.

C.  1. World literature written in English (WWWIE)

     b. the others

Africa:

CHINUA ACHEBE    in conversation with Nuruddin Farah

Translation - African & Nigerian identity - choosing a language in which to write - setting.  Chinua Achebe was born in 1930 in Eastern Nigeria. After studying medicine and literature at the University of Ibadan, he went to wrok for the Nigerian Broadcasting Company in Lagos. Things Fall Apart, his first novel published in 1958, has
sold over two million copies in over thirty languages. It was followed by No Longer at Ease, Arrow of Gold and A Man of the People. He has written short stories and children's books. Beware Soul Brother, a book of poetry, won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1972

 

BEN OKRI  in conversation with EDWARD BLISHEN

Socialist realism in the African novel - Use of ghosts as representations of nightmares - Using style as distancing factor from experience - differences in language between the
novel and the short story - Using literature to face wounds  Ben Okri is a Nigerian writer resident in London. His novels include Flowers and Shadows and The Landscapes Within.  Collections of short stories include Incidents at the Shrine and Stars of the New Curfew. Okri has been poetry editor oF West Africa
and a broadcaster with the BBC. In 1987 he won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Africa and the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. He was awarded the Booker Prize in 199l for his novel, The Famished Road.

 

WOLE SOYINKA

   creative spaces in which people work. - Artists working in societies in which they are banned - impact of African culture on America -Creative response to the nuclear bomb - the erosion of moral rights in climates of fear

(Wole Soyinka, Nobel Prize winner, playwright, poet, novelist, film-maker, teacher, Secretary General of the Union of African writers is also a Nigerian political activist whose name is associated worldwide with the struggle for justice and freedom in Africa. Born in Nigeria in 1934, he is without doubt one of the great writers and thinkers of our time. He has had a number of major poetry collections published, Idanre and Other Poems and A Shuttle in the Crypt, which contains poems written while Soyinka was imprisoned during the Nigerian Civil War. Novels include The Interpreters and A Season of Anomy. He has written over twenty plays including The Swamp Dwellers, The Lion and The Jewel, The Invention, A Dance of the Forests, Madmen and Specialists and Death and The King's Horseman.)
 

Afrique, je te plumerai (Africa, I Will Fleece You)   (see intro from California Newsreel)

Director Jean-Marie Teno uses Cameroon,  the only African country colonized by three  European powers, for a carefully   researched case study of the continuing  damage done to traditional African  societies by alien neo-colonial cultures.
Unlike most historical films, Afrique, Je Te Plumerai moves from present to past,  peeling away layer upon layer of cultural forgetting. Teno explains: "I  wanted to trace cause and effect between an intolerable present and   the colonial violence of yesterday...to understand how a country  could fail to succeed as a state which was once composed of    well-structured traditional societies."

 

Bye Bye Africa  This first feature film from Chad brings the reflexive filmmaking of Fellini's 8  and  Truffaut's Day for Night to African cinema.

               Director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun presents what he calls a "documentary fiction" but  which might just as well be called a fictional  documentary about the making of a film of  the same name, Bye Bye Africa. Like Abderrahmane Sissako in   Rostov-Luanda and La vie sur terre, Haroun casts himself - or, more  precisely, a fictionalized version of himself - as the central character  of his "documentary." This focus on the process of filmmaking makes  Bye Bye Africa one of the first films to address the technical and  economic difficulties of film production in Africa while at the same  time demonstrating the potential of new digital video technology.

 

Faat Kine (see intro from California Newsreel)

    by Ousmane Sembene, the deceptively light domestic drama of Faat Kine, a gas station operator born, significantly, the same year  as Senegalese independence, 1960


LONG NIGHT'S JOURNEY INTO DAY  (see intro from California Newsreel) 
STUDY GUIDE, transcript

 winner of the Grand Prize for Best  Documentary at the 2000 Sundance Festival and ALA Booklist's  Editor's Choice Award for best video of 2000.  It follows several TRC (the Truth and Reconciliation Commission) cases over a two-year period.   As it investigated the crimes of apartheid, the Commission brought together victims and perpetrators to relive South Africa's brutal history. By revealing the past instead of burying it, the  TRC hoped to pave the way to a peaceful future.


 

Caribbean:
The Harder They Come

Ivan, the lead character played to perfection by reggae star Jimmy Cliff, arrives in Kingston
    a naive but ambitious young man from "country". Through a bit of luck and persistence he
    gets a chance to record a tune. Ivan earns all of twenty dollars for his record -- the same
    amount he will later pay for a gun when he gets into the ganja trade. He kills a cop and his
    record is soon all over the airwaves. By this time he sees himself as one of the spaghetti
    western gunmen that pull in the crowds at the local cinema. Ivan's rise to fame has now
    paralleled that of Rhygin, a famous Jamaican gunman of the 1940s.    Set in a still-obscure corner of the Caribbean and featuring local musicians playing a virtually unknown music and a cast of amateur actors speaking in a thick and all but incomprehensible patois, The Harder They Come opened at a Boston cinema in 1973. (source)

Caribbean Poetry: The Literary and Oral Traditions

            Three poets, James Berry, David Dabydeen and Jackie Kay, discuss the varied traditions of poetry in the  Caribbean and look at two
            distinct strands of poetry, the oral and the literary, and how they have affected poets  writing in Britain.
                                       Part of the series Literature in the Modern World at Roland Collection.

 

India:
Monsoon Wedding (Feature Film) by Mira Nair

Empire and Nation: The Re-fashioning of Literature
           The program looks at the relationship between Britain and India from an Indian perspective. Presented by Susie      Tharu, an Indian
            academic who teaches English literature in Hyderabad, it traces the history of one Indian poem, Radhika Santwanam, from the
            eighteenth century to  Independence. The complex relationship between Britain and India is explored, showing how modern India is a
            product of British colonialism. Shot in New Delhi, Madras, Hyderabad and Thanjavur, the program analyzes the rise of a new middle
            class in India, which dresses more `modestly,' studies English literature and appreciates Western values, as embodied in British
            architecture in India.
              Part of the series Literature in the Modern World at Roland Collection.
 
Writers in conversation: SALMAN RUSHDIE with CHARLOTTE CORNWELL EV820/026B01

writing about Nicaragua - the tradition of cultural histories written from a political perspective - the writer's role in politics in Latin America - US involvement in Nicaragua - the role of newspapers Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay in and now lives in London. Qn publication of his first novel, Grimus, in 1977, one reviewer advised him to give up writing. Midnight's Children, which followed, won the 1981 Booker Prize and was feted by the literary establishment the world over. His third novel, Shame, was greeted with equal acclaim. In this video he talks about his portrait of Nicaragua, The Jaguar Smile, with actress Charlotte Cornwell.

 

Writers in conversation: Salman Rushdie with W L Webb EV820/032B01

Background to The Satanic Verses Themes of the divided self - the nature of the city as metaphor - writing dialogue - writing from the experience of uprootedness Salman Rushdie is the author of the novels Grimus, Midnight's Children (winner of the 1981 Booker Prize, the James Tait Memorial Prize and English Speaking Union Literary Award), Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Jaguar Smile: A Nicuraguan Journey; and the television films, The Riddle of Midnight and The Painter and The Pest.

 

Others:

DULAAN, A Video Documentary on Philippine Theater   EVR/700/047M11       V0008012
DULAAN, a video documentary  on Philippine theater EV/700/047B01        V0032701

MARIO VARGAS LLOSA with JOHN KING

using satire and farce to examine Peruvian society - mass culture and modernism - The Latin American novelist's role in politics - role of intellectuals - Latin American romanticism
Critically acclaimed as one of the greatest writers in a literature rich in novelists, Mario Vargas Llosa is at once a subtle craftsman and an imaginative spinner of tales. Born in Peru in 1936, Vargas Llosa studied literature and law in his native country but went abroad when his first stories won him the opportunity to study in Paris and Madrid. After eighteen years of writing in Europe and the United States he returned permanently to Lima just before democratic rule was restored in 1980. Novels include Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The War Of The End Of The World and The Time of the Hero.

 

PANITIKAN, A Documentary on Philippine Literature  Video   EVR/700/048M11

PANITIKAN, a documentary on Philippine literature  video EV/700/048B01

Rabbit-Proof Fence (Phillip Noyce) (color, 94 min) (Buena Vista Home Entertainment) 791.43 N949r DVDe W051471V

Rabbit-Proof Fence - featuring the Golden Globe-nominated score by Peter Gabriel – is the powerful true story of hope and survival, and has been met with international acclaim! At a time when it was Australian government policy to train aboriginal children as domestic workers and integrate them into white society, young Molley Craig decides to lead her little sister and cousin in a daring escape from their internment camp! Molley and the girls, part of what would become known as Australia’s “Stolen Generations,” must then elude the authorities on a dangerous 1,500-mile adventure along the rabbit-proof fence that bisects the continent and will lead them home! As shown by this outstanding motion picture, their universally touching plight and unparalleled courage are a beautiful testament to the undying strength of the human spirit!

Rabbit-Proof Fence is a 2002 Australian drama film based on the book Follow The Rabbit Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington Garimara. It concerns the author's mother, and two other young mixed-race Aboriginal girls, who ran away from the Moore River Native Settlement, north of Perth, in which they were placed in 1931, in order to return to their Aboriginal families. The film follows the girls as they trek/walk for nine weeks along 1,500 miles (2414km) of the Australian rabbit-proof fence to return to their community at Jigalong being tracked by a white authority figure and a black tracker

 

 

 

 

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Video Catalogue
English Department
, Fu Jen University