This article considers how the theme of waiting is treated in two African realist novels: Chinua ... more This article considers how the theme of waiting is treated in two African realist novels: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Goretti Kyomuhendo’s Waiting: A Novel of Uganda at War. Building on recent scholarship that seeks to understand waiting as more than deferral or failure, the article develops the notion of idleness as an important aspect of waiting. It shows how the novels engage with waiting on both thematic and formal levels, thereby conveying “a human measurement of time” that is grounded in the nexus of community, nature, and storytelling. Specifically, it suggests that the communal temporalities of waiting are indebted to animist storytelling practices, which allow communities to construct themselves through their embeddedness in nature. Comparing two novels in which waiting is a communal strategy for resisting political oppression in the wake of colonialism, the article thus teases out culturally specific modes of temporality and waiting that predated colonialism and which offered — and still offer — a rejection of the binaries of productiveness/idleness, growth/stasis, and failure/success.
This article is a historical investigation of language-in-education policy in Uganda. It compares... more This article is a historical investigation of language-in-education policy in Uganda. It compares educational reports from the 1890s to the 2000s with research from cultural history to trace how language ideologies shaped the use of English and African languages in Ugandan schools. The historical perspective seeks to complement current research on mother tongue education in Uganda by interrogating the nexus of economic, religious, political and ideological factors that shaped the modern educational system in Uganda. Analysing language policy in the British Empire through the specific case of Uganda, particularly the influential role of Makerere University, we show there are Eurocentric ideologies that are embedded in the historical support for mother tongue education. Mother tongues were and are used as scaffolds to learn English. Through the lenses of linguistic imperialism and critical pedagogy, we argue that the current model of transitional bilingual education needs to be reframed as full bilingual education, with particular attention to the segregation between public/private and rural/urban schools, and to smaller languages.
Mary Seacole's memoir Wonderful Adventures is recognized for its negotiation of various g... more Mary Seacole's memoir Wonderful Adventures is recognized for its negotiation of various genres of Victorian writing, including autobiography, travel writing, the slave narrative, and a burgeoning Caribbean tradition of letters. It is a text which is usually interpreted through conventions of Empire, or through the lens of Postcolonial studies. Attempting to bridge this either/or approach, this article focuses on Seacole's construction of narrative commonalities: I ask, why would a woman so clearly bent on defying the limitations placed on her by gender and race, and whose achievements appear so exceptionally individual, undergird her narrative with constant references to collective identities—often in their most stereotypical abstractions? To answer this question, I engage in close readings that explore the tension between the typical and the specific though Seacole's use of terminology, focalization and passive voice, and the repeated use of antiphonal structures such as an AAB pattern. I show how Seacole's self-representation, and her reference to black communities and individuals, draw on trickster sensibilities, thus expanding previous readings of her text that consider her either subversive or complicit in the imperial project. I suggest that Seacole injects Jamaican and black Atlantic sensibilities into her text, even as she uses Victorian rhetorical devices, making the two traditions complementary—as they seem to be in her life.
In this paper I use the concept of teacherliness to explore the connections between literature an... more In this paper I use the concept of teacherliness to explore the connections between literature and education in Binyavanga Wainaina’s memoir One Day I Will Write About This Place and his opinion pieces on education. I read Wainaina’s texts against the way the literature/literacy duality has been envisioned in historical discourses, arguing that deeper pedagogical questions were largely overlooked in the intersections between the two theoretical fields. To address this lacuna, I use Paulo Freire’s theory of Critical Pedagogy to analyze historical debates of curriculum and canonization, as well as Wainaina’s more recent engagement with the Kenyan educational system, in which questions on how to write are intertwined with thoughts on how to teach. After detailing this history of literature and literacy in East Africa, I explore the themes and aesthetic devices that Wainaina develops in One Day to reflect on his own role as an educator in the context of his troubled relationship with hi...
