Thinking a Post-coronavirus Africa
Reading Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon in the Era of Covid-19
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22192205 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rogers Asempasah (0000-0003-1272-1211, University of Cape Coast, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 3 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 1-22 |
| Publication date | 2022-05-28 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | KENTE - Cape Coast Journal of Literature and the Arts (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2579-0285 • E-ISSN: 2579-0285 |
| Publisher | University of Cape Coast (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.47963/jla.v3i1.767 |
| OpenAlex | W4281953960 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 10 |
The coronavirus pandemic has exposed Africa’s precarious position within the global system. Once again, Africa is looking to the West for salvation in the form of vaccines and loans. Beyond the economic crisis, however, perhaps the most telling impact of the pandemic is not death but the shame of being postcolonial — a shame that arises from the painful realization that postcolonial is a condition of dependency. There is therefore a growing a critical voice on a post-coronavirus world. However, much of the discussion is taking place in the sciences and the social sciences, to the neglect of the humanities, especially literature. This paper addresses this lacuna by arguing that Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon (1995) can help us think a post-coronavirus Africa. Focusing specifically on the title of the novel as encapsulating a narrative of crisis that decolonizes the “beyond” and a subtle pedagogy on how to transcend postcolonial conceptual and material dependency on the West, the paper argues that Darko’s exploration of the shame of being postcolonial and postcolonial liberation is relevant to thinking about a post Covid-19 Africa. It concludes that Darko’s ethico-political vision is located in her subtle affirmation of Fanon’s call on Third World countries to strategically delink from Europe and the West in order to realize and inaugurate a genuine postcoloniality
Art · Literature · Narrative · Pandemic · Political science · Politics · Shame · Sociology · COVID-19 Pandemic Impacts · History · Law · Medicine · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
Cultural Action and Conscientization
Democracy, Capacity, and Coercion in Pandemic Response
Unsettling the coloniality of power
Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism
Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism
Law and Disorder in the Postcolony
Conceptual decolonization as an imperative in contemporary African philosophy
The Economic Costs of Covid-19 in Sub-Saharan Africa
Conscripts of Modernity
The Biopolitics of Social Distancing
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,25 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2022 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |