Brenda Cooper
Biographic Data
| ID | 3922963 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Brenda Cooper |
| GIVEN NAMES | Brenda |
| FAMILY NAME | Cooper |
| SIGNATURE | COOPER B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cape Town |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 12 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 22 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
A Tribute to Harry Garuba (1958–2020)
A member of our editorial board, Professor Harry Garuba passed away in 2020. The Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies Journal would like to pay tribute to Harry’s many roles: the caring me
‘Eight chickens’ … ‘and there was this goat’
We have to be knowledgeable, us academic writers, otherwise what is the point of us? It is a truism to state that we read and research with the purpose of adding to the store of knowledge in the wo
Long-Term Worries after Colposcopy
The politics of the genre of academic writing; or, Professor Curtin, Professor Clegg, and the African Studies network war
What are the politics of the genre of academic writing, and its enabling networks? This genre of writing and those networks shape the form and substance of our writing within an African research context. I examine the dominant template of academic writing style, which operates across many fields of scholarly endeavour. It enables different sorts of knowledge to be accepted as true, or to be excluded. What and how to write academically have been f…
The Middle Passage of the Gods and the New Diaspora
The paper explores how Helen Oyeyemi searches for an appropriate form and language to describe the multiple cultures, histories and tongues she has inherited. She can barely remember Africa, a loss she only partially shares with slave descendents because she was born in Nigeria, but raised in England from the age of four. The novel is set within the triangular space of the trade between Britain, the West Coast of Africa and the Caribbean. I show …
Dealing with Evils
Reviewed by: Dealing with Evils: Essays on Writing from Africa Brenda Cooper Dealing with Evils: Essays on Writing from Africa Annie Gagiano Studies in English Literatures 11. Stuttgart: ibidem, 2008. xi + 239 pp. ISBN 978-3-89821-867-2 paper. Annie Gagiano's collection of essays employs a wide-angle lens to tackle a range of writing, from diverse parts of Africa, writing that employs multiple genres and is preoccupied with varied and different i…
A New Generation of African Writers
Brenda Cooper examines the work of the new generation of African writers who have placed migration as central to their writing. There is a new interest among publishers in New York and London in books by writers of African origin. These authors have often grown up or passed their early adult years out of Africa. The Orange Prize for Fiction was awarded inLondon 2007 to Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun , and the Caine Prize for Afr…
New Generation of African Writers
Breaking Gods & Petals of Purple Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus
Fiction and the Incompleteness of History
Reviewed by: Fiction and the Incompleteness of History: Toni Morrison, V. S. Naipaul, and Ben Okri Brenda Cooper Fiction and the Incompleteness of History: Toni Morrison, V. S. Naipaul, and Ben Okri By Zhu Ying. Bern: Peter Lang, 2006. 160pp. ISBN 3-03910-746-1 Zhu Ying’s study is, in her own words, a reading of “Morrison, Naipaul and Okri in terms of their historical projects in fiction” (107). It looks closely at Morrison’s Beloved, two of Naip…
Framing Brokeback Mountain
Publisher PDF is available for download through the link above.This study of 113 reviews of the 2005 film Brokeback Mountain finds that although U.S. critics applauded it, the discourse underlying their reviews created three complementary but conflicting frames that direct attention away the movie's core theme of destructive rural homophobia. Our interrogation of press reviews revealed that reviewers framed the film as a “universal” love story wh…
Banished from Oedipus? Buchi Emecheta's and Assia Djebar's Gendered Language of Resistance
I derive my title from Gayatri Spivak, who declares that postcolonial writers and intellectuals, like Buchi Emecheta and Assia Djebar, are banished from Oedipus. Thus they are also outside the patriarchal Law of the Symbolic and the dominant Western metaphors to which it is bonded. The paper goes on to examine the transformative potential of the metonymic language of material culture and the everyday. We see how the writers transform commonplace …
The Rhetoric of a New Essentialism versus Multiple Worlds
This paper contrasts two recently published novels by Nigerian writers living in the Diaspora — Isidore Okpewho's Call Me by My Rightful Name and Buchi Emecheta's The New Tribe. It demonstrates how Emecheta, long resident in London, embeds her fiction in the concrete realities of the everyday. She rejects the myths attached to an idealized Africa. In so doing, she relies on the rhetoric of metonymy. Okpewho, by contrast, a relatively recent migra…
Chick Flicks” as Feminist Texts
Through an explication of the female gazes underlying the narrative structure of the 1991 film Thelma and Louise, this study suggests explanations for the movie's wide appeal among women spectators. The film's female gazes undercut and appropriate the dominant male gazes typical of mainstream Hollywood cinema by using mockery as a narrative device to illustrate the sexism inherent in the male gaze, and it is precisely this appropriation of patria…
The relevancy and gender identity in spectators’ interpretations of Thelma & Louise
