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Informationen zum Autor Ngugi wa Thiong'o^r, an acclaimed novelist, playwright, and critic, is Professor of Comparative Literature and Performance Studies at New York University. Klappentext The author, one of Africa's leading writers, explores the relationship between art and political power in society, taking as its starting point the experience of writers in contemporary Africa, where writers are often seen as enemies of the post-colonial state. This study raises the wider issues of the relationship between the state of art and the art of the state, within territorial, temporal, social, and even psychic contexts. 224 pp. Zusammenfassung Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams explores the relationship between art and political power in society, taking as its starting point the experience of writers in contemporary Africa, where they are often seen as the enemy of the postcolonial state. This study, in turn, raises the wider issues of the relationship between the state of art and the art of the state, particularly in their struggle for the control of performance space in territorial, temporal, social, and even psychic contexts. Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, calls for the alliance of art and people power, freedom and dignity against the encroachments of modern states. Art, he argues, needs to be active, engaged, insistent on being what it has always been, the embodiment of dreams for a truly human world. Inhaltsverzeichnis Preface Introduction 1: Art War with the State: Writers and Guardians of a Postcolonial Society 2: Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: The Conflict Between the Crafts of Art and the State 3: Enacting Power: The Politics of the Performance State 4: Voicing Silence: Language, Democracy, and a New World Order 5: Renaissance or Orature: Freeing Creativity from the Literary Colonisation of Orality Conclusion
