Aghogho Akpome
Biographic Data
| ID | 79330 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Aghogho Akpome |
| GIVEN NAMES | Aghogho |
| FAMILY NAME | Akpome |
| SIGNATURE | AKPOME A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Zululand |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4538-360X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 15 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
What – and how – should we teach when we teach English in (South) Africa
This study proposes changes to the teaching of English (language and literature) in South African institutions of learning in ways that prioritise functionality and communicative competence rather than the current dominant and problematic approach that seeks adherence to received standards. The author draws on his personal experience as a lecturer in a comprehensive South African university in a semi-rural setting as well as on postcolonial and d…
Post-dictatorship Protest and Ecocriticism in Selected Works of Ogaga Ifowodo
The principal link between technology and competitive advantage is innovation. The quest for sustainable competitive advantage has caused firms to invest in innovation, consequently, innovation is responsible for new industries coming into being, and it is innovation, which allows some firms to dominate in that space. Thus, this study aimed to examine the critical supply chain (SC) innovation indicators that enhance business performance. This res…
Depicting the Black African Refugee in The Jungle by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson
This paper explores the depiction of black African refugees in The Jungle, a 2017 play by two young British playwrights, Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson. The Jungle is a theatrical recreation of the lives of refugees from the migrant camp in Calais, from which hundreds of refugees made – and still make – often fatal attempts to enter the UK through the Channel Tunnel. The graphic images of the squalid living conditions of its residents – many of the…
Discourses of Corruption in Africa: Between the Colonial Past and the Decolonizing Present
To civilize and rescue certain populations from self-destruction was a cardinal aim of colonization, which reflected the supposition that colonized people were evolutionarily, culturally, intellectually, and morally deficient and therefore incapable of attaining advanced levels of sociopolitical organization. This article explores how contemporary discourses of corruption in Africa echo these discredited narratives, which I critically analyze usi…
Memory, Ethics and the Re-temporalisation of South African National History in the Works of Jacob Dlamini
This paper examines Jacob Dlamini’s two main historical works, Askari (2014) and Native Nostalgia (2009), for the ways in which they critique dominant South African memory practices while offering an alternative, and presumably more ethical, form of memoralisation which can also be read as a modality of temporality in the literary (re)historicisation of South Africa’s national history. In Askari, Dlamini’s recall of collaboration between traitors…
Child and youth protagonists in Habila’s Measuring Time and Dangor’s Bitter Fruit
Helon Habila’s Measuring Time and Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit deploy child and youth protagonists to offer nuanced perspectives on contemporary nationhood in Nigeria and South Africa respectively, displacing the adult, and mostly male viewpoints that have dominated novelistic portrayals of postcolonial nationhood for decades. These protagonists are portrayed symbolically in the context of the biological family, which can be read in allegorical a…
Imagining Africa’s futures in two Caine Prize-winning stories: Henrietta Rose-Innes’s “Poison” and NoViolet Bulawayo’s “Hitting Budapest”
Since its launch in 1999, the annual Caine Prize for African short stories has assumed a dominant position on the continent’s literary landscape. It has been hailed for the exposure it provides for its winners who are mostly budding writers. Expectedly, it has also attracted stinging criticism, especially for what is perceived to be its legitimization of stereotypical narratives about Africa. In this article, I examine how the two winning entries…
Re-Writing the Nation: Literary Rehistoricisation and Counter-Hegemonic Discourse in Ken Wiwa's In the Shadow of a Saint and Jacob Dlamini's Native Nostalgia
In this article, I analyse two recent African autobiographical works for the ways in which they provide counter-hegemonic national discourses in regard to Nigeria and South Africa. The texts are In the Shadow of a Saint (2001), Ken Wiwa's memoir and biographical homage to his father, the martyred Nigerian writer and activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Native Nostalgia (2009) by the South African historian, Jacob Dlamini. The article highlights the diffe…
Zones of indistinction” and visions of post-reconciliation South Africa in District 9
In this article, I explore the ways in which District 9 reflects South Africa’s current socio-political transition through the problematical representation of the film’s eponymous slum and its impoverished inhabitants as well as its protagonist, Wikus van der Merwe. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s influential ideas of biopolitics, I demonstrate the ways in which the film provides a compelling critique of the effects of neoliberal capitalism on post-…
Late Capitalism, Urbanisation, and Cultures of Economic 'Survivalism' in the BBC's Welcome to Lagos
This article examines the depiction of three impoverished Lagosian slums in the controversial British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) documentary, Welcome to Lagos, which highlights the negative impacts of globalised capitalism on urban culture in Nigeria's commercial centre and biggest city. In recent times scholarship on postcolonial urbanisation has been marked by an important shift in focus from economic concerns to interest in the peculiar cu…
Intertextuality and influence: Chinua Achebe'sAnthills of the Savannah(1987) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie'sHalf of a Yellow Sun(2006)
This article explores the apparent influence of Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's award-winning second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, with regard to the literary re-historicization of the Nigerian Civil War, the representation of Biafra and the renegotiation of post-independence Nigerian nationalism. It foregrounds several compelling intertextual links – stylistic and ideological – between the two works, and arg…
What is Nigeria? Unsettling the Myth of Exceptionalism
This article explores perceptions and representations of Nigeria and Nigerians in the popular global imaginary. It analyses selected popular media narratives in order to foreground contradictions and paradoxes in the ways in which the country and people of Nigeria are discursively constructed. By doing so, it interrogates stereotypes of corruption and criminality as well as myths of exceptionalism about Nigeria and Nigerians originating from both…
Ways of Telling: (Re)Writing the Nation in the Novels and Memoir of Chinua Achebe
Perhaps the most recognisable thematic feature of Chinua Achebe's celebrated fictional and critical praxis is his keen interest in the social and political transformation of African societies following colonisation and independence. This article focuses on his engagement with African/Nigerian nationhood in his five novels and memoir, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (2012). The objective is to make evident significant trajectorie…
The Narrative Construction of Identity in Contemporary Rwanda: A Study ofAn Ordinary Manby Paul Rusesabagina (with Tom Zoellner)
In this article, I examine the autobiography of Paul Rusesabagina, An Ordinary Man, to interrogate the narrative construction of identity in contemporary Rwanda. My primary focus is the discursive and narrative dynamics involved in the problematical configuration of ethnic, class, and national identities prior to, and after the country's 1994 genocide. Regarding the contradictions in the way Rusesabagina attempts to articulate modern Rwandan iden…
Ominous Inevitabilities: Reflecting on South Africa's Post-Transition Aporia in Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit
Achmat Dangor's novel Bitter Fruit (2001), nominated for the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2004, is one of several important works of fiction that comment on the imperfections of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), offering a polemical critique of South Africa's on-going transition. In this article, I examine two significant ways in which Dangor's novel questions the work of the TRC. First, I posit that the story represents the TRC's…
What is Nigeria? Unsettling the Myth of Exceptionalism
This article explores perceptions and representations of Nigeria and Nigerians in the popular global imaginary. It analyses selected popular media narratives in order to foreground contradictions and paradoxes in the ways in which the country and people of Nigeria are discursively constructed. By doing so, it interrogates stereotypes of corruption and criminality as well as myths of exceptionalism about Nigeria and Nigerians originating from both…
Imagining Africa’s futures in two Caine Prize-winning stories: Henrietta Rose-Innes’s “Poison” and NoViolet Bulawayo’s “Hitting Budapest”
Since its launch in 1999, the annual Caine Prize for African short stories has assumed a dominant position on the continent’s literary landscape. It has been hailed for the exposure it provides for its winners who are mostly budding writers. Expectedly, it has also attracted stinging criticism, especially for what is perceived to be its legitimization of stereotypical narratives about Africa. In this article, I examine how the two winning entries…
Re-Writing the Nation: Literary Rehistoricisation and Counter-Hegemonic Discourse in Ken Wiwa's In the Shadow of a Saint and Jacob Dlamini's Native Nostalgia
In this article, I analyse two recent African autobiographical works for the ways in which they provide counter-hegemonic national discourses in regard to Nigeria and South Africa. The texts are In the Shadow of a Saint (2001), Ken Wiwa's memoir and biographical homage to his father, the martyred Nigerian writer and activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Native Nostalgia (2009) by the South African historian, Jacob Dlamini. The article highlights the diffe…
