A Vagabond on the Road: The Pressure of Genre in Nadifa Mohamed’s Black Mamba Boy.

This article argues that Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope offers an insightful conceptual tool to read Nadifa Mohamed’s debut novelBlack Mamba Boyand particularly its depiction of time-space in relation to the representation of her protagonist, who functions in the text as an exceptional adventure...

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Publicado en:African Studies Vol. 75; no. 2; pp. 176 - 189
Autor principal: Steiner, Tina
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Taylor & Francis Ltd Aug2016
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        atl: A Vagabond on the Road: The Pressure of Genre in Nadifa Mohamed’s Black Mamba Boy.
      aug:
        au: Steiner, Tina
        affil: Stellenbosch University
      su:
        Black Mamba Boy (Book)
        Mohamed, Nadifa
        Spacetime
        Somalis
        World War II
      sug:
        subj:
          Black Mamba Boy (Book)
          Mohamed, Nadifa
          Spacetime
          Somalis
          World War II
      keyword:
        adventure chronotope
        historical narrative
        Italian colonialism
        Nadifa Mohamed
        Second World War in East Africa
        Somali migration
      ab: This article argues that Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope offers an insightful conceptual tool to read Nadifa Mohamed’s debut novelBlack Mamba Boyand particularly its depiction of time-space in relation to the representation of her protagonist, who functions in the text as an exceptional adventure hero and as representative of the young Somali men who fought for Mussolini and perished during the Second World War. The novel can be read as an adventure of Jama’s travels across eastern Africa on a quest to find his father and as a historical account of the impact of the war on the region. These two aims, overtly identified by Mohamed, result in narrative strands that put different emphases on the representation of chronotopic space-time; the former – what we could call the adventure tale – foregrounds space and the protagonist’s movement through space while the latter offers important commentary on the way in which this story’s particular historical past writes the colonial present, that is, it focuses more on time and its impact on the characters.Black Mamba Boyinterweaves the adventure tale with the historical narrative to tell a fascinating story of migration, loss and survival.
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    language: English
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