Blackness: faith, culture, ideology and discourse

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Periodical article

Title:	Blackness: faith, culture, ideology and discourse
Author:	Abodunrin, Femi
Year:	1999
Periodical:	Journal of Humanities (ISSN 1016-0728)
Issue:	13
Pages:	1-25
Language:	English
Notes:	biblio. refs.
Geographic terms:	Subsaharan Africa world
Subjects:	literary criticism literature History, Archaeology social history Blacks Whites Cultural environment
Abstract:	A literary theory that will adequately account for the complexity of black texts cannot afford to be manichaean, linear or exclusively dialectical. With respect to the position of myth in the study and understanding of literary discourse, the critic must become a reader of myth as opposed to someone who mythologizes or someone who focuses on an empty signifier, both of whom either make the intention of the myth obvious by merely unmasking it, or destroy it altogether. The reader must focus on the history of the myth, which is very often embedded in its concept, and may even be independent of its language. For through the concept, it is a whole new history that is implanted in the myth, as opposed to the empty nature of the form. This also involves a discussion of high and low discourses, of history seen from above and history seen from below. The investigation here is limited to one particular context: the social history of a selection of black writing from Africa and the diaspora, which has been rather arbitrarily divided into 'old perspectives' and 'the generation of realism'. Bibliogr., notes, ref.