Zones of indistinction” and visions of post-reconciliation South Africa in District 9
In this article, I explore the ways in which District 9 reflects South Africa’s current socio-political transition through the problematical representation of the film’s eponymous slum and its impoverished inhabitants as well as its protagonist, Wikus van der Merwe. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s influential ideas of biopolitics, I demonstrate the ways in which the film provides a compelling critique of the effects of neoliberal capitalism on post-…
Intertextuality and influence: Chinua Achebe'sAnthills of the Savannah(1987) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie'sHalf of a Yellow Sun(2006)
This article explores the apparent influence of Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's award-winning second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, with regard to the literary re-historicization of the Nigerian Civil War, the representation of Biafra and the renegotiation of post-independence Nigerian nationalism. It foregrounds several compelling intertextual links – stylistic and ideological – between the two works, and arg…
Ominous Inevitabilities: Reflecting on South Africa's Post-Transition Aporia in Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit
Achmat Dangor's novel Bitter Fruit (2001), nominated for the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2004, is one of several important works of fiction that comment on the imperfections of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), offering a polemical critique of South Africa's on-going transition. In this article, I examine two significant ways in which Dangor's novel questions the work of the TRC. First, I posit that the story represents the TRC's…
Ominous Inevitabilities: Reflecting on South Africa's Post-Transition Aporia in Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit
Achmat Dangor's novel Bitter Fruit (2001), nominated for the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2004, is one of several important works of fiction that comment on the imperfections of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), offering a polemical critique of South Africa's on-going transition. In this article, I examine two significant ways in which Dangor's novel questions the work of the TRC. First, I posit that the story represents the TRC's…
Ways of Telling: (Re)Writing the Nation in the Novels and Memoir of Chinua Achebe
Perhaps the most recognisable thematic feature of Chinua Achebe's celebrated fictional and critical praxis is his keen interest in the social and political transformation of African societies following colonisation and independence. This article focuses on his engagement with African/Nigerian nationhood in his five novels and memoir, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (2012). The objective is to make evident significant trajectorie…
The Narrative Construction of Identity in Contemporary Rwanda: A Study ofAn Ordinary Manby Paul Rusesabagina (with Tom Zoellner)
In this article, I examine the autobiography of Paul Rusesabagina, An Ordinary Man, to interrogate the narrative construction of identity in contemporary Rwanda. My primary focus is the discursive and narrative dynamics involved in the problematical configuration of ethnic, class, and national identities prior to, and after the country's 1994 genocide. Regarding the contradictions in the way Rusesabagina attempts to articulate modern Rwandan iden…
What is Nigeria? Unsettling the Myth of Exceptionalism
This article explores perceptions and representations of Nigeria and Nigerians in the popular global imaginary. It analyses selected popular media narratives in order to foreground contradictions and paradoxes in the ways in which the country and people of Nigeria are discursively constructed. By doing so, it interrogates stereotypes of corruption and criminality as well as myths of exceptionalism about Nigeria and Nigerians originating from both…
Re-Writing the Nation: Literary Rehistoricisation and Counter-Hegemonic Discourse in Ken Wiwa's In the Shadow of a Saint and Jacob Dlamini's Native Nostalgia
In this article, I analyse two recent African autobiographical works for the ways in which they provide counter-hegemonic national discourses in regard to Nigeria and South Africa. The texts are In the Shadow of a Saint (2001), Ken Wiwa's memoir and biographical homage to his father, the martyred Nigerian writer and activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Native Nostalgia (2009) by the South African historian, Jacob Dlamini. The article highlights the diffe…
Zones of indistinction” and visions of post-reconciliation South Africa in District 9
In this article, I explore the ways in which District 9 reflects South Africa’s current socio-political transition through the problematical representation of the film’s eponymous slum and its impoverished inhabitants as well as its protagonist, Wikus van der Merwe. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s influential ideas of biopolitics, I demonstrate the ways in which the film provides a compelling critique of the effects of neoliberal capitalism on post-…
