Description

Ngøgð wa Thiong’o is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of California, Irvine, and an award winning Kenyan author currently writing primarily in the Gðkøyø language. The author of many novels, plays, short stories, and essays, Ngøgð wa Thiong’o is founder and editor of the online Gðkøyø language journal, Møtiiri and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In this volume, Ngøgð wa Thiong’o summarises and develops a variety of issues he has grappled with in his work, which deploys a strategy of imagery, language, folklore, and character to ‘decolonize the mind’. Ngøgð confronts the politics of language in African writing; the problem of linguistic imperialism and literature’s ability to resist it; the difficult balance between orality, or ‘orature’, and the writing, or ‘literature’; the tension between national and world literature; and the role of the literary curriculum in both reaffirming and undermining the dominance of the Western canon. Throughout, he engages a range of philosophers and theorists writing on power and postcolonial creativity, including Hegel, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and Aimé Césaire. Yet his explorations remain grounded in his own experiences with literature and orature and reworks the difficult dialectics of theory into richly evocative prose.