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Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance
Author(s): Ngugi Ngugi Wa Thiong'o (Author)
- Publisher: Basic Books
- Publication Date: February 24, 2009
- Edition: First Edition
- Language: English
- Print length: 176 pages
- ISBN-10: 0465009468
- ISBN-13: 9780465009466
Book Description
Novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o has been a force in African literature for decades: Since the 1970s, when he gave up the English language to commit himself to writing in African languages, his foremost concern has been the critical importance of language to culture. In Something Torn and New, Ngugi explores Africa’s historical, economic, and cultural fragmentation by slavery, colonialism, and globalization. Throughout this tragic history, a constant and irrepressible force was Europhonism: the replacement of native names, languages, and identities with European ones. The result was the dismemberment of African memory.
Seeking to remember language in order to revitalize it, Ngugi’s quest is for wholeness. Wide-ranging, erudite, and hopeful,
Something Torn and New is a cri de coeur to save Africa’s cultural future.Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
African scholar Thiong’o examines the collateral damage of colonization, focusing on the erasure of indigenous people’s cultural memory along with the renaming of people, places, and objects to reflect the culture of the colonizer. Africans in the diaspora as well as those who remained on the continent were treated to the same erasure of all that preceded European conquest and colonization. Thiong’o sees similar patterns among other cultures, whether the conquered people were Irish or Native American. But his specific concern is Africa, where European colonialism has left the continent fractured and searching for wholeness. He points to a long tradition of African disaporic writers longing to reconnect to African culture. “Creative imagination is one of the greatest of re-membering practices,” and Thiong’o argues for a “re-membering” of indigenous African culture and language and ponders whether an African renaissance—sure to happen following the dark ages of colonialism—would be expressed in European languages. “Memory resides in language,” he asserts. A slim volume with a very impassioned discussion of the impact of colonialism and hope for cultural recovery. –Vanessa Bush
About the Author
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, currently Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine, was born in Kenya in 1938. After penning Petals of Blood in 1977, a novel sharply critical of life in neo-colonial Kenya, he was arrested and imprisoned without charge for a year. Vanity Fair has called him “the scourge of African dictators and warlords” and the San Diego Union-Tribune praised him as “a writer whose output feels essential for those hoping to understand contemporary Africa.” He lives in Irvine, California.
