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This book examines a selection of prison memoirs by five renowned African writers: Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Ruth First, Wole Soyinka, Nawal El Saadawi and Jack Mapanje. Detained across the continent from the 1960s onward due to their writing and political engagement, each writer's memoir forms a crucial yet often overlooked part of their wider literary work. The author analyses the varied and unique narrative strategies used to portray the prison, formulating a theory of prison memoir as genre that reads the texts alongside postcolonial, trauma, life-writing and prison theory. The book also illustrates the importance of these memoirs in the telling of their historical moment, from apartheid South Africa to post-independence Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt and Malawi.
List of contents
CONTENTS: «I was never one for writing diaries»: The Individual and the Collective in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary (1981) - «We were all serving time»: Prison Memoir and Perspectival Variation in Ruth First's 117 Days (1965) - «Language needs to be a part of resistance therapy»: Narrating Psychological Breakdown and Political Opposition in Wole Soyinka's The Man Died (1972) - «Moving the body means life»: Liberation and the Body in Nawal El Saadawi's Memoirs from the Women's Prison (1986) - «[W]hat song shall I sing from this stench?»: Creating a Prison Poetics in Jack Mapanje's And Crocodiles Are Hungry at Night (2011).
About the author
Rachel Anna Knighton completed her PhD in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, for which she was awarded a Graduate Research Scholarship by Girton College. Her PhD research forms the basis of this book.
Report
«This is an outstanding study of African prison writing which makes a significant contribution to the study of life writing and twentieth-century African history alike. By focusing on key African writers and intellectuals, all of whom were incarcerated for their politics, Knighton explores in great detail how prison affects the mind, body and imagination, and how it strengthens rather than weakens the will to resist.» (Dr Christopher Warnes, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Cambridge)
«Writing the Prison in African Literature is a glittering contribution to the field of African life writing. Countering the prejudice that autobiography is implicitly a Western form, the book demonstrates that the African prison memoir enables agile self-construction through a multi-layered structure and a mutable set of mechanics. Readers will find much to savour in Knighton's astute and understated masterpiece.» (Dr Brendon Nicholls, Lecturer in African and Postcolonial Literatures, University of Leeds)
