Annie Gagiano
Biographic Data
| ID | 83468 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Annie Gagiano |
| GIVEN NAMES | Annie |
| FAMILY NAME | Gagiano |
| SIGNATURE | GAGIANO A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stellenbosch University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0812-9215 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 39 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Valuing East African Anglophone Writing: Aesthetic Range and Narrative Powers
Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1 Keynote delivered at the 6th Mashariki Literary and Cultural Studies Conference, Makerere University, August 24–26, 2023.2 I apologise for my linguistic limitations in lacking access to Kiswahili and other East African tongues.3 See my (forthcoming) chapter, "Spokeswomen: African Authors' Historical-fictional Witnessing in the Literary Anglosphere." In Mapping…
Eastern African women writers' 'national epics: A new force in creative fiction
In this article, I bring five recent, substantial novels by Eastern African women writers together for the first time in a study regarding the texts as modern 'national epics', analysing some of their shared characteristics in foregrounding local participation in the making of East African ethno-national histories. I trace the novelists' implicit, open-eyed moral evaluation of their leaders and peoples, neither sentimentalising nor deriding the o…
War-affected Children in Three African Short Stories: Finding Sanctuary within the Space of Placelessness
In short stories by three postcolonial African authors depicting war-affected children – Zimbabwean Dambudzo Marechera’s “The Camp” (1994, written in 1986), Nigerian Ben Okri’s “Laughter beneath the Bridge” (1986) and Ethiopian Maaza Mengiste’s “A Good Soldier” (2012) – the child protagonists are displaced and exist in precarious spaces of unbelonging. The conditions vividly evoked from these war-affected African children’s perspectives indicate …
Precarity, Protectedness and Power in Emmanuel Jal's WARchild: A Boy Soldier's Story
(2020). Precarity, Protectedness and Power in Emmanuel Jal's WARchild: A Boy Soldier's Story. Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa: Vol. 32, Precarity in South/African Texts, pp. 187-197
Complicating Apartheid Resistance Histories by Means of South African Autobiographies
This article addresses twelve South African autobiographical texts, focusing on (paired) authors’ portrayed experiences of apartheid in order to give recognition to the enduring relevance of their life writing and resistance work. Life writing materials by Es’kia Mphahlele and Chris van Wyk; Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe and Bessie Head; Ray Alexander Simons and Emma Mashinini; Ronnie Govender and Sindiwe Magona; Mxolisi “Bra Ace” Mgxashe and Harold S…
Recovering and recovering from an African past: Four women’s quest narratives
African literature and social change: Tribe, Nation, Race
African literature and social change: tribe, nation, race." Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 55(1), pp. 139–140
Discovering Home. A selection of Works from the Caine Prize for African Writing 2002
Tydskrif vir Letterkunde is an online, peer-reviewed, accredited scholarly journal which publishes original, previously unpublished research and overview articles on theoretical, applied or comparative aspects of African literatures and cultural practices.
Incarceration and Torture in Eastern African Fiction: Issues in Representation
This article assesses representations of imprisonment without trial and inmates’ torture in three novels depicting severely repressive, murderous regimes—Malawi’s under Hastings Banda, Ethiopia’s under the Derg, and Kenya’s under colonial and successive post-colonial rulers. In The Detainee (Kayira 1974), the narrative of a naïve, apolitical villager’s unjust detention highlights unrestrained power abuse through minions and gradually uncovers atr…
Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism
A small spate of books on the Martinican thinker Frantz Fanon has appeared recently. Along with the book reviewed here, Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades by Peter Hudis (PlutoPress, 2015
Diaspora and identity in South African fiction
(2017). Diaspora and identity in South African fiction. Critical Arts: Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 119-121
From North Africa to France: Family migration in text and film: Democracy at home in South Africa: Family fictions and transitional culture
After fifty years of Algerian independence”, writes Isabel Hollis-Toure, “the question of how colonizing nations and their postcolonial migrants belong together has not subsided” (145). Analysing
A death retold in truth and rumor: Kenya, Britain and the Julie Ward murder
The struggle for the Eurasian borderlands: From the rise of early modern empires to the end of the First World War
The struggle for the Eurasian borderlands: from the rise of early modern empires to the end of the First World War." Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 52(3), pp. 375–376
The Book in Africa: Critical Debates/The Critical Imagination in African Literature: Essays in Honour of Michael J.C. Echeruo
As is often the case, the content of The Book in Africa: Critical Debates, though interesting, does not quite live up to its ambitious title, but it remains an informative and significant publicati
