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(More customer reviews)Isichei gives us a sweeping survey of African views and folktales. Perspectives that are often ignored outside the continent. Yet here, as in fragments of poetry that she translates, they shine through in eloquence.
Grim subjects also appear. Especially the sourge of AIDS, which ravages southern Africa. An irony is that traditional folk healers' influences are sometimes reinforced by AIDS. Mostly because of the lack of an affordable cure, since the protease inhibitors are largely out of the peasants' budgets.
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"Isichei's fine book points the way to further integration between anthropology and history, providing a rich example of the meansby which scholars can investigate popular consciousness by taking seriously the world of symbolic meaning." INTL J OF AFRICAN HISTORICAL STUDIES Vol 36 No 2 (2003)Elizabeth Isichei explores the Atlantic slave trade, as reflected in the poetics of rumour and the poetics of memory - an approach different from the quantitative and demographic studies which have transformed the subject over the past twenty years. She brings together a wide range of disciplines - anthropology, fiction, art and art history, philosophy, and contemporary literary theory - to look at the intellectual history of Africa, from African rather than European premisses. The result is a history of popular consciousness which shows the experiences of ordinary people, often in protest at their exploitation by generation after generation of powerful foreigners and locals.ELIZABETH ISICHEI is Professor of Religious Studies, Otago University, Dunedin, New Zealand, and author of over a dozen books on African history and political thought.
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