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Full Description
What are Sierra Leonean and diaspora authors writing about today? What genres are they working in? What are future possibilities and directions of travel?
The ethnically and linguistically diverse nation of Sierra Leone boasts a rich cultural legacy and, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, has built an internationally recognized literary canon despite the ravages caused by a brutal civil war and then the Ebola and Covid pandemics. While acknowledging the country's literary and creative heritage dating back to the mid-twentieth century, this book interrogates a number of prominent themes and critical perspectives on Sierra Leone's contemporary literature.
Drawing from body studies, post-colonial theory, spatial theory, trauma theory, ecocriticism, history, and cultural studies, scholars and writers from West Africa and the United States tease out the beginnings, ecology, and dynamism of a bona fide national literature. They do so through a careful examination of such themes as social oppression and class distinction, dystopia, ethnocentricity, homophobia, misogyny and gender disparities, anthropocentrism, self-discovery, social transformation, identity, social degradation, genocide, and trauma, while also theorizing constructs such as home, migration, displacement, community, and return. Throughout, contributors argue for a better appreciation of a vibrant national literature by Sierra Leoneans themselves as well as its place in and contribution to world literature more generally.
Contents
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Section I: The Creative Imagination: Language, History, and Culture
1. Unacknowledged Creative Loops: Orature, Literature and Society in Sierra Leone's Contemporary History - Mohamed Gibril Sesay
2. The Past Flows: Water as a Metaphor for Nostalgia in Ahmed Koroma's The Moon Rises Over Isale Eko - Oumar Farouk Sesay
3. English Language Learning and Intelligibility: Idiomaticity, Sierra Leonean English and Sierra Leonean Fiction - Momodu Turay
4. The Female Condition in the Novels of Aminatta Forna - Saidu Bangura
Section II: Legacies of War and Pandemic: Literature as Witness to Violence, Trauma, and Resilience
5. Syl Cheney-Coker's Stone Child and Other Poems: a Graphic Exploration of War Trauma - Eustace Palmer
6. Space, Trauma, and Healing in Delia Jarrett-Macauley's Moses, Citizen and Me - Oumar Chérif Diop
7. Learning How to Smile Again: Ebola, Resilience, and Sierra Leonean Fiction - Joya Uraizee
8. War and Social Degradation in Oumar Farouk Sesay's Landscape of Memories - Elizabeth Kamara
Section III: Visions of the Future: New Genres, Aesthetics, and Epistemologies
9. "A Window to Society": The Human Condition in the Context of Interspecies Relations in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and Aminatta Forna's The Window Seat - Ernest Cole
10. Namina Forna's The Gilded Ones: An Afrocentric Vision of the Beloved Community - Mohamed Kamara
11. Smartphone Literature in Today's Sierra Leone: Assessing Claims of Continuity with Traditional Fireside Folktales - Stephen Ney
12. The Intersection of Life and History in Eldred Jones' The Freetown Bond: A Life under Two Flags - Samuel Kamara
13. Relatability, Spaces, Symbols and Legends: Fiction as a Mirror Image for Social Transformation in Walon-Jalloh's 'Dharmendra Died' - Gibrilla Kargbo
Index