Using relevancy as a conceptual framework, this study investigates women and men spectators’ experiences with the 1991 film, Thelma & Louise. An analysis of the spectators’ self‐report essays explicates contradictory cultural subjectivities and subsequent interpretations of the film between the spectators: women tended to like the film—men generally hated it. While issues of sexism and women's marginalization appear irrelevant to the cultural sub…
Snapshots of Postcolonial Masculinities
Why the Bombs Did Not Go Off in the Cinema
(1997). Why the Bombs Did Not Go Off in the Cinema: The English Patient as Fiction and Film. Social Dynamics: Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 154-167
It had no voice to it”
Through a thematic analysis, this study investigates the rhetorical implications of Sydney Pollack's translation of Isak Dinesen's autobiographical texts. Specifically, the essay argues that Pollack's film uses strategies of transference, redefinition, antithesis, and displacement to renarrate Dinesen's writings, resulting in a depoliticized romantic adventure. These strategies marginalize, or mute altogether, pivotal elements of Dinesen's texts …
Liberated repressions
Does Marxism allow for the magical side of things? Magical realism and a comparison between one hundred years of solitude and the house of the spirits
This paper examines Magical Realism from a few different angles. Does this genre arise out of socio‐economic conditions in the Third World, distinguishing it from the cultural conventions of First World Postmodernism? Can the fiction of Magical Realism capture complex social and historical realities? Put another way, are the conventions of Magical Realism compatible with Marxism? Can a Marxist framework incorporate mystery and magic? I deal with …
Marxism and African Literature
This book stakes out an 'alternative terrain' for literary critics using a class-based analysis to discuss topics and themes in African literature. North America: Africa World Press
A Look at David Maughan-Brown'sLand, Freedom and Fiction
A Look at David Maughan‐Brown's Land, Freedom and Fiction, Zed Press, London, 1985
Framing Brokeback Mountain
Publisher PDF is available for download through the link above.This study of 113 reviews of the 2005 film Brokeback Mountain finds that although U.S. critics applauded it, the discourse underlying their reviews created three complementary but conflicting frames that direct attention away the movie's core theme of destructive rural homophobia. Our interrogation of press reviews revealed that reviewers framed the film as a “universal” love story wh…
Chick Flicks” as Feminist Texts
Through an explication of the female gazes underlying the narrative structure of the 1991 film Thelma and Louise, this study suggests explanations for the movie's wide appeal among women spectators. The film's female gazes undercut and appropriate the dominant male gazes typical of mainstream Hollywood cinema by using mockery as a narrative device to illustrate the sexism inherent in the male gaze, and it is precisely this appropriation of patria…
The Middle Passage of the Gods and the New Diaspora
The paper explores how Helen Oyeyemi searches for an appropriate form and language to describe the multiple cultures, histories and tongues she has inherited. She can barely remember Africa, a loss she only partially shares with slave descendents because she was born in Nigeria, but raised in England from the age of four. The novel is set within the triangular space of the trade between Britain, the West Coast of Africa and the Caribbean. I show …
It had no voice to it”
Through a thematic analysis, this study investigates the rhetorical implications of Sydney Pollack's translation of Isak Dinesen's autobiographical texts. Specifically, the essay argues that Pollack's film uses strategies of transference, redefinition, antithesis, and displacement to renarrate Dinesen's writings, resulting in a depoliticized romantic adventure. These strategies marginalize, or mute altogether, pivotal elements of Dinesen's texts …
A Look at David Maughan-Brown'sLand, Freedom and Fiction
A Look at David Maughan‐Brown's Land, Freedom and Fiction, Zed Press, London, 1985
Marxism and African Literature
This book stakes out an 'alternative terrain' for literary critics using a class-based analysis to discuss topics and themes in African literature. North America: Africa World Press
Does Marxism allow for the magical side of things? Magical realism and a comparison between one hundred years of solitude and the house of the spirits
This paper examines Magical Realism from a few different angles. Does this genre arise out of socio‐economic conditions in the Third World, distinguishing it from the cultural conventions of First World Postmodernism? Can the fiction of Magical Realism capture complex social and historical realities? Put another way, are the conventions of Magical Realism compatible with Marxism? Can a Marxist framework incorporate mystery and magic? I deal with …
Liberated repressions
It had no voice to it”
Through a thematic analysis, this study investigates the rhetorical implications of Sydney Pollack's translation of Isak Dinesen's autobiographical texts. Specifically, the essay argues that Pollack's film uses strategies of transference, redefinition, antithesis, and displacement to renarrate Dinesen's writings, resulting in a depoliticized romantic adventure. These strategies marginalize, or mute altogether, pivotal elements of Dinesen's texts …
Why the Bombs Did Not Go Off in the Cinema
(1997). Why the Bombs Did Not Go Off in the Cinema: The English Patient as Fiction and Film. Social Dynamics: Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 154-167
The relevancy and gender identity in spectators’ interpretations of Thelma & Louise
