Our Sister Killjoy part 2

This week, we contiuned our analysis of Our Sister Killjoy. This week, instead of reading with the text, we read against it. We discussed the way that postcolonial reading of the novel can influence our interpretation. As I have already said in this journal, Africa often seems to be left out from the Universal experience. This class confirms this, as Africa is described as mute. This is a real issue in my eyes, especially since I think we have already hurt Africa enough.

Another something discussed in this class was representation, and how language can be a tool to create it or to work against it. This was very interesting to me, as I always considered language as a tool to create representation. We zoomed in on the portrayal of Africa in precolonial times, during colonial times and in the postcolonial times. We also talked about the intersectionality of race, class, and gender, and how Ama Ata Aidoo introduces that to us in Our Sister Killjoy. She turns the eyes on the Western World when it comes to the absence of modernity in Africa. This is where the title of this class comes from: the empire writes back.

The conclusion of the class is this: we discussed the critique of English as a tool of imperialism, the dynamics of the British Colonial Empire, and the development of postcolonial African women's literature. It also delves into the themes of language as hegemony and language as subversive. We emphasized the importance of reading literature within its cultural and historical context, and we did all of this based on Our Sister Killjoy.