Daria Tunca

Postcolonial Thresholds: Gateways and Borders

Introduction to a special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing coedited by Janet Wilson and Daria Tunca

PAYING ATTENTION TO LANGUAGE, REPLICAS AND THE ROLE OF THE ARTIST IN JANET FRAME’S LIVING IN THE MANIOTOTO 1

Janet Frame’s 1979 novel Living in the Maniototo features a ubiquitous narrator whose multiple personalities are linked by a common interest in creation. This choice of narrative perspective, coupled with the characters and events depicted in the book, provides the basis for an exploration of the related concepts of art, language and replicas. By establishing connections between these elements, this article attempts to unveil the dynamics at work in the novel’s multi‐layered structure and thus shed light on the role of the artist in the narrative and, by extension, on the author’s metafictional strategy.

Review of Chris Abani's Graceland and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus

Georges Adéagbo ‘The Explorer and Explorers Confronting the History of Exploration …! The Theatre of the World’ Soul Tourists Bernardine Evaristo Hamish Hamilton, London, 2005, pb 304PP ISBN o 24114115 X £12.99 www.hamishhamilton.co.uk The Icarus Girl Helen Oyeyemi Bloomsbury, London, 2005, hb 305PP ISBN 0 7475 7548 7 £16–99 www.bloomsbury.com Maps for Lost Lovers Nadeem Aslam Faber, London, 2004, hb 369PP ISBN o 5712 2180 7 £16.99 www.faber.co.uk Moses, Citizen And Me Delia Jarrett‐Macaulay Granta, London, 2005, pb 240PP ISBN 18620 7741X £10.99 www.granta.com The Oxford English Literary History, 1948–2000: The Internationalization of English Literature, Vol 13 Bruce King Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004, hb 386pp ISBN 019818428 X £32 www.oup.co.uk Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis John Clement Ball University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2004, hb 265PP ISBN 08020 4496 4 £28 www.utpress.utoronto.ca Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis John McLeod Routledge, Abingdon, 2004, pb 224PP ISBN 04153 4460 3 £19.99 www.routledge.com Black British Writing R Victoria Arana & Lauri Ramey, eds Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2004, hb 192PP ISBN 14039 6555 2 £45 www.palgrave.com Buchi Emechetas ‘London Novels’: An Intercultural Approach Susanne Pichler Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, Trier, 2001, pb 176pp ISBN 3 88476 474 8 €27 www.wvttrier.de The In‐Between World of Vikram Lall M G Vassanji Canongate, Edinburgh, 2004, hb 439PP ISBN 18419 5538 8 £14.99 www.canongate.net Magic Seeds V S Naipaul Picador, London, 2004, hb 294PP ISBN 03304 8520 2 £16.99 www.panmacmillan.com Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism Ranjana Khanna Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2003, pb 310pp ISBN 08223 3067 9 £16.95 www.dukeupress.edu Graceland Chris Abani Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2004, hb 339PP ISBN 0374165890

The danger of a single short story: Reality, fiction and metafiction in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Jumping Monkey Hill”

24.00 www.fsgbooks.com Purple Hibiscus Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Anchor Books New York, 2004, pb 32opp ISBN 14000 7694 3

Linguistic Counterpoint in Gbenga Agbenugba’s Another Lonely Londoner

13.00 www.randomhouse.com

Caryl Phillips: Writing in the Key of Life

Abstract Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story “Jumping Monkey Hill” was inspired by its author’s experience at the inaugural workshop of the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2003, during which, the writer says, she was faced with the lustful and patronizing attitude of the then-administrator of the award. Adichie’s piece, by virtue of being a short story about writing itself, is a so-called “metafictional” text. It is on this self-reflexive quality that this essay focuses. More precisely, the article examines the interaction between reality and fiction in Adichie’s story, paying particular attention to the ways in which the text uses techniques of mise en abyme to comment on gender subjection, colonially tinged condescension, and resistance to both of these forms of oppression. Ultimately, the essay argues that “Jumping Monkey Hill” can be read as a literary manifesto that incarnates its own theorization, a conclusion that is, however, shown to be problematic in more than one respect.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This essay examines Gbenga Agbenugba’s Another Lonely Londoner (1991), a rarely discussed novel recounting the experiences of a young Nigerian man living in London. The narrative is written in an experimental style mixing English with Nigerian Pidgin, and including elements of Nigerian English, Black British English, Cockney, and Yoruba. By way of introduction, Agbenugba’s work is briefly discussed in relation to the novel that inspired it, Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956). An analysis is then undertaken of the interaction between English and Nigerian Pidgin in Another Lonely Londoner, both in dialogue and in narrative passages, with a view to assessing the impact of the combined use of these languages on possible literary interpretations of the novel. The other codes, varieties, and linguistic influences revealed in the book also receive systematic treatment, and it gradually appears that all these elements combine to produce a complex polyphonic work mirroring the main character’s multifarious identity.