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Preliminary Material -- Some Thoughts on the Idea of Exit: in Recent African Narratives of Childhood /Richard K. Priebe -- Generation and Complicity: in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light /Maria Olaussen -- “Let Me Tell You About Bekolo’s Latest Film, Les Saignantes, But First . . . ” /Kenneth W. Harrow -- Tradition and Creativity: in Zakes Mda’s Cion /David Bell -- Paton’s Discovery, Soyinka’s Invention /Bernth Lindfors -- Writing Out Imperialism?: A Note on Nationalism and Political Identity in the African-Owned Newspapers of Colonial Ghana /Stephanie Newell -- After Exit: Exile, Creativity, and the Risk of Translation /Stefan Helgesson -- African Presences and Representations: in the Principality/Markgrafschaft of Bayreuth /Eckhard Breitinger -- Taking Flight: and the Libertarian Crow-Scarer /Gerald Porter -- “In my end is my beginning”: The Death of Virginia Woolf /Catherine Sandbach–Dahlström -- Following the Race Track?: Swedish, Chinese, Scottish, Irish, Canadian in Diamond Grill by Fred Wah /Elisabeth Mårald -- Literature and Scripture: An Impossible Filiation /J. Hillis Miller -- “Gazing into the future”: Beginnings, Endings, and Midpoints in Paul Muldoon’s Why Brownlee Left /Lars–Håkan Svensson -- Exiting the Environmental Trap: Knowledge Regimes and the Third Phase of Environmental Policy /Sverker Sörlin -- The End of the “Earth” /Willy Bach -- Myself as a Puff of Dust: A Ghost Story /Jane Bryce -- TIXE YLNO: or Redefining Identities /Janice Kulyk Keefer -- Contributors. If anything is certain in human existence, it is the exit. Before the universal yet radically singular event of death, however, history leaves its mark on us by determining which exits are possible, necessary or desirable. This collection of essays, which celebrates the achievement of the Swedish Africanist and postcolonial scholar Raoul Granqvist, deal with the broad theme of exit – in the form of exile, displacement, suicide, endings and, indeed, beginnings. After all, “In my end is my beginning” (T.S. Eliot). Childhood as exit rite in contemporary African literature (Camara Laye’s L’Enfant Noir and Ishmael Beah’s Long Way Gone ); the Cameroonian director Jean Pierre Bekolo’s controversial film Les Saignantes ; an early play by Wole Soyinka; Ghana during the First World War; Zakes Mda’s Cion ; proto-nationalist writing on the Gold Coast; passing in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light ; the exile of South African and Caribbean writers; translation theory in the global South; public representations of Africans in north-east Bavaria; oral poetry in rural England; Fred Wah’s Swedish-Chinese background in twentieth-century Canada; Toni Morrison’s Beloved and infanticide; the open endings of the poetry of Paul Muldoon; the suicide of Virginia Woolf; the viability of global environmental policies – these are some of the topics that this book, in defiance of neat disciplinary boundaries, addresses. The closing section, “Voicing the Exit,” transcends the academic format with its evocative literary representations of the experience of exit (in Tanzania, Uganda, Ukrainian Canada and elsewhere)
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