ABSTRACT This article engages with the works of Sudanese American poet Safia Elhillo, a rising st... more ABSTRACT This article engages with the works of Sudanese American poet Safia Elhillo, a rising star in Arab, African, and diasporic literary circles. It explores the chronotopic use of metre, repetition, keywords, and mise-en-abyme in Elhillo’s works to think through the ontological stakes of postcolonial verse. It consequently proposes fractals as a non-binary way of conceptualizing hybridity, linking these to a polychronic logic, where the poems’ form and content foreground temporality as a recursive, self-repetitive contemporaneity. Further, through a sustained focus on how Elhillo creates a network of intertextual links between her poems, the article shows how recursive structures that highlight time-space dialectics cast scale as the main link between the various building blocks of the poems. By linking these chronotopic fractals to patterns of orature that draw on both Arabic and African traditions, the article gives an aesthetic reading of the betweenness of Elhillo’s American Sudanese positionality.
ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 2020
This article seeks to contribute to critical readings of realism’s memetic claims by tracing the ... more This article seeks to contribute to critical readings of realism’s memetic claims by tracing the ways in which framed narration, or writing-about-writing, serve to establish reliability in Chimamanda Adichie’s seminal novel Half of a Yellow Sun. I argue that conceptions of typicality are used almost interchangeably in scholarly discussions on realism and Africanness, and that this requires a narrative framework that untangles the myriad links between them. Inserting Adichie’s now-famous concept of the ‘single story’ into this debate, I show how Africanness and realism are negotiated as two kinds of typicality that work, counterintuitively, to undercut stereotypes, and moreover, to allow realism to establish a kind of verisimilitude that is far from mimetically naïve. I start from a theoretical overview of terms such as realism, Africanness, typicality, referentiality, diegesis, and metalepsis, attempting to clarify the connections I draw between them. I then move briefly to a juxtaposition between the embedded books in Adichie’s novel and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as an oscillation between oral and written representations. Finally, the focal point of my investigation is the diegetic layering in Half of a Yellow Sun, where I read typicality in-between orality and writing, the public and the private, and specificity and typification. &nbsp
ABSTRACT: This article examines the continuity between Chinua Achebe’s rural novels and Chimamand... more ABSTRACT: This article examines the continuity between Chinua Achebe’s rural novels and Chimamanda Adichie’s 2007 novel Half of a Yellow Sun. Based on the concept of complementary dualism, the article explores the affinity between the two authors and their works through several sets of dualities: individualism and collectivism, natural and supernatural, and tradition and change, which gradually becomes the duality of African and Western. Suggesting that these dualities allow us to see how Achebe’s legacy has reincarnated into a nuanced engagement with the categories of specificity and typicality, I suggest that Adichie’s conscious engagement of Achebe is pertinent to the contemporary critical discussion on Africanness as it is constructed through literature. Moreover, I explore how realism, as a genre entailed with its own engagement with typicality and specificity, engages with Africanness to illustrate the circularity of interpretation, where historical events are infused with new meaning in a process of reciprocal influences between new and old representations.
This article is possibly the first qualitative research on the USAID-funded School Health and Rea... more This article is possibly the first qualitative research on the USAID-funded School Health and Reading Program (SHRP), implemented in Uganda since 2012. The SHRP program is aimed at scaling up the Thematic Curriculum (TC) reform, which was the first attempt to standardize the use of mother tongues in lower primary schools through child-centred pedagogical practices. SHRP has expanded the TC to additional local languages and districts , providing new learning materials-including specific teaching techniques-and teacher training to support it. However, the implementation of SHRP is marked by the fact that it is a donor-led reform that is perceived by teachers as an external intervention not well suited for Ugandan classroom realities. Our research is a multi-layered analysis of how teachers perceive the reform as its grassroots implementers. We ask how SHRP's pedagogical emphasis on child-centred pedagogy is linked to it being donor-funded, and how teachers translate this perceived link into their classroom practices. We trace the links between the policy, classroom, and community levels to make concrete suggestions on how the SHRP program can benefit from teachers' resources and creativity, while highlighting which aspects of mother tongue education the Ugandan Government needs to prioritize on a national level, and which aspects need to be better adjusted on a regional basis.
Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 2021
Mary Seacole's memoir Wonderful Adventures is recognized for its negotiation of various genres of... more Mary Seacole's memoir Wonderful Adventures is recognized for its negotiation of various genres of Victorian writing, including autobiography, travel writing, the slave narrative, and a burgeoning Caribbean tradition of letters. It is a text which is usually interpreted through conventions of Empire, or through the lens of Postcolonial studies. Attempting to bridge this either/or approach, this article focuses on Seacole's construction of narrative commonalities: I ask, why would a woman so clearly bent on defying the limitations placed on her by gender and race, and whose achievements appear so exceptionally individual, undergird her narrative with constant references to collective identities—often in their most stereotypical abstractions? To answer this question, I engage in close readings that explore the tension between the typical and the specific though Seacole's use of terminology, focalization and passive voice, and the repeated use of antiphonal structures such as an AAB pattern. I show how Seacole's self-representation, and her reference to black communities and individuals, draw on trickster sensibilities, thus expanding previous readings of her text that consider her either subversive or complicit in the imperial project. I suggest that Seacole injects Jamaican and black Atlantic sensibilities into her text, even as she uses Victorian rhetorical devices, making the two traditions complementary—as they seem to be in her life.
In this paper I use the concept of teacherliness to explore the connections between literature an... more In this paper I use the concept of teacherliness to explore the connections between literature and education in Binyavanga Wainaina’s memoir One Day I Will Write About This Place and his opinion pieces on education. I read Wainaina’s texts against the way the literature/literacy duality has been envisioned in historical discourses, arguing that deeper pedagogical questions were largely overlooked in the intersections between the two theoretical fields. To address this lacuna, I use Paulo Freire’s theory of Critical Pedagogy to analyze historical debates of curriculum and canonization, as well as Wainaina’s more recent engagement with the Kenyan educational system, in which questions on how to write are intertwined with thoughts on how to teach. After detailing this history of literature and literacy in East Africa, I explore the themes and aesthetic devices that Wainaina develops in One Day to reflect on his own role as an educator in the context of his troubled relationship with his own schooling. By focusing on the theme of failure and Wainaina’s embedding of oral structures into his text, I suggest Wainaina’s work offers insights and concrete narrative patterns that might become fruitful tools through which educational theory and literary analysis might illuminate each other’s blind spots, specifically in regard to oral skills in education.
This article engages with the works of Sudanese American poet Safia Elhillo, a rising star in Ara... more This article engages with the works of Sudanese American poet Safia Elhillo, a rising star in Arab, African, and diasporic literary circles. It explores the chronotopic use of metre, repetition, keywords, and mise-en-abyme in Elhillo’s works to think through the ontological stakes of postcolonial verse. It consequently proposes fractals as a non-binary way of conceptualizing hybridity, linking these to a polychronic logic, where the poems’ form and content foreground temporality as a recursive, self-repetitive contemporaneity. Further, through a sustained focus on how Elhillo creates a network of intertextual links between her poems, the article shows how recursive structures that highlight time-space dialectics cast scale as the main link between the various building blocks of the poems. By linking these chronotopic fractals to patterns of orature that draw on both Arabic and African traditions, the article gives an aesthetic reading of the betweenness of Elhillo’s American Sudanese positionality.
International Journal of Educational Development, 2021
This article is possibly the first qualitative research on the USAID-funded School Health and Rea... more This article is possibly the first qualitative research on the USAID-funded School Health and Reading Program (SHRP), implemented in Uganda since 2012. The SHRP program is aimed at scaling up the Thematic Curriculum (TC) reform, which was the first attempt to standardize the use of mother tongues in lower primary schools through child-centred pedagogical practices. SHRP has expanded the TC to additional local languages and districts , providing new learning materials-including specific teaching techniques-and teacher training to support it. However, the implementation of SHRP is marked by the fact that it is a donor-led reform that is perceived by teachers as an external intervention not well suited for Ugandan classroom realities. Our research is a multi-layered analysis of how teachers perceive the reform as its grassroots implementers. We ask how SHRP's pedagogical emphasis on child-centred pedagogy is linked to it being donor-funded, and how teachers translate this perceived link into their classroom practices. We trace the links between the policy, classroom, and community levels to make concrete suggestions on how the SHRP program can benefit from teachers' resources and creativity, while highlighting which aspects of mother tongue education the Ugandan Government needs to prioritize on a national level, and which aspects need to be better adjusted on a regional basis.
ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 2020
This article seeks to contribute to critical readings of realism’s mimetic claims by tracing how ... more This article seeks to contribute to critical readings of realism’s mimetic claims by tracing how framed narration, or writing-about-writing, establishes reliability in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s seminal novel Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). Conceptions of typicality are used almost interchangeably in scholarly discussions about realism and Africanness without a critical framework that untangles the myriad links between them. To fill this lacuna, I provide a theoretical exploration of how typicality and typification, as two modes of characterization, connect fiction and reference in Adichie’s novel. Focusing on the diegetic layering in Half of a Yellow Sun, I show how Africanness and realism are negotiated as two kinds of typicality that work, counterintuitively, to undercut stereotypes. Building on Adichie’s now-famous concept of the “single story,” I use narratological terminology to think through the tension between typicality and specificity, and its particular stakes in African literature. Using this terminology, I trace how the writing of the protagonists Ugwu and Richard oscillates between fictional and referential, public and private, and oral and written representations. I thus show that realism, through framed narrations, establishes a kind of verisimilitude that is far from mimetically naïve.
This article, published in HaAretz, contextualizes recent protests by the Israeli Ethiopian commu... more This article, published in HaAretz, contextualizes recent protests by the Israeli Ethiopian community following the shooting of Solomon Teka, arguing that the ongoing stereotypical portrayal of Africa - for instance in travel columns - both reflects and perpetuates public attitudes towards Ethiopian Jews.
This short essay traces Binyavanga Wainaina's fierce advocacy for innovative and creative educati... more This short essay traces Binyavanga Wainaina's fierce advocacy for innovative and creative education in Africa. While criticizing the Kenyan educational system, Wainaina's writings and his personal activism demonstrate his keen and nuanced support of public education, in a manner that reflects the tenets of critical pedagogy. Further, by demonstrating how oral pedagogy can lend itself to discernment, rationality, and critical thinking, I argue that Wainaina calls for imaginative and context-specific solutions that can only be achieved by mapping challenges alongside successes, and by re-imagining the ways in which literature and literacy, as well as formal and informal networks, stand beside each other.
International Development in Africa: Between Policy and Practice, 2019
This article (in Hebrew) examines the challenges that teacher in Burundi face following recent ch... more This article (in Hebrew) examines the challenges that teacher in Burundi face following recent changes to language policy (Varly & Mazunya 2011), based on fieldwork conducted in Makamba Province in 2014, read through the prism of critical pedagogy (Freie 1968).
This article considers how the theme of waiting is treated in two African realist novels: Chinua ... more This article considers how the theme of waiting is treated in two African realist novels: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Goretti Kyomuhendo’s Waiting: A Novel of Uganda at War. Building on recent scholarship that seeks to understand waiting as more than deferral or failure, the article develops the notion of idleness as an important aspect of waiting. It shows how the novels engage with waiting on both thematic and formal levels, thereby conveying “a human measurement of time” that is grounded in the nexus of community, nature, and storytelling. Specifically, it suggests that the communal temporalities of waiting are indebted to animist storytelling practices, which allow communities to construct themselves through their embeddedness in nature. Comparing two novels in which waiting is a communal strategy for resisting political oppression in the wake of colonialism, the article thus teases out culturally specific modes of temporality and waiting that predated colonialism and which offered — and still offer — a rejection of the binaries of productiveness/idleness, growth/stasis, and failure/success.
This article is a historical investigation of language-in-education policy in Uganda. It compares... more This article is a historical investigation of language-in-education policy in Uganda. It compares educational reports from the 1890s to the 2000s with research from cultural history to trace how language ideologies shaped the use of English and African languages in Ugandan schools. The historical perspective seeks to complement current research on mother tongue education in Uganda by interrogating the nexus of economic, religious, political and ideological factors that shaped the modern educational system in Uganda. Analysing language policy in the British Empire through the specific case of Uganda, particularly the influential role of Makerere University, we show there are Eurocentric ideologies that are embedded in the historical support for mother tongue education. Mother tongues were and are used as scaffolds to learn English. Through the lenses of linguistic imperialism and critical pedagogy, we argue that the current model of transitional bilingual education needs to be reframed as full bilingual education, with particular attention to the segregation between public/private and rural/urban schools, and to smaller languages.