Reading Nuruddin Farah: The Individual, the Novel and the Idea of Home
Fiona Moolla makes a bold move in her dense reading of Farah’s oeuvre: eschewing most localising perspectives, she approaches the texts primarily in terms of genre and indeed in terms of European t
Rebmann: A novel; African literatures and beyond: a florilegium
In Rebmann: A Novel, Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye, a leading Kenyan novelist, writes an absorbingly interesting account of the life of a German member of the Church Missionary Society, who worked among
Perceiving pain in African literature; Transgressing boundaries: Gender, identity, culture, and the "other" in postcolonial women's narratives in East Africa
Zoe Norridge’s Perceiving Pain in African Literature is a compelling and accomplished study and a major contribution to the study of African literature. Following the introduction, “Pain, Literatur
Topographies of Power and Pain in A Question of Power
A focus on Head's complex use of a discourse of location – outer and actual as well as social or psychic (imagined) – is employed as an interpretative strategy by means of which to map a reading of A Question of Power. Head's articulation of her struggles to relocate successfully to Botswana from South Africa through evocations of Elizabeth's experiences, thoughts and feelings is shown to employ references to place, social and geographical placem…
What Determines the Suspension of Budget Support
Illuminating Africa: Commemorating and Reassessing the Work of Chinua Achebe (1930-2013)
Cruel city; Blue white red
Cruel City (originally published in 1954 as Ville Cruelle) was the first novel – published under a different pseudonym – of Mongo Beti, who would in his lifetime become the leading African author w
Moving spirit: The legacy of Dambudzo Marechera in the 21st century
edited by Julie Cairnie and Dobrota Pucherova, Zurich, Lit. Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Wien, 2012, 216 pp. plus DVD, ISBN 978 3 6439 0215 3 This text grew out of a symposium titled “Dambudzo Marechera
Ice-Candy-Man and In the Country of Men: The politics of cruelty and the witnessing child
Using two novels employing child narrators as observers of atrocities by which they are not only profoundly affected, but in which they become implicated (respectively by a Pakistani and a Libyan author), the article sets out to try and discover how the technique of mediation by a child witness and commentator affects the reader's perception of the Partition of Pakistan from India and the early rule of Gen. Quaddafi [or Gaddafi] in Libya, North A…
Lyrical Meditations on Spirituality and Sexuality: Drawing a Poetic Line
This essay proposes a reconsideration of poetic representations of the sexual and spiritual dimensions of human experience, arguing that, while generally less time-bound than works of fiction, lyrics both reflect and respond to attitudes concerning these aspects of our lives. The communicative and affective power of poetic texts makes exploration of a chronological selection of influential lyrics on these topics a worthwhile experience in itself,…
What Determines the Suspension of Budget Support
Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism
A small spate of books on the Martinican thinker Frantz Fanon has appeared recently. Along with the book reviewed here, Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades by Peter Hudis (PlutoPress, 2015
Eastern African women writers' 'national epics: A new force in creative fiction
In this article, I bring five recent, substantial novels by Eastern African women writers together for the first time in a study regarding the texts as modern 'national epics', analysing some of their shared characteristics in foregrounding local participation in the making of East African ethno-national histories. I trace the novelists' implicit, open-eyed moral evaluation of their leaders and peoples, neither sentimentalising nor deriding the o…
Complicating Apartheid Resistance Histories by Means of South African Autobiographies
This article addresses twelve South African autobiographical texts, focusing on (paired) authors’ portrayed experiences of apartheid in order to give recognition to the enduring relevance of their life writing and resistance work. Life writing materials by Es’kia Mphahlele and Chris van Wyk; Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe and Bessie Head; Ray Alexander Simons and Emma Mashinini; Ronnie Govender and Sindiwe Magona; Mxolisi “Bra Ace” Mgxashe and Harold S…
Entering the Oppressor’s Mind: A Strategy of Writing in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power , Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins and Unity Dow’s The Screaming of the Innocent
In this article, Bessie Head’s A Question of Power (1974), Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins (2002) and Unity Dow’s The Screaming of the Innocent (2003) are read as examples of texts in which women writers explore from within the minds and motives of fellow-African, male figures who perpetrate crimes and cruelties against women in their respective postcolonial societies. It is argued that, by doing so, these authors employ a strategy of both acknow…
Reading The Stone Virgins as Vera's Study of the Katabolism of War
