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Education
University of Connecticut
Ph.D. (2008)
Fields of Concentration: African literature, the Caribbean and India; Victorian
literature; early American literature; African-American literature and
Rhetoric and Composition.
Examination: Post-Colonial literature, early American literature and Victorian
literature.
Dissertation: “Post-Apartheid and Its Representation: The Interregnum
as Motif in Selected South African Novels.”
Advisors: Dr. Eleni Coundouriotis, Dr. Thomas Recchio, and Dr. Jerry Phillips.
Abstract of Dissertation
In
this study of post-apartheid South Africa, I share Nadine Gordimer’s
conception of an interregnum as a period of stasis characterized by ambiguities,
uncertainties, and contradictions. Consequently, I have deployed Gordimer’s
view in my analysis of selected works on South African literature published
between 1981 and 2006. I have argued in this study that despite the political
transformation in 1994 from apartheid to multi-party democracy, post-apartheid
South African literature reveals that the old binaries and strictures
of apartheid have been carried over into the present. Thus, the new landscape
in South Africa depicts ambiguities and contradictions that are indicative
of a state of interregnum.
Accordingly, I argued that apartheid South Africa as explored by Gordimer
in July’s People presents a picture of resistance to change and
asserts that the process of political transition to black rule will require
a redefinition of roles and relationships, self-sacrifice, and re-examination
of values if racial and political harmony are to be achieved. The study
has also focused on racial tension, prejudice and exploitation by using
rape as structural device to critique the Immorality Act of 1950. I have
shown that rape is indicative of the relations of power, the social,
political and cultural tensions, and the different histories at stake
in post-apartheid South Africa. Besides rape, I examined violence, corruption,
political ineptitude, suffering and death as illustrative of disillusionment
in the new South Africa.
The study has also demonstrated a more
nuanced perspective to the conception of post-apartheid South Africa as
dystopia.
In my analysis
of colored
identity, I concluded that even though the challenges facing the new
democracy are enormous, there are some indications of possibilities for
racial reconciliation and integration. Overall, the study has used the
literature of South Africa as a basis of inquiry into its history to
demonstrate that post-apartheid South Africa constitutes a state of interregnum,
where the old is preventing the birth of the new, and that post-1994
South Africa is characterized by paradoxes, ambiguities and uncertainties
that are indicative of disillusionment.
Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone
M.A. English Studies (1994)
Field of Concentration: Sierra Leonean Literature
Thesis: “A Thematic and Stylistic Study of Sierra Leonean Literature:
Drama and Poetry.”
Advisors: Professor Emeritus Eldred Durosimi Jones, FBC, USL, and Dr.
Amy Davies, Njala University College, USL.
Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone
B.A. (Hon) English Language and Literature (1990)
Field of Concentration: African Literature
Dissertation: “The Changing Trends in the African Novel: An Examination
of the Novels of Ngugi Wa Thiong’o.”
Advisor: Professor Eustace Palmer, FBC, USL.
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