in their wake. The pioneering sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois may have…
Picasso and Africa, Again
Suzanne Preston Blier. Picasso’s Demoiselles: The Untold Origins of a Modern Masterpiece. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. 448 pp.; 353 ills. $114.95Pablo Picasso, one of the major European
Writing in Limbo
and I owe thanks to Micere Mugo for introducing me to Lamming and Brathwaite and to
Ngugi: Reflections on his Life of Writing
Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature
and I owe thanks to Micere Mugo for introducing me to Lamming and Brathwaite and to
Nelson Mandela: The Absent Cause
Throughout the last half of 2013, it is clear to everyone that his end is near and that the deathwatch has began. Nelson Mandela's long and glorious life is coming to a close. Although he has been
Rethinking the Archive of Enslavement
Rethinking the Archive of Enslavement Simon Gikandi (bio) For several years now, literary scholars, especially those who work in early literary periods, have been asking questions about the authority of the documents on which their work is based and the relationship between old texts and contemporary theories: How are we to read evidence in the archive outside our own (presentist) set of interests and desires? On what authority are we to recover …
Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference
Response: Rethinking the Public/Private
Obama as Text: The Crisis of Double-Consciousness
The argument of this essay is that given the unique circumstances of his life, including his location in multiple spaces of cultural identity, Obama is an indeterminate signifier. To textualize Obama, we must account for how the narrative of his life is structured by need and demand as he tries to comprehend his own location and dislocation in American culture and to give meaning to the gap between the idea of what he is and what others assume hi…
Coda: Three Fragments
This chapter describes three events. The first is Republican representative from New York James Tallmadge Jr.'s proposed amendment to the to the bill seeking to grant statehood to Missouri. On February 13, 1819, he proposed that “the further introduction of slavery or involuntary servitude be prohibited” in Missouri as a condition for its entry into the union and that “all children of slaves, born within the said state, after admission thereof in…
The Ontology of Play: Mimicry and the Counterculture of Taste
This chapter argues that whether they were produced in defiance or imitation of the culture of taste, the works of art imagined and implemented by slaves, from buildings to dances and festivals, enabled the enslaved to redefine their relation to time and space, to reconstitute their own bodies and social relationships outside the shadow of their masters, and thus to display bodies that were not mere chattel. The animatedness of the slave in festi…
Intersections: Taste, Slavery, and the Modern Self
This chapter moves beyond the critical debates raised in Chapter 1 to provide a more concrete narrative of the coexistence of taste and slavery as aesthetic objects and products of everyday life in the modern world. It explores the link between slavery, consumption, and the culture of taste, all-important conduits for understanding modern identity. With a particular emphasis on changing theories of taste in eighteenth-century Britain, it provides…
“Popping Sorrow”: Loss and the Transformation of Servitude
This chapter argues that the condition of possibility of being black in the new world could not be realized until slavery, a sorrowful state of shame and negation, was transformed into a narrative of identity. It is probably this transformation that W. E. B. Du Bois had in mind when, in the concluding chapter of the Souls of Black Folk , he described Negro spirituals—the sorrow songs—as the medium of what was tantamount to a black logos. Through …
Unspeakable Events: Slavery and White Self-Fashioning
This chapter presents two instances of how slave money shaped the moment of taste in both pragmatic and conceptual terms. It provides a substantive exploration of the cultural traffic between Britain and its colonial outposts in order to show how the experience of slavery was turned into an aesthetic object that was woven into the fabric of everyday life. It then seeks to connect slave money and the power and prestige of art by focusing on the ae…
Overture: Sensibility in the Age of Slavery
This chapter reflects on the character and shape of sensibility in the age of slavery. It explores how ideas and ideals about taste and beauty demanded powerful counterpoints built around notions of black difference. Focusing on British debates on the question of taste and the role of culture in the shaping of modern identity and the reality of enslavement and its objects, the chapter considers how some of the most important ideas of bourgeois cu…
Close Encounters: Taste and the Taint of Slavery
This chapter considers the relationship between the violence of slavery and the culture of conduct within the geography of enslavement itself. It reflects on the status of art and taste in the heart of American slavery. It argues that although members of the American plantocracy in Virginia (William Byrd and Thomas Jefferson, for example) sought to fashion their lives after those of British gentry, they could not separate themselves from the conc…
On Afropolitanism
Slavery and the Culture of Taste
It would be easy to assume that, in the eighteenth century, slavery and the culture of taste--the world of politeness, manners, and aesthetics--existed as separate and unequal domains, unrelated in the spheres of social life. But to the contrary, Slavery and the Culture of Taste demonstrates that these two areas of modernity were surprisingly entwined. Ranging across Britain, the antebellum South, and the West Indies, and examining vast archives,…