The article addresses Vera's unusual foregrounding of a violent male figure in The Stone Virgins-that of the dissident war veteran Sibaso, whose acts of murder and rape are depicted in mesmeric detail, as is his inner life. This focus in the text is read as serving Vera's analysis of the deforming, decreating effects of war on the individual psyche and on wider social forms. The densities of Vera's style and the disquieting shifts in narrative pe…
Adapting the national imaginary: Shifting identities in three post-1994 South African novels
This article investigates the contribution of imaginative writing (specifically, recent novels by Coetzee, Wicomb, Duiker and Langa) to the formation of notions of national identity, or their rejection, in post‐1994 South Africa. Dipesh Chakrabarty has urged writers of history to become aware of the collusion involved in subsuming alternative forms of solidarity to a nationalist master‐narrative. His is an apposite expression of some of the press…
Finding Foundations for Change in Bessie Head's The Cardinals
The struggle for the Eurasian borderlands: From the rise of early modern empires to the end of the First World War
The struggle for the Eurasian borderlands: from the rise of early modern empires to the end of the First World War." Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 52(3), pp. 375–376
The nation writ small: African fictions and feminisms, 1958-1988
Surveying the contours of ‘a country in exile: Nuruddin Farah's Somalia
The article examines the paradox of Farah's preoccupation with a ‘nation’ that exists neither as a society or a state – only as a ‘country’ in the sense of a geographical expression. Using comments from authorial interviews to introduce the analysis, the article sees Farah's fiction as following historical transitions and social adaptations (or deteriorations) both in Somalia itself, and those manifested in the Somali diaspora. Discussion of the …
Finding Foundations for Change in Bessie Head's The Cardinals
Achebe, Head, Marechera: On Power and Change in Africa
Concentrating on issues of power and change, this analysis of texts by Chinua Achbe, Bessie Head and Dambudzi Marechera teases out each author's view of how colonialism affected Africa, the contributions of Africans to their malaise, and how many reacted in creative, progressive, pragmatic ways
Marecheran postmodernism: Mocking the bad joke of “African Modernity”
This discussion begins by setting up a critique of the modernisation project of the West as closely entwined with territorial expansionism and the development of racial arrogance ‐ with reference to a range of theorists. The role of modernism (in literature) is recognised as simultaneously an exposure of territorial and racial power factors at work in the European modernisation project, and as (to some extent) complicit in them. The text used her…
Adapting the national imaginary: Shifting identities in three post-1994 South African novels
This article investigates the contribution of imaginative writing (specifically, recent novels by Coetzee, Wicomb, Duiker and Langa) to the formation of notions of national identity, or their rejection, in post‐1994 South Africa. Dipesh Chakrabarty has urged writers of history to become aware of the collusion involved in subsuming alternative forms of solidarity to a nationalist master‐narrative. His is an apposite expression of some of the press…
The celebrants (review of History is the home address by Mongane Wally Serote and This way I salute you by Keorapetse Kgositsile)
Extracted from text ... ~ 105 . . . . REVIEWS owner with Toyota HiLux very patronised, isint? So which way is bourgeois, white sub- urban man Mr Vladislavic? to jump as artist? Now is he not Mr Simeon Majara in another skin, exploiting violence and strangeness of Jozi for his own famousness? It is sad, Mr Grekov. You come to feel that Mr V feels art is dead. Gone are the days when you and your socialist ilk created great statues of bulk and porte…
Entering the Oppressor’s Mind: A Strategy of Writing in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power , Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins and Unity Dow’s The Screaming of the Innocent
In this article, Bessie Head’s A Question of Power (1974), Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins (2002) and Unity Dow’s The Screaming of the Innocent (2003) are read as examples of texts in which women writers explore from within the minds and motives of fellow-African, male figures who perpetrate crimes and cruelties against women in their respective postcolonial societies. It is argued that, by doing so, these authors employ a strategy of both acknow…
South African Novelists and the Grand Narrative of Apartheid
The apartheid policies and practices by means of which South Africa was formerly governed also had an ideological or mythological dimension, which functioned as its justificatory narrative. The process of replacing that narrative which needs to be undertaken in South Africa can make use, among other processes, of the re-presentations of this society by our novelists. This paper sketches something of the complex interplay between fiction, social r…
Surveying the contours of ‘a country in exile: Nuruddin Farah's Somalia