Late Capitalism, Urbanisation, and Cultures of Economic 'Survivalism' in the BBC's Welcome to Lagos
This article examines the depiction of three impoverished Lagosian slums in the controversial British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) documentary, Welcome to Lagos, which highlights the negative impacts of globalised capitalism on urban culture in Nigeria's commercial centre and biggest city. In recent times scholarship on postcolonial urbanisation has been marked by an important shift in focus from economic concerns to interest in the peculiar cu…
Intertextuality and influence: Chinua Achebe'sAnthills of the Savannah(1987) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie'sHalf of a Yellow Sun(2006)
This article explores the apparent influence of Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's award-winning second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, with regard to the literary re-historicization of the Nigerian Civil War, the representation of Biafra and the renegotiation of post-independence Nigerian nationalism. It foregrounds several compelling intertextual links – stylistic and ideological – between the two works, and arg…
Memory, Ethics and the Re-temporalisation of South African National History in the Works of Jacob Dlamini
This paper examines Jacob Dlamini’s two main historical works, Askari (2014) and Native Nostalgia (2009), for the ways in which they critique dominant South African memory practices while offering an alternative, and presumably more ethical, form of memoralisation which can also be read as a modality of temporality in the literary (re)historicisation of South Africa’s national history. In Askari, Dlamini’s recall of collaboration between traitors…
Child and youth protagonists in Habila’s Measuring Time and Dangor’s Bitter Fruit
Helon Habila’s Measuring Time and Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit deploy child and youth protagonists to offer nuanced perspectives on contemporary nationhood in Nigeria and South Africa respectively, displacing the adult, and mostly male viewpoints that have dominated novelistic portrayals of postcolonial nationhood for decades. These protagonists are portrayed symbolically in the context of the biological family, which can be read in allegorical a…
Imagining Africa’s futures in two Caine Prize-winning stories: Henrietta Rose-Innes’s “Poison” and NoViolet Bulawayo’s “Hitting Budapest”
Since its launch in 1999, the annual Caine Prize for African short stories has assumed a dominant position on the continent’s literary landscape. It has been hailed for the exposure it provides for its winners who are mostly budding writers. Expectedly, it has also attracted stinging criticism, especially for what is perceived to be its legitimization of stereotypical narratives about Africa. In this article, I examine how the two winning entries…
Discourses of Corruption in Africa: Between the Colonial Past and the Decolonizing Present
To civilize and rescue certain populations from self-destruction was a cardinal aim of colonization, which reflected the supposition that colonized people were evolutionarily, culturally, intellectually, and morally deficient and therefore incapable of attaining advanced levels of sociopolitical organization. This article explores how contemporary discourses of corruption in Africa echo these discredited narratives, which I critically analyze usi…
Depicting the Black African Refugee in The Jungle by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson
This paper explores the depiction of black African refugees in The Jungle, a 2017 play by two young British playwrights, Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson. The Jungle is a theatrical recreation of the lives of refugees from the migrant camp in Calais, from which hundreds of refugees made – and still make – often fatal attempts to enter the UK through the Channel Tunnel. The graphic images of the squalid living conditions of its residents – many of the…
Post-dictatorship Protest and Ecocriticism in Selected Works of Ogaga Ifowodo
The principal link between technology and competitive advantage is innovation. The quest for sustainable competitive advantage has caused firms to invest in innovation, consequently, innovation is responsible for new industries coming into being, and it is innovation, which allows some firms to dominate in that space. Thus, this study aimed to examine the critical supply chain (SC) innovation indicators that enhance business performance. This res…
What – and how – should we teach when we teach English in (South) Africa
This study proposes changes to the teaching of English (language and literature) in South African institutions of learning in ways that prioritise functionality and communicative competence rather than the current dominant and problematic approach that seeks adherence to received standards. The author draws on his personal experience as a lecturer in a comprehensive South African university in a semi-rural setting as well as on postcolonial and d…
Sociology (14 works) · Political science (13 works) · Law (10 works) · Art (9 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Narrative (9 works) · History (8 works) · Literature (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Law (7 works)