Ngugi Wa Thiong'O
Fifty Years of Things Fall Apart (1958): A n I nterview with C hinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe is considered to be the most influential African novelist of the modern period and the publication of Things Fall Apart in 1958 was a seminal event in the history of African letters
Slavery and the Culture of Taste
It would be easy to assume that, in the eighteenth century, slavery and the culture of taste--the world of politeness, manners, and aesthetics--existed as separate and unequal domains, unrelated in the spheres of social life. But to the contrary, Slavery and the Culture of Taste demonstrates that these two areas of modernity were surprisingly entwined. Ranging across Britain, the antebellum South, and the West Indies, and examining vast archives,…
Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature
and I owe thanks to Micere Mugo for introducing me to Lamming and Brathwaite and to
Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality
The South Atlantic Quarterly - Volume 100, Number 3, Summer 2001
Theory, Literature, and Moral Considerations
In 1967, a group of prominent African writers met in Stockholm, Sweden, to discuss the role of the writer in the modern African nation. We were still in the early days of decolonization, and although disenchantment with what was later to be characterized as a compromised postcoloniality was beginning to enter literary texts, writers and intellectuals still believed that their works and words had an innate and functional capacity to intervene in e…
Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction
Simon Gikandi has set out to reveal '...the very nature of (Achebe's) creativity, its prodigious complexity and richness...its paradoxes and ambiguities. This is scholarship of real stature and supersedes all other studies of Achebe's writing. It comes at a good time. Achebe's literary reputation is equal to that of any living author and a substantial critical canon has been established. - G.D. Killam, Professor of English, University of Guelph K…
Chinua Achebe and the Invention of African Culture
I have never met Chinua Achebe in person, but every time I read his fiction, his essays, or critical works, I feel as if I have known him for most of my life. For if the act of reading and re-reading establishes networks of connections between readers, writers, and context, and if texts are indeed crucial to the modes of knowledge we come to develop about subjects and objects and the images we associate with certain localities and institutions, t…
Pan-Africanism and Cosmopolitanism: The Case of Jomo Kenyatta
(2000). PAN-AFRICANISM AND COSMOPOLITANISM: THE CASE OF JOMO KENYATTA. English Studies in Africa: Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 3-27
E. K. Brathwaite and the Poetics of the Voice: "The Allegory of History in "Rights of Passage
Of Global Anglophone: A Response
This commentary identifies and discusses the three issues that have driven the turn to the term Global Anglophone in literary studies: the demand by institutions for tags that signal diversity of bodies and forms of knowledge; the desire for a new descriptive term for English literatures outside Britain and North America; and the need to rethink the long history of the discipline within the cultures of the British empire. The commentary focuses o…
The Ghost of Matthew Arnold: Englishness and the Politics of Culture
Encyclopaedia of African Literature
Simon Gikandi. Encyclopaedia of African Literature. New York: Routledge, 2003. xv + 629 pp. Index. $150.00. Cloth. Early scholars of African literature still remember how welcome Hans Zell's Readers' Guide to African Literature (1972) was in this new field of criticism. Since then, African literature has become an established discipline, and need for reliable reference works on all levels is even greater. Simon Gikandi's Encyclopaedia of African …
Cultural Translation and the African Self a (Post)colonial Case Study
This article explores what it means to locate the African subject at the intersection between colonial governmentality and the realm of subjective desires. It discusses the process by which Africans cultivated their identity as modern subjects both within and against the institutions of colonial rule. Using one unique colonial subject (Jomo Kenyatta) as its case study, the essay tries to understand what happens when we read Africa - and the Afric…
Traveling Theory: Ngugi's Return to English
Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Toward a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa, by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. The Clarendon Lectures, 1996. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998
Ngugi: Reflections on his Life of Writing
Nelson Mandela: The Absent Cause
Throughout the last half of 2013, it is clear to everyone that his end is near and that the deathwatch has began. Nelson Mandela's long and glorious life is coming to a close. Although he has been
African Literature and Modernity
Uganda's Katikiro in England
Glossary - Map of Buganda - Introduction - Notes and bibliography - Original preface - Original introduction - Origianl table of contents - Uganda's Katikiro in England - Notes
Uganda's Katikiro in England
Englishness, travel, and theory: Writing the West Indies in the nineteenth century
On culture and the state: The writings of Ngugi wa Thiong'o
(1989). On culture and the state: The writings of Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Third World Quarterly: Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 148-156
On culture and the state: The writings of Ngugi wa Thiong'o
(1989). On culture and the state: The writings of Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Third World Quarterly: Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 148-156
Reading the African Novel
E. K. Brathwaite and the Poetics of the Voice: "The Allegory of History in "Rights of Passage
Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction
Simon Gikandi has set out to reveal '...the very nature of (Achebe's) creativity, its prodigious complexity and richness...its paradoxes and ambiguities. This is scholarship of real stature and supersedes all other studies of Achebe's writing. It comes at a good time. Achebe's literary reputation is equal to that of any living author and a substantial critical canon has been established. - G.D. Killam, Professor of English, University of Guelph K…
Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction
Englishness, travel, and theory: Writing the West Indies in the nineteenth century
Paule Marshall and the search for the African diaspora
First paragraph]The Fiction of Paule Marshall: Reconstructions of History, Culture, and Gender. DOROTHY HAMER DENNISTON. Knoxville: University of Tennesee Press, 1995. xxii + 187 pp. (Paper US$ 15.00)Toward Wholeness in Paule Marshall's Fiction. JOYCE PETTIS.Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995. xi + 173 pp. (Cloth US$ 29.50)Black and Female: Essays on Writings by Black Women in the Diaspora. BRITA LINDBERG-SEYERSTED. Oslo: Scandin…
Uganda's Katikiro in England
The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature
Book summary page views Book summary page views help Close Book summary page views help Book summary views reflect the number of visits to the book and chapter landing pages. Total views: 0 * Loading metrics...
Pan-Africanism and Cosmopolitanism: The Case of Jomo Kenyatta
(2000). PAN-AFRICANISM AND COSMOPOLITANISM: THE CASE OF JOMO KENYATTA. English Studies in Africa: Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 3-27
Traveling Theory: Ngugi's Return to English
Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Toward a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa, by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. The Clarendon Lectures, 1996. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998
Uganda's Katikiro in England
Glossary - Map of Buganda - Introduction - Notes and bibliography - Original preface - Original introduction - Origianl table of contents - Uganda's Katikiro in England - Notes
Theory, Literature, and Moral Considerations
In 1967, a group of prominent African writers met in Stockholm, Sweden, to discuss the role of the writer in the modern African nation. We were still in the early days of decolonization, and although disenchantment with what was later to be characterized as a compromised postcoloniality was beginning to enter literary texts, writers and intellectuals still believed that their works and words had an innate and functional capacity to intervene in e…
Chinua Achebe and the Invention of African Culture
I have never met Chinua Achebe in person, but every time I read his fiction, his essays, or critical works, I feel as if I have known him for most of my life. For if the act of reading and re-reading establishes networks of connections between readers, writers, and context, and if texts are indeed crucial to the modes of knowledge we come to develop about subjects and objects and the images we associate with certain localities and institutions, t…
Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality
The South Atlantic Quarterly - Volume 100, Number 3, Summer 2001
Cultural Translation and the African Self a (Post)colonial Case Study
This article explores what it means to locate the African subject at the intersection between colonial governmentality and the realm of subjective desires. It discusses the process by which Africans cultivated their identity as modern subjects both within and against the institutions of colonial rule. Using one unique colonial subject (Jomo Kenyatta) as its case study, the essay tries to understand what happens when we read Africa - and the Afric…
Ngugi wa Thiong'o
The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature: Volume 2
The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature Volume 1: Volume 1
Encyclopaedia of African Literature
Simon Gikandi. Encyclopaedia of African Literature. New York: Routledge, 2003. xv + 629 pp. Index. $150.00. Cloth. Early scholars of African literature still remember how welcome Hans Zell's Readers' Guide to African Literature (1972) was in this new field of criticism. Since then, African literature has become an established discipline, and need for reliable reference works on all levels is even greater. Simon Gikandi's Encyclopaedia of African …
The Ghost of Matthew Arnold: Englishness and the Politics of Culture
Utopian Generations: The Political Horizons of Twentieth-century Literature , by Nicholas Brown
African Literature and Modernity
Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship , by Leela Gandhi
Reviewed by: Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship Simon Gikandi (bio) Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship, by Leela Gandhi; pp. x + 254. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006, $21.95 paper, £45.00, £11.99 paper. Like other Europeans in the long nineteenth century, Victorians struggled to reconcile the claims …
History (30 works) · Art (26 works) · Political science (25 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Law (20 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Literature (17 works) · Aesthetics (14 works) · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies (14 works) · Politics (13 works)