The article examines the paradox of Farah's preoccupation with a ‘nation’ that exists neither as a society or a state – only as a ‘country’ in the sense of a geographical expression. Using comments from authorial interviews to introduce the analysis, the article sees Farah's fiction as following historical transitions and social adaptations (or deteriorations) both in Somalia itself, and those manifested in the Somali diaspora. Discussion of the …
Reading The Stone Virgins as Vera's Study of the Katabolism of War
The article addresses Vera's unusual foregrounding of a violent male figure in The Stone Virgins-that of the dissident war veteran Sibaso, whose acts of murder and rape are depicted in mesmeric detail, as is his inner life. This focus in the text is read as serving Vera's analysis of the deforming, decreating effects of war on the individual psyche and on wider social forms. The densities of Vera's style and the disquieting shifts in narrative pe…
Writing a Life in Epistolic Form: Bessie Head's Letters
In this article Bessie Head's letters – mainly those published in the two collections, Vigne's A Gesture of Belonging (1991) and Cullinan's Imaginative Trespasser (2005) along with extracts from her letters quoted in Eilersen's biography of Head, Thunder Behind Her Ears (1995) – are used to suggest that in these texts we have a broken or intermittent autobiography. As the quotations illustrate, Head's published letters (almost all dating from her…
To Remember Is Like Starting to See”: South African life stories today
South African autobiographies in English published over the past ten years are abundant and cover a wide social range: from writers to politicians and from journalists to activists; TRC commissioners and medical specialists; artists and those in religious orders have all contributed to building a considerable oeuvre of informative, indeed often fascinating texts recording participation from different angles in the South African social process. Sh…
De-Othering’ the Perpetrator
The Uncoiling Python: South African storytellers and resistance
No abstract available
Ice-Candy-Man and In the Country of Men: The politics of cruelty and the witnessing child
Using two novels employing child narrators as observers of atrocities by which they are not only profoundly affected, but in which they become implicated (respectively by a Pakistani and a Libyan author), the article sets out to try and discover how the technique of mediation by a child witness and commentator affects the reader's perception of the Partition of Pakistan from India and the early rule of Gen. Quaddafi [or Gaddafi] in Libya, North A…
Lyrical Meditations on Spirituality and Sexuality: Drawing a Poetic Line
This essay proposes a reconsideration of poetic representations of the sexual and spiritual dimensions of human experience, arguing that, while generally less time-bound than works of fiction, lyrics both reflect and respond to attitudes concerning these aspects of our lives. The communicative and affective power of poetic texts makes exploration of a chronological selection of influential lyrics on these topics a worthwhile experience in itself,…
Imagining the Cape colony: History, literature, and the South African nation
The nation writ small: African fictions and feminisms, 1958-1988
The creolization of theory
edited by Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, Durham, NC, and London, Duke University Press, 2011, 306 pp., £15.99, ISBN 978 0 8223 4846 7 Opening with a substantial introduction by the editors, th
Moving spirit: The legacy of Dambudzo Marechera in the 21st century
edited by Julie Cairnie and Dobrota Pucherova, Zurich, Lit. Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Wien, 2012, 216 pp. plus DVD, ISBN 978 3 6439 0215 3 This text grew out of a symposium titled “Dambudzo Marechera
Topographies of Power and Pain in A Question of Power
A focus on Head's complex use of a discourse of location – outer and actual as well as social or psychic (imagined) – is employed as an interpretative strategy by means of which to map a reading of A Question of Power. Head's articulation of her struggles to relocate successfully to Botswana from South Africa through evocations of Elizabeth's experiences, thoughts and feelings is shown to employ references to place, social and geographical placem…
What Determines the Suspension of Budget Support
Illuminating Africa: Commemorating and Reassessing the Work of Chinua Achebe (1930-2013)
Cruel city; Blue white red
Cruel City (originally published in 1954 as Ville Cruelle) was the first novel – published under a different pseudonym – of Mongo Beti, who would in his lifetime become the leading African author w
The Book in Africa: Critical Debates/The Critical Imagination in African Literature: Essays in Honour of Michael J.C. Echeruo
As is often the case, the content of The Book in Africa: Critical Debates, though interesting, does not quite live up to its ambitious title, but it remains an informative and significant publicati
Reading Nuruddin Farah: The Individual, the Novel and the Idea of Home
Fiona Moolla makes a bold move in her dense reading of Farah’s oeuvre: eschewing most localising perspectives, she approaches the texts primarily in terms of genre and indeed in terms of European t
Sociology (28 works) · Art (26 works) · History (22 works) · History (19 works) · Literature (19 works) · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies (18 works) · Political science (17 works) · South African History and Culture (15 works) · Law (14 works) · African history and culture studies (13 works)