Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing
Ng g wa Thiong'o is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of California, Irvine, and an award winning Kenyan author currently writing primarily in the G k y language. The author of many novels, plays, short stories, and essays, Ng g wa Thiong'o is founder and editor of the online G k y language journal, M tiiri and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In this volume, Ng g wa Thiong'o summarises and develops a variety of issues he has grappled with in his work, which deploys a strategy of imagery, language, folklore, and character to 'decolonize the mind'. Ng g confronts the politics of language in African writing; the problem of linguistic imperialism and literature's ability to resist it; the difficult balance between orality, or 'orature', and the writing, or 'literature'; the tension between national and world literature; and the role of the literary curriculum in both reaffirming and undermining the dominance of the Western canon. Throughout, he engages a range of philosophers and theorists writing on power and postcolonial creativity, including Hegel, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and Aim C saire. Yet his explorations remain grounded in his own experiences with literature and orature and reworks the difficult dialectics of theory into richly evocative prose.
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