Using relevancy as a conceptual framework, this study investigates women and men spectators’ experiences with the 1991 film, Thelma & Louise. An analysis of the spectators’ self‐report essays explicates contradictory cultural subjectivities and subsequent interpretations of the film between the spectators: women tended to like the film—men generally hated it. While issues of sexism and women's marginalization appear irrelevant to the cultural sub…
Snapshots of Postcolonial Masculinities
Chick Flicks” as Feminist Texts
Through an explication of the female gazes underlying the narrative structure of the 1991 film Thelma and Louise, this study suggests explanations for the movie's wide appeal among women spectators. The film's female gazes undercut and appropriate the dominant male gazes typical of mainstream Hollywood cinema by using mockery as a narrative device to illustrate the sexism inherent in the male gaze, and it is precisely this appropriation of patria…
Banished from Oedipus? Buchi Emecheta's and Assia Djebar's Gendered Language of Resistance
I derive my title from Gayatri Spivak, who declares that postcolonial writers and intellectuals, like Buchi Emecheta and Assia Djebar, are banished from Oedipus. Thus they are also outside the patriarchal Law of the Symbolic and the dominant Western metaphors to which it is bonded. The paper goes on to examine the transformative potential of the metonymic language of material culture and the everyday. We see how the writers transform commonplace …
The Rhetoric of a New Essentialism versus Multiple Worlds
This paper contrasts two recently published novels by Nigerian writers living in the Diaspora — Isidore Okpewho's Call Me by My Rightful Name and Buchi Emecheta's The New Tribe. It demonstrates how Emecheta, long resident in London, embeds her fiction in the concrete realities of the everyday. She rejects the myths attached to an idealized Africa. In so doing, she relies on the rhetoric of metonymy. Okpewho, by contrast, a relatively recent migra…
A New Generation of African Writers
Brenda Cooper examines the work of the new generation of African writers who have placed migration as central to their writing. There is a new interest among publishers in New York and London in books by writers of African origin. These authors have often grown up or passed their early adult years out of Africa. The Orange Prize for Fiction was awarded inLondon 2007 to Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun , and the Caine Prize for Afr…
New Generation of African Writers
Breaking Gods & Petals of Purple Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus
Fiction and the Incompleteness of History
Reviewed by: Fiction and the Incompleteness of History: Toni Morrison, V. S. Naipaul, and Ben Okri Brenda Cooper Fiction and the Incompleteness of History: Toni Morrison, V. S. Naipaul, and Ben Okri By Zhu Ying. Bern: Peter Lang, 2006. 160pp. ISBN 3-03910-746-1 Zhu Ying’s study is, in her own words, a reading of “Morrison, Naipaul and Okri in terms of their historical projects in fiction” (107). It looks closely at Morrison’s Beloved, two of Naip…
Framing Brokeback Mountain
Publisher PDF is available for download through the link above.This study of 113 reviews of the 2005 film Brokeback Mountain finds that although U.S. critics applauded it, the discourse underlying their reviews created three complementary but conflicting frames that direct attention away the movie's core theme of destructive rural homophobia. Our interrogation of press reviews revealed that reviewers framed the film as a “universal” love story wh…
The Middle Passage of the Gods and the New Diaspora
The paper explores how Helen Oyeyemi searches for an appropriate form and language to describe the multiple cultures, histories and tongues she has inherited. She can barely remember Africa, a loss she only partially shares with slave descendents because she was born in Nigeria, but raised in England from the age of four. The novel is set within the triangular space of the trade between Britain, the West Coast of Africa and the Caribbean. I show …
Dealing with Evils
Reviewed by: Dealing with Evils: Essays on Writing from Africa Brenda Cooper Dealing with Evils: Essays on Writing from Africa Annie Gagiano Studies in English Literatures 11. Stuttgart: ibidem, 2008. xi + 239 pp. ISBN 978-3-89821-867-2 paper. Annie Gagiano's collection of essays employs a wide-angle lens to tackle a range of writing, from diverse parts of Africa, writing that employs multiple genres and is preoccupied with varied and different i…
Long-Term Worries after Colposcopy
The politics of the genre of academic writing; or, Professor Curtin, Professor Clegg, and the African Studies network war
What are the politics of the genre of academic writing, and its enabling networks? This genre of writing and those networks shape the form and substance of our writing within an African research context. I examine the dominant template of academic writing style, which operates across many fields of scholarly endeavour. It enables different sorts of knowledge to be accepted as true, or to be excluded. What and how to write academically have been f…
‘Eight chickens’ … ‘and there was this goat’
We have to be knowledgeable, us academic writers, otherwise what is the point of us? It is a truism to state that we read and research with the purpose of adding to the store of knowledge in the wo
A Tribute to Harry Garuba (1958–2020)
A member of our editorial board, Professor Harry Garuba passed away in 2020. The Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies Journal would like to pay tribute to Harry’s many roles: the caring me
Art (17 works) · Literature (13 works) · History (12 works) · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies (10 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Art history (8 works) · History (5 works) · Linguistics (5 works) · Narrative (5 works)