Art, Ideology and Social Commitment in African Poetry

by Udenta O. Udenta

In this study the author argues that African poetry is a response to the socio-cultural and political realities of the African condition shaped, as it were, by the specificities of African pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial experience. The author’s contention is that the study of African poetry must situate, as its take-off point, the mediation of the aesthetic imagination and creative individuality of African poets in relation to the acute and objectively existing material forces that undergird the destiny of African nations and peoples.

The author posits that the organic ontology of African poetry is a persistent aesthetic confrontation with (and rework of) the modes of social production and the reproduction of values in the context of the material foundations of the continent’s colonial and postcolonial moments as African communities get increasingly sucked into the globalist, late postmodern capitalist epoch.

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