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9781603295840 Academic Inspection Copy

Giambatista Viko; or, the Rape of African Discourse

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Georges Ngal's pathbreaking satire Giambatista Viko explores the vexed relations between metropolitan centers and peripheral former colonies through its titular antihero, an African professor at an African studies institute divided between European-focused cosmopolitans and Afrocentrists. Struggling to write the great African novel and subject to abuse, Viko realizes he can no longer separate the African and the European parts of his multilayered, African francophone culture. Viko's fate is a warning about the perils of artistic creation in a world where power is not shared. Part of the wave of African novels of the 1960s and 70s that grappled with the disenchantments of decolonization, Giambatista Viko can be read at once as a Congolese novel, a francophone novel, and a work of world literature.
Georges Ngal, born in 1933 in the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo, has published novels and literary scholarship, including a book on Aime Cesaire and works on African writers. He has taught at the Sorbonne and at universities in Africa, the United States, and Canada. He served in the Congolese parliament and worked for many years with UNESCO and other international organizations.
"A fresh translation of a challenging and overlooked work, accompanied by a perceptive and clear introduction that provides a nimble synthesis of the work's historical and political contexts. . . . Viko has the potential to become a regular feature of syllabi for years to come." --Tobias Warner, University of California, Davis
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