European Studies
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Item Gender inequality: African feminist fiction reflecting scientific data(GMO, University of Ibadan, 2013) Olayinka, E. B.When one mentions the situation of women anywhere in the world today, certain issues inevitably come to mind. Issues such as oppression of women, feminism and women's struggle for liberation, woman as liberated-subaltern in organisations, sexuality and sexism, among others. These are issues that have often trailed humanity. Available answers do not yet adequately address the woman question. We are in a complex situation, a complex world that smacks of gender war in the midst of gendered rhetoric. The matter of Sub-Saharan African women's evolution calls to mind immense, complex and culturally multifarious questions that surround women in the region and the fast changing world of African culture, relating to issues of family, education, work and lifestyle. The compass of women development in the region is therefore multidirectional. This necessitates knowing her pre-colonial past, her colonial status and her post- or neo-colonial condition. This paper therefore looks at the African woman under the three stages above, with particular attention on the Nigerian woman of today.Item The oppressor is oppressed and in a pathological state too: Calixthe Beyala and Bauchi Emecheta's male characters