The Campus as War Zone
Contemporary Anglophone Fiction, Post-Independence Civil War, and the African University
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2173333 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Anne W Gulick (0000-0002-1292-410X, University of South Carolina, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 35 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 37-52 |
| Publication date | 2023-01-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of African Cultural Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1369-6815 • E-ISSN: 1469-9346 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/13696815.2022.2158789 |
| OpenAlex | W4319794160 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 21 |
This article explores how a set of contemporary Anglophone African novels critically engage the relationship between universities and war. Dinaw Mengestu's 2014 All Our Names, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 2006 Half of a Yellow Sun, and Aminatta Forna's 2010 The Memory of Love are war novels that chronicle the collapse of the postcolonial state in the face of military coups and authoritarian rule in the late 1960s; in all three texts, the university takes on a stealthy significance as the institutional backdrop for that collapse. The transformation of university campuses into war zones in these novels occasions material devastation and both individual and collective trauma. It also exposes deep and longstanding entanglements between war, education, and knowledge production in the postcolony, and invites nuanced reflection on the ambivalent legacy of the 1960s for the present. Beyond these novels' sober and bleak assessments of post-independence conflict lies an invitation to imagine how war might also serve as a source of knowledge, a means of building and improving upon the anticolonial aspirations that were never fully achieved in the era of independence
Ambivalence · Art · Authoritarianism · Democracy · Face (sociological concept · Independence (probability theory · Literature · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Social science · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · War of independence · African history and culture studies · History · Law · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology · South African History and Culture
Nigeria’s University Age
A Third University Is Possible
Beyond Education
Cruel Optimism
The Legacies of Empire in Nwaubani's I Do Not Come to You by Chance and Mengestu's All Our Names
An African Voice
Revolt and Protest
The Child Soldier Narrative and the Problem of Arrested Historicization
The Half Lives of African Fictive States
Writing About the Dead in the Present Tense
Imperialism, Academe and Nationalism
The Promise of Partnership and Continuities of Dependence
African Visions
A Companion to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2024 - 2024 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |