395 research outputs found
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Gender and the politics of war historiography in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra
Buchi Emecheta’s novel about the Nigerian Civil War, Destination Biafra (1982), challenges war historiography in ways that scholarship designating it a “female perspective” on the conflict can sometimes overlook. This article focuses on how Emecheta deploys a dual narrative approach that weaves an omniscient narrator with diverse Nigerian women’s points of view in order to position their lived experiences and subjective knowledges as collectively amounting to the definitive history of the Civil War. This draws the reader’s attention to the gendered effects of the civil war as the lens whereby which all facets of the war can be understood - even and especially its macro causes in neocolonialism and petrocapitalism. By writing women who know the economic imperatives behind the conflict; exercise agency under dangerous circumstances; and employ methods of survival that safeguard others, Emecheta reveals the gendered politics of war historiography, and tests these politics by collapsing distinctions between what is habitually conceived of as the war front (and therefore to be narrated by active combatants), and everywhere else (to be narrated by witnesses, refugees, or survivors). Destination can therefore be understood as an attempt to intervene directly in historiographical method, as it rejects the designation of women’s war experiences as mere addenda and questions gendered expectations of where to look for and find historical truths
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"Regarde le nègre!": Race, (In)Visibility and Subjecthood in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye
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“The self and the world against which it had to live”: Neocolonialism and the resistant subject in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born has been read in terms of its political criticism of the native elite in Nkrumah’s post-independence Ghana, and for its treatment of individual consciousness – but these elements have been treated largely in isolation from each other. This article argues that the novel establishes a nuanced interdependency between subjectivity and the material everyday of neocolonialism, grounding its exploration of the psychic strain of such conditions on its exposé of Ghana’s neocolonial economy. Defining subjectivity in Fanonian terms, it argues that the multi-temporality of Beautyful Ones, and its treatment of its protagonist’s interiority, illustrate how the self and its socio-economic conditions are mutually constitutive, explanatory and effectual. The neocolonial circumstances that Armah’s protagonist navigates each day equip him with the consciousness to historicize his psychic malaise. In this way, the novel gestures towards what a resistant subject, responsive to such corrupt conditions, might be
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Writing Exile: Displacement and Arrival in Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation and Edward Said's Out of Place
Both Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation and Edward Said's Out of Place are memoirs that recount a life of constant adjustments and re-orientations of the self, where the anchoring concept of ‘home’ cannot denote a centre upon which their multiple displacements can be tethered. There is no attempt here to imply both of these memoirs can seamlessly be read together in every sense, simply because both are émigré intellectuals; however, their shared trajectory of departures and arrivals crucially foregrounds space in their negotiation of the exilic experience. For both writers, inner dépaysement gives rise to a simultaneous coming to terms with the tensions of belonging that are already apparent within that origin so longed for. To compensate, Hoffman and Said designate language a power of emplacement, in that their shared refuge in it (both linguistic and musical) turns their displaced selves into articulated, and thus inhabited, ones. In configuring the different ‘belongings’ their selves undertake, the displacements and arrivals in Lost in Translation and Out of Place advocate a space for autobiography where plural identity is recognised as ontologically cohesive
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“They Drew an Entire People after Them”
Ousmane Sembène’s 1975 film Xala, a searing satire about the post-independence Senegalese elite, has received wide scholarly attention for its critique of crony capitalism masquerading as African socialism. This essay seeks to examine how Xala approaches the under-studied question of subjectivity under these circumstances, seeking to trace the film’s key concern with the effects of such neocolonial conditions upon the wider populace. Proposing that the central allegory of Sembène’s film – the native elite as complicit against and/or unable to spearhead national decolonization – is not the final but the starting point of the analysis it offers of the relationship between subjectivity and arrested decolonization, this essay argues Xala centres land dispossession as the primary issue in post-independence Senegal, both because it sabotages the redistributive promise of independence, and because it strips people of the material moorings of their sujectivities. In three interconnected discussions of sartorial self-fashioning, the politics of La Francophonie, and the kinship networks broken by land theft, I propose that Xala is an exposé of how structures and subjectivities are inseparably bound under conditions of neocolonialism, with the futurity of national decolonization dependent on transforming both
The clinical pattern of HER-2/neu oncogene overexpressing breast cancer in Pakistani patients at initial presentation: an analysis of HER-2/neu positive versus negative disease--a preliminary report
Background: HER 2/new oncogene is an important prognostic marker in Breast Cancer and has implications in therapy planning.Objective: To describe the clinical features of HER 2/new positive and negative Breast Cancer in the Pakistani patient population and note clinical differences between the two groups if any.Design: A retrospective analysis of Breast Cancer cases at the Aga Khan University, Hospital.METHOD: Immunochemical staining on formation fixed paraffin embedded tissue using oxidase antiperoxidase method. A total of 152 Breast cancer tissue samples were tested for HER-2/neu gene presence. Of these 43 (39%) samples tested positive and 109 (61%) tested negative. A comparison of the two groups revealed that only a few factors tested for either significance or borderline statistical significance between the two groups. These factors included the estrogen receptor status and the number of lymph nodes involved in the axilla. The progesterone receptor status was of borderline significance.CONCLUSION: Given the large number of factors tested it appears that there is no consistent defining feature which helps to separate HER-2/neu positive versus HER-2/neu negative cases with Breast Cancer
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