Mary Seacole's memoir Wonderful Adventures is recognized for its negotiation of various g... more Mary Seacole's memoir Wonderful Adventures is recognized for its negotiation of various genres of Victorian writing, including autobiography, travel writing, the slave narrative, and a burgeoning Caribbean tradition of letters. It is a text which is usually interpreted through conventions of Empire, or through the lens of Postcolonial studies. Attempting to bridge this either/or approach, this article focuses on Seacole's construction of narrative commonalities: I ask, why would a woman so clearly bent on defying the limitations placed on her by gender and race, and whose achievements appear so exceptionally individual, undergird her narrative with constant references to collective identities—often in their most stereotypical abstractions? To answer this question, I engage in close readings that explore the tension between the typical and the specific though Seacole's use of terminology, focalization and passive voice, and the repeated use of antiphonal structures such as an AAB pattern. I show how Seacole's self-representation, and her reference to black communities and individuals, draw on trickster sensibilities, thus expanding previous readings of her text that consider her either subversive or complicit in the imperial project. I suggest that Seacole injects Jamaican and black Atlantic sensibilities into her text, even as she uses Victorian rhetorical devices, making the two traditions complementary—as they seem to be in her life.
In this paper I use the concept of teacherliness to explore the connections between literature an... more In this paper I use the concept of teacherliness to explore the connections between literature and education in Binyavanga Wainaina’s memoir One Day I Will Write About This Place and his opinion pieces on education. I read Wainaina’s texts against the way the literature/literacy duality has been envisioned in historical discourses, arguing that deeper pedagogical questions were largely overlooked in the intersections between the two theoretical fields. To address this lacuna, I use Paulo Freire’s theory of Critical Pedagogy to analyze historical debates of curriculum and canonization, as well as Wainaina’s more recent engagement with the Kenyan educational system, in which questions on how to write are intertwined with thoughts on how to teach. After detailing this history of literature and literacy in East Africa, I explore the themes and aesthetic devices that Wainaina develops in One Day to reflect on his own role as an educator in the context of his troubled relationship with hi...
ABSTRACT This article engages with the works of Sudanese American poet Safia Elhillo, a rising st... more ABSTRACT This article engages with the works of Sudanese American poet Safia Elhillo, a rising star in Arab, African, and diasporic literary circles. It explores the chronotopic use of metre, repetition, keywords, and mise-en-abyme in Elhillo’s works to think through the ontological stakes of postcolonial verse. It consequently proposes fractals as a non-binary way of conceptualizing hybridity, linking these to a polychronic logic, where the poems’ form and content foreground temporality as a recursive, self-repetitive contemporaneity. Further, through a sustained focus on how Elhillo creates a network of intertextual links between her poems, the article shows how recursive structures that highlight time-space dialectics cast scale as the main link between the various building blocks of the poems. By linking these chronotopic fractals to patterns of orature that draw on both Arabic and African traditions, the article gives an aesthetic reading of the betweenness of Elhillo’s American Sudanese positionality.
ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 2020
This article seeks to contribute to critical readings of realism’s memetic claims by tracing the ... more This article seeks to contribute to critical readings of realism’s memetic claims by tracing the ways in which framed narration, or writing-about-writing, serve to establish reliability in Chimamanda Adichie’s seminal novel Half of a Yellow Sun. I argue that conceptions of typicality are used almost interchangeably in scholarly discussions on realism and Africanness, and that this requires a narrative framework that untangles the myriad links between them. Inserting Adichie’s now-famous concept of the ‘single story’ into this debate, I show how Africanness and realism are negotiated as two kinds of typicality that work, counterintuitively, to undercut stereotypes, and moreover, to allow realism to establish a kind of verisimilitude that is far from mimetically naïve. I start from a theoretical overview of terms such as realism, Africanness, typicality, referentiality, diegesis, and metalepsis, attempting to clarify the connections I draw between them. I then move briefly to a juxtaposition between the embedded books in Adichie’s novel and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as an oscillation between oral and written representations. Finally, the focal point of my investigation is the diegetic layering in Half of a Yellow Sun, where I read typicality in-between orality and writing, the public and the private, and specificity and typification. &nbsp
ABSTRACT: This article examines the continuity between Chinua Achebe’s rural novels and Chimamand... more ABSTRACT: This article examines the continuity between Chinua Achebe’s rural novels and Chimamanda Adichie’s 2007 novel Half of a Yellow Sun. Based on the concept of complementary dualism, the article explores the affinity between the two authors and their works through several sets of dualities: individualism and collectivism, natural and supernatural, and tradition and change, which gradually becomes the duality of African and Western. Suggesting that these dualities allow us to see how Achebe’s legacy has reincarnated into a nuanced engagement with the categories of specificity and typicality, I suggest that Adichie’s conscious engagement of Achebe is pertinent to the contemporary critical discussion on Africanness as it is constructed through literature. Moreover, I explore how realism, as a genre entailed with its own engagement with typicality and specificity, engages with Africanness to illustrate the circularity of interpretation, where historical events are infused with new meaning in a process of reciprocal influences between new and old representations.
This article is possibly the first qualitative research on the USAID-funded School Health and Rea... more This article is possibly the first qualitative research on the USAID-funded School Health and Reading Program (SHRP), implemented in Uganda since 2012. The SHRP program is aimed at scaling up the Thematic Curriculum (TC) reform, which was the first attempt to standardize the use of mother tongues in lower primary schools through child-centred pedagogical practices. SHRP has expanded the TC to additional local languages and districts , providing new learning materials-including specific teaching techniques-and teacher training to support it. However, the implementation of SHRP is marked by the fact that it is a donor-led reform that is perceived by teachers as an external intervention not well suited for Ugandan classroom realities. Our research is a multi-layered analysis of how teachers perceive the reform as its grassroots implementers. We ask how SHRP's pedagogical emphasis on child-centred pedagogy is linked to it being donor-funded, and how teachers translate this perceived link into their classroom practices. We trace the links between the policy, classroom, and community levels to make concrete suggestions on how the SHRP program can benefit from teachers' resources and creativity, while highlighting which aspects of mother tongue education the Ugandan Government needs to prioritize on a national level, and which aspects need to be better adjusted on a regional basis.
Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 2021
Mary Seacole's memoir Wonderful Adventures is recognized for its negotiation of various genres of... more Mary Seacole's memoir Wonderful Adventures is recognized for its negotiation of various genres of Victorian writing, including autobiography, travel writing, the slave narrative, and a burgeoning Caribbean tradition of letters. It is a text which is usually interpreted through conventions of Empire, or through the lens of Postcolonial studies. Attempting to bridge this either/or approach, this article focuses on Seacole's construction of narrative commonalities: I ask, why would a woman so clearly bent on defying the limitations placed on her by gender and race, and whose achievements appear so exceptionally individual, undergird her narrative with constant references to collective identities—often in their most stereotypical abstractions? To answer this question, I engage in close readings that explore the tension between the typical and the specific though Seacole's use of terminology, focalization and passive voice, and the repeated use of antiphonal structures such as an AAB pattern. I show how Seacole's self-representation, and her reference to black communities and individuals, draw on trickster sensibilities, thus expanding previous readings of her text that consider her either subversive or complicit in the imperial project. I suggest that Seacole injects Jamaican and black Atlantic sensibilities into her text, even as she uses Victorian rhetorical devices, making the two traditions complementary—as they seem to be in her life.
In this paper I use the concept of teacherliness to explore the connections between literature an... more In this paper I use the concept of teacherliness to explore the connections between literature and education in Binyavanga Wainaina’s memoir One Day I Will Write About This Place and his opinion pieces on education. I read Wainaina’s texts against the way the literature/literacy duality has been envisioned in historical discourses, arguing that deeper pedagogical questions were largely overlooked in the intersections between the two theoretical fields. To address this lacuna, I use Paulo Freire’s theory of Critical Pedagogy to analyze historical debates of curriculum and canonization, as well as Wainaina’s more recent engagement with the Kenyan educational system, in which questions on how to write are intertwined with thoughts on how to teach. After detailing this history of literature and literacy in East Africa, I explore the themes and aesthetic devices that Wainaina develops in One Day to reflect on his own role as an educator in the context of his troubled relationship with his own schooling. By focusing on the theme of failure and Wainaina’s embedding of oral structures into his text, I suggest Wainaina’s work offers insights and concrete narrative patterns that might become fruitful tools through which educational theory and literary analysis might illuminate each other’s blind spots, specifically in regard to oral skills in education.
This article engages with the works of Sudanese American poet Safia Elhillo, a rising star in Ara... more This article engages with the works of Sudanese American poet Safia Elhillo, a rising star in Arab, African, and diasporic literary circles. It explores the chronotopic use of metre, repetition, keywords, and mise-en-abyme in Elhillo’s works to think through the ontological stakes of postcolonial verse. It consequently proposes fractals as a non-binary way of conceptualizing hybridity, linking these to a polychronic logic, where the poems’ form and content foreground temporality as a recursive, self-repetitive contemporaneity. Further, through a sustained focus on how Elhillo creates a network of intertextual links between her poems, the article shows how recursive structures that highlight time-space dialectics cast scale as the main link between the various building blocks of the poems. By linking these chronotopic fractals to patterns of orature that draw on both Arabic and African traditions, the article gives an aesthetic reading of the betweenness of Elhillo’s American Sudanese positionality.
International Journal of Educational Development, 2021
This article is possibly the first qualitative research on the USAID-funded School Health and Rea... more This article is possibly the first qualitative research on the USAID-funded School Health and Reading Program (SHRP), implemented in Uganda since 2012. The SHRP program is aimed at scaling up the Thematic Curriculum (TC) reform, which was the first attempt to standardize the use of mother tongues in lower primary schools through child-centred pedagogical practices. SHRP has expanded the TC to additional local languages and districts , providing new learning materials-including specific teaching techniques-and teacher training to support it. However, the implementation of SHRP is marked by the fact that it is a donor-led reform that is perceived by teachers as an external intervention not well suited for Ugandan classroom realities. Our research is a multi-layered analysis of how teachers perceive the reform as its grassroots implementers. We ask how SHRP's pedagogical emphasis on child-centred pedagogy is linked to it being donor-funded, and how teachers translate this perceived link into their classroom practices. We trace the links between the policy, classroom, and community levels to make concrete suggestions on how the SHRP program can benefit from teachers' resources and creativity, while highlighting which aspects of mother tongue education the Ugandan Government needs to prioritize on a national level, and which aspects need to be better adjusted on a regional basis.
ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 2020
This article seeks to contribute to critical readings of realism’s mimetic claims by tracing how ... more This article seeks to contribute to critical readings of realism’s mimetic claims by tracing how framed narration, or writing-about-writing, establishes reliability in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s seminal novel Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). Conceptions of typicality are used almost interchangeably in scholarly discussions about realism and Africanness without a critical framework that untangles the myriad links between them. To fill this lacuna, I provide a theoretical exploration of how typicality and typification, as two modes of characterization, connect fiction and reference in Adichie’s novel. Focusing on the diegetic layering in Half of a Yellow Sun, I show how Africanness and realism are negotiated as two kinds of typicality that work, counterintuitively, to undercut stereotypes. Building on Adichie’s now-famous concept of the “single story,” I use narratological terminology to think through the tension between typicality and specificity, and its particular stakes in African literature. Using this terminology, I trace how the writing of the protagonists Ugwu and Richard oscillates between fictional and referential, public and private, and oral and written representations. I thus show that realism, through framed narrations, establishes a kind of verisimilitude that is far from mimetically naïve.
This article, published in HaAretz, contextualizes recent protests by the Israeli Ethiopian commu... more This article, published in HaAretz, contextualizes recent protests by the Israeli Ethiopian community following the shooting of Solomon Teka, arguing that the ongoing stereotypical portrayal of Africa - for instance in travel columns - both reflects and perpetuates public attitudes towards Ethiopian Jews.
This short essay traces Binyavanga Wainaina's fierce advocacy for innovative and creative educati... more This short essay traces Binyavanga Wainaina's fierce advocacy for innovative and creative education in Africa. While criticizing the Kenyan educational system, Wainaina's writings and his personal activism demonstrate his keen and nuanced support of public education, in a manner that reflects the tenets of critical pedagogy. Further, by demonstrating how oral pedagogy can lend itself to discernment, rationality, and critical thinking, I argue that Wainaina calls for imaginative and context-specific solutions that can only be achieved by mapping challenges alongside successes, and by re-imagining the ways in which literature and literacy, as well as formal and informal networks, stand beside each other.
International Development in Africa: Between Policy and Practice, 2019
This article (in Hebrew) examines the challenges that teacher in Burundi face following recent ch... more This article (in Hebrew) examines the challenges that teacher in Burundi face following recent changes to language policy (Varly & Mazunya 2011), based on fieldwork conducted in Makamba Province in 2014, read through the prism of critical pedagogy (Freie 1968).
Paper presented at at the international workshop “Celebrity and Protest in Africa and in the Anti... more Paper presented at at the international workshop “Celebrity and Protest in Africa and in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle,” 29-31 Oct. 2018, University of Copenhagen.
The paper approaches the idea of celebrity and protest as an investigation into specific ways in which Chimamanda Adichie and Binyavanga Wainaina establish their public image, arguably by performing authenticity. The main research question is whether the authors’ public image, as it is established through the dynamics of written culture and self-writing, can carry the weight of their political arguments, or whether, as author and journalist Sisonke Msimang has recently claimed, such literary celebrities “wander into territory they aren’t equipped to navigate all the time, and in so doing they grossly oversimplify and flatten and demean the experiences of the people on whose behalf they claim to speak”.
Paper presented at the book launch of the Hebrew translation of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperia... more Paper presented at the book launch of the Hebrew translation of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism. Ben Gurion University of the Negev, 11 November 2019. In Hebrew.
Conference paper, the fourth annual SELI (Study of English Literatures in Israel) conference, 2019
This conference paper takes the newly published novel American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins as a point... more This conference paper takes the newly published novel American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins as a point of departure to revisit the difficult questions of identity politics and cultural appropriation that come up in the study literature from the Global South. Looking at critiques of Cummins' portrayal of migration from Mexico to the USA in light of the fact that she herself is a white American, I connect these critiques to previous debates around novels such as NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names, Riyad Sattouf's The Arab of the Future, and Lionel Shriver's The Mandibles. I ask how it might be possible to speak of cultural appropriation in migration literature without undermining the fundamental need to include debates about authors' identities. Here I suggest it might be productive to focus on the text's negotiation of fictionality and referentiality while taking account of the specific aesthetic stakes through which we judge migration literature.
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Papers by Ruth S Wenske
Link to full paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/RRZSCN4CGPZ5SFVYKXVY/full?target=10.1080/17449855.2021.1888150
Adichie’s seminal novel Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). Conceptions
of typicality are used almost interchangeably in scholarly discussions about realism and Africanness without a critical framework
that untangles the myriad links between them. To fill this lacuna, I
provide a theoretical exploration of how typicality and typification,
as two modes of characterization, connect fiction and reference in
Adichie’s novel. Focusing on the diegetic layering in Half of a Yellow
Sun, I show how Africanness and realism are negotiated as two
kinds of typicality that work, counterintuitively, to undercut stereotypes. Building on Adichie’s now-famous concept of the “single
story,” I use narratological terminology to think through the tension between typicality and specificity, and its particular stakes in
African literature. Using this terminology, I trace how the writing
of the protagonists Ugwu and Richard oscillates between fictional
and referential, public and private, and oral and written representations. I thus show that realism, through framed narrations, establishes a kind of verisimilitude that is far from mimetically naïve.
Link to full paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/RRZSCN4CGPZ5SFVYKXVY/full?target=10.1080/17449855.2021.1888150
Adichie’s seminal novel Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). Conceptions
of typicality are used almost interchangeably in scholarly discussions about realism and Africanness without a critical framework
that untangles the myriad links between them. To fill this lacuna, I
provide a theoretical exploration of how typicality and typification,
as two modes of characterization, connect fiction and reference in
Adichie’s novel. Focusing on the diegetic layering in Half of a Yellow
Sun, I show how Africanness and realism are negotiated as two
kinds of typicality that work, counterintuitively, to undercut stereotypes. Building on Adichie’s now-famous concept of the “single
story,” I use narratological terminology to think through the tension between typicality and specificity, and its particular stakes in
African literature. Using this terminology, I trace how the writing
of the protagonists Ugwu and Richard oscillates between fictional
and referential, public and private, and oral and written representations. I thus show that realism, through framed narrations, establishes a kind of verisimilitude that is far from mimetically naïve.
The paper approaches the idea of celebrity and protest as an investigation into specific ways in which Chimamanda Adichie and Binyavanga Wainaina establish their public image, arguably by performing authenticity. The main research question is whether the authors’ public image, as it is established through the dynamics of written culture and self-writing, can carry the weight of their political arguments, or whether, as author and journalist Sisonke Msimang has recently claimed, such literary celebrities “wander into territory they aren’t equipped to navigate all the time, and in so doing they grossly oversimplify and flatten and demean the experiences of the people on whose behalf they claim to speak”.