The storyteller function in contemporary Nigerian narrative
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9002353 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Madhu Krishnan (University of Bristol, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2013 |
| Volume | 49 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 29-45 |
| Publication date | 2013-12-12 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-9894 • E-ISSN: 1741-6442 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0021989413510519 |
| OpenAlex | W2039218361 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 28 |
This paper considers the articulation of orality in contemporary Nigerian writing, focusing on Helon Habila’s Measuring Time (2007) and Chris Abani’s Song for Night (2008), asserting that, through the manipulation of collective engagement in meaning-making, each text functions as a contemporary griot, or repository of communal, cultural history. In contrast to earlier generations’ writing, which relied on the use of folktale, proverb, and linguistic techniques to forge a connection to the oral tradition, contemporary Anglophone African writers, this article argues, inscribe the oral tradition into their work through an epistemic shift that engages with the open signifiers of the communal, highlighting the storyteller function of their works. Both Habila’s and Abani’s novels thus occupy a discursive space which straddles registers, and both function through the art of the storyteller as a means of translating modes of collective address, foregrounding the very act of narration through their textual frames. From these foundational qualities, each work marks a contribution to, and departure from, ongoing debates surrounding the status of orality and writing as a means of cultural memorialization in global Anglophone African literature, a debate made fraught in no small part due to each discursive system’s implication with Enlightenment-driven conceptions of civilization and modernity
Aesthetics · Art · Articulation (sociology · Epistemology · Foregrounding · Indexicality · Linguistics · Literature · Modernity · Narrative · Orality · Politics · Sociology · Textuality · Anthropology · Cultural Identity and Representation · History · Law · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
African oral literature
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
How To Do Things With Words
The Tortoise and the Leopard, or the Postcolonial Muse
African Child Soldiers and Humanitarian Consumption
The Narrative of Conversion in Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God
Metonymic Eruptions
Oral literature in Africa
Imagined communities
Griots and Griottes
West Africa in the Atlantic Community
African Signs and Spirit Writing
Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
Trauma theory and Nigerian civil war literature
(Re-)Forming stereotypes
Imbongi and griot
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |