Anthem Press African Memoirs and Cultural Representations: Narrating Traditions

Oral traditions and creative oratures have been celebrated in African studies over the years, specifically from the 1950s, as the most important and viable correspondence, aside from material artifacts, between social “archeologists” attempting to penetrate the African preliterate past and the social-political and economic productions of that same past.In the memoirs chosen for this book, oral traditions are braided with personal experiences in the formation of the self, providing the basis of some African literary outputs and championed as having the ability to engineer the African knowledge system in global academe. In this regard, this work stressesthe concept that most memoir writing scholars feel that the production and presentation of the autobiographical self aredependent on the categories of individualism and relationality.The memoirists depict their own identities in their tales as not simply a part of their society but also one strongly impacted by prominent persons in their many lived settings. The bookdiscusses an approach that enables West African memoirists to review their cultural backgrounds in the light of living in other spaces and acquiring different experiences. Traditions and cultures represent a set of persisting or prevailing beliefs, social practices, oral, linguistic, and values that define an individual’s way of life. In other words, in memoir writing, the emphasis is often to propagate a unilateral need or embrace of self-identity. However, the dominant narrative and method of analysis in this study holds the notion and privileges that tradition and cultures imbibed by memoirists are sometimes subverted, refashioned, or reworked due to the strand of experiences or realities they encounter in different spaces as their narration develops. Thus, memoirists embrace indifference and open-mindedness, which is also greatly explored in the context of autobiography. In this book, memoirs by West African writers are discussed as repositories of African communities, ranging from the traditional to the contemporary. Each memoir examined analyzes and sheds light on the inner workings of society via the individual, including the dynamic processes of African cultures, civilizations, and peoples. Autorid: Toyin Falola