The Oral and Beyond: Doing Things with Words in Africa by Ruth Finnegan [New]

ISBN: 9781869141257 / 1869141253 - The Oral and Beyond: Doing Things with Words in Africa by Ruth Finnegan. Published by UKZN Press, 2007. Softcover. New. 272 pp.

Africa has long been known as the oral continent, at once the home of oral literature, orature and orality, the oral background to the postcolonial literatures of today and the inspiration of the voiced traditions of the diaspora.

The Oral and Beyond looks simultaneously backwards and forwards, reviewing and critiquing the achievements of scholarship on African oral literature. Exploring fundamental questions as how texts and textuality relate to performance, how ideology inflects language, and how traditional forms adapt to modern media and popular culture, Finnegan essentially crafts an intellectual history of her field.

Her provocative conclusion is that it is time to abandon the long entrenched image of Africa as ‘the oral continent’ and to adopt a more critical comparative perspective on ‘the oral’.

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