Since the emergence of Hiplife as a musical genre in Ghana, it has enjoyed some scholarly attention, focusing primarily on issues pertaining to its evolution as a blend of Hip hop and Ghanaian ...Highlife genres, as well as how it employs linguistic resources involving code-switching and proverbs to comment on social issues. In this study, I approach the Ghanaian Hiplife genre from a stylistic perspective by focusing on the narrative perspectives Ghanaian Hiplife artistes use in conveying their messages to listeners. From the analysis, it was found that the artistes, in most cases, adopted the autobiographical, third-person and multi-perspectival narrative approaches where the narrator combined either the first-person or the third-person narrative technique. Also, the artistes used multimedia approaches, dialogue, cantor-response, and apostrophes in the songs. The study concludes that Hiplife artistes use traditional narrative perspectives as the initial tools and then adopt other narrative perspectives to be innovative, kill boredom and have lasting stylistic effects on listeners. The study provides a window for literary scholars to be more open to approaching literary analysis as modern creativity transcends the traditional purviews of point of view into more adoptive modes for stylistic effects.
The recurrent themes of identity and social belongingness, and tension between tradition and modernity reflect the complexities across generations of post-colonial African writers, mainly in Ghana. ...This study explores how address and reference terms (ARTs), as constructs of naming practices, used for and by characters in Armah’s Fragments, Aidoo’s Changes, and Gyasi’s Homegoing reiterate the themes of identity and social belongingness, and tension between tradition and modernity. Using Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall’s principles of post-colonial theory, and the concept of address and reference terms, the study revealed that ARTs, mainly descriptive phrases and personal names, contribute to the characterisation and the exploration of themes such as identity and social belongingness, and the tension between tradition and modernity. Each novel explores the complexities of identity and social belongingness within the context of historical, cultural, and societal changes, illustrating the enduring impact of these factors on Ghanaian experiences. The study offers implications for literary and interdisciplinary studies.
In his historical novel, The Healers, Ayi Kwei Armah correlates elements of the fictional settings of Esuano and the Eastern Forest, with different phases of social communication. The binary settings ...and their elements mirror the symbiotic character of the relationship that ought to exist between humans and nature. Armah employs symbolic, temporal and cultural codes reflective of African tradition and indigenous values through natural representation in the text as communicative properties. Eco-critical theory guides this study to explore the relationship that exists between humans and the natural world. Principles from eco-criticism are explored with a focus on Armah's creation of groups in the Eastern Forest and rivers as emblems of the divine with particular powers, in contrast to what Esuano represents to these groups. In this novel, Esuano is associated with manipulation, while the Eastern Forest is the site for inspiration and healing.
Most toponomastics research has ignored the importance of indigenous places as sites for identity and other cultural and social significance. Using Cape Coast as a historical site of the ...transatlantic slave trade, this study explores the origin, meanings and relevance of indigenous place names in the suburbs of Cape Coast, Ghana. Through an interdisciplinary approach that synergizes an interview with a chief, who is a prosopographer, historical documents, and literary sources, this study traces the city’s evolution from its ancestral hunting origins. The findings revealed that Cape Coast’s identity is encapsulated in the indigenous names, which point out the complex dynamics of culture, geography, identity and power. The names reference landmarks, events, environment and communities, transforming the city itself into a living archive with historical relevance. The literary interpretations uncovered metaphorical meanings encoded in some toponyms. Tracing connections across people, events, geography and time, these names reveal an interconnection often obscured by colonial ruptures. Based on these findings, there is a need to preserve the indigenous place names to foster intergenerational connections to the city’s storied landscape. The study contributes to Critical Toponymy theory and empirical insights into using indigenous toponyms to decolonize urban heritage.
The numerous literary explorations of Ayi Kwei Armah’s novels reveal his aesthetic creativity and relevance in addressing African and diasporic issues that have contemporary relevance. Guided by two ...objectives, this corpus study set out to analyse the narration and thematisation of Armah’s Fragments (1970) through part-of-speech and semantic domain tags using Wmatrix. We compared Fragments as a target corpus with two other novels by Armah. Results of the analysis suggest that Armah alternates between homodiegetic narrative in character dialogues and monologues, which dominate the main heterodiegetic discourse narration. He also provides a critical perspective on the immediacy of a historic and instantaneous present by giving a specific past account that projects a possible continuity of events in Ghana and Africa. Additionally, Armah discusses the geographic mobility of characters as a metaphor for a quest for a place of being and identity. These findings illustrate the value of applying computational tools like Wmatrix to examine African literary texts and provide a base for further studies.
Songs are one of the oldest forms of literature and they continue to play important roles in the socialization of members of a society. Considering the importance of songs, this study sought to ...analyze ambiguity in Ghanaian songs focusing on songs produced by one of the vibrant production houses in Ghana ‘Ruff town Records’. The study was based on 15 sampled songs by Ebony Reigns and Wendy Shay, the leading artistes of the record label. The study revealed instances of ambiguity in 10 of the sampled songs with the causes of these indeterminacies being mainly phonological intonation and lexical choices. These ambiguities were euphemistically deployed mostly to highlight sexual images. The study has implications for revealing the trends and patterns of contemporary Ghanaian music. It is therefore recommended that more studies should be carried out on Ghanaian songs, focusing on other styles and presentation techniques employed by song writers.
The process of creation with its attendant questions of understanding the world has been the bane of the quest for knowledge to understand natural hazards. The recent climatic hazards confronting ...mankind are blamed on climate change. One literary genre that seeks to explain the causes of natural hazards, including climate change, is the creation myth. All cultures of humankind have specific myths they harness as basic answers to mind-boggling questions on natural occurrences. This paper sets out to examine how the Akan creation myth is employed to address issues of climate change as well as the direction given to ensure the sustainability of development. In achieving this, five Akan creation myths are analysed through the lens of the formalistic approach to literary appreciation. The study reveals that Akan creation myths provide meaning to basic issues in natural occurrences and also provide means to protect the climate against unhealthy practices, failure of which spells doom in offsetting developmental agenda. The research has implications for the scholarship of both oral literature and climate change.
Foregrounding the Verbal Process Nkansah, Samuel Kwesi; Bonsu, Emmanuel Mensah
Linguistics Initiative,
08/2022, Letnik:
2, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Literature mirrors societies. While the plethora of studies on African literature, spanning from the early 21st century, have discussed literary texts in their political spectrums, recent studies ...using transitivity analysis have offered new and objective understandings of these novels. Nonetheless, most transitivity analyses have been fixated on characterization, style and themes. Against this background, the purpose of this study was to use corpus procedures to examine the transitivity of verbal process types in Adichie’s recent novel Zikora. Assisted by corpus linguistics, the study used transitivity as an analytical framework to analyse the verbal process in the text. From the analysis, three major findings are reported from the discussion. First, through the verbal processes, the Adichie deconstructed the myriad suffering and subjugation of women through dialogic means and taking responsibility for their livelihood. Second, the foregrounded verbal processes reflect the attribution of processes to other characters than accounting for the literary effects projected through the clauses. Finally, while the writer used the projected clauses to attribute the verbal processes to others, the dominant use of the first-person mode of narration identifies a sharing of roles to account for the writing of the literary work. Following these findings, the study extends the scholarship on literary stylistics and provides implications for further research in other genres of (African) literature.
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