More than just a book, Storytelling in Northern Zambia lets you watch videos of the storytellers while you read. Storytelling plays an important part in the vibrant cultural life of Zambia and in ...many other communities across Africa. This innovative book provides a collection and analysis of oral narrative traditions as practiced by five Bemba-speaking ethnic groups in Zambia. The integration of newly digitalised audio and video recordings into the text enables the reader to encounter the storytellers themselves and hear their narratives as they were recounted during Robert Cancel’s research trips to Zambia. Robert Cancel's thorough critical interpretation, combined with these newly digitalised audio and video materials, makes Storytelling in Northern Zambia a much needed addition to the slender corpus of African folklore studies that deal with storytelling performance. Cancel threads his way between the complex demands of African fieldwork studies, folklore theory, narrative modes, reflexive description and simple documentation and succeeds in bringing to the reader a set of performers and their performances that are vivid, varied and instructive. He illustrates this living narrative tradition with a wide range of examples, and highlights the social status of narrators and the complex local identities that are at play. Cancel’s innovative study tells us not only about storytelling but sheds light on the study of oral literatures throughout Africa and beyond. Its innovative format, meanwhile, explores new directions in the integration of primary source material into scholarly texts. This book is part of our World Oral Literature Series in conjunction with the World Oral Literature Project.
Afro‐descendant oral traditions are powerful modes of political expression that disrupt anti‐black logics within Latin America's mestizaje. Scholarship on Afro‐Latin American anti‐racist mobilisation ...centres on large‐scale, collective action. Instead, in this article, I examine songs and décimas, central forms of Afro‐descendant cultural subjectivity. Drawing on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in La Guaira state, Venezuela, I show how oral traditions are place‐based forms of resistance against anti‐black racism. This research calls on scholars to attend to oral traditions and their geographies as a tool of anti‐racist political mobilisation.
Word Mingas Rocha Vivas, Miguel; Worley, Paul M; Birkhofer, Melissa
08/2021, Volume:
320
eBook
Word Mingas is an English-language translation by Paul M.
Worley and Melissa Birkhofer of the award-winning book Mingas
de la palabra written by Miguel Rocha Vivas (Casa de las
Americas, 2016). It is ...an encompassing study of
oralitures--multilayered cultural knowledge shared through the
power of orality--and written literatures by authors from Colombia
and other regions in the hemisphere who self-identify as
Indigenous. In consequential dialogue with the most recent theories
of decoloniality and interculturality, the book weaves and compares
two threads of literary critique Rocha Vivas names as
oralitegraphies and mirrored visions . The study
focuses on texts produced from the early 1990s to the present, and
offers productive avenues to discuss, understand, and foster
dialogue with the wide array of symbolic-literary systems of the
original peoples. Rocha Vivas offers a valuable contribution to the
much-needed dialogue on the basic rights of self-representation,
self-determination, and the coexistence of multiple systems of
representation and identity.
The relationship between Paul and the Jesus tradition is a central issue in New Testament scholarship. Although it is customary to look for Gospel traditions in the Pauline epistles, an opposite ...approach would better fit the chronology of the sources. It is more probable that the evangelists were influenced by Paul than the other way around. For this reason, a re-evaluation of the development of the Jesus tradition from Jesus, via Paul, and to the Gospels, is necessary. This essay examines the possibility of viewing Paul as a source of the Gospels.
Studies of Yoruba culture and performance tend to focus mainly on standardised forms of performance, and ignore the more prevalent performance culture which is central to everyday life. What the ...Forest Told Me conveys the elastic nature of African cultural expression through narratives of the Yoruba hunters' exploits. Hunters' narratives provide a window on the Yoruba understanding and explanation of their world; a cosmology that negates the anthropocentric view of creation. In a very literal sense, man, in this peculiar world, is an equal actor with animal and nature spirits with whom he constantly contests and negotiates space.
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