Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Thiong'o, Ngugi wa - Steven Tobias (essay date spring 1997)
Thiong'o, Ngugi wa - Steven Tobias (essay date spring 1997)
Steven Tobias (essay date spring 1997)
SOURCE: Tobias, Steven. “The Poetics of Revolution: Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Matigari.” Critique 38, no. 3 (spring 1997): 163-76.
[In the following essay, Tobias contends that Matigari utilizes an unique Marxist-African perspective to critique the sociopolitical structures existing within postcolonial African states.]
The term postcolonial literature is inherently problematic. A useful and generally acceptable definition of this nebulous and diffuse genre appears in the 1989 book, The Empire Writes Back:
What each of these [various postcolonial countries'] literatures has in common … is that they emerged in their present form out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the imperial culture.
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Criticism
- Roger A. Berger (essay date spring 1989)
- Richard Gibson (review date 16 June 1989)
- Carol M. Sicherman (essay date fall 1989)
- K. L. Goodwin (essay date 1991)
- Abdulrazak Gurnah (essay date winter 1991)
- David Maughan Brown (essay date winter 1991)
- Theodore Pelton (essay date March-April 1993)
- Christine Loflin (essay date winter 1995)
- Patrick Williams (essay date 1997)
- Steven Tobias (essay date spring 1997)
- Christopher Wise (essay date spring 1997)
- Nicholas Brown (essay date winter 1999)
- Simon Gikandi (essay date summer 2000)
- Helen Hayward (review date 15 March 2002)
- Bonnie Roos (essay date summer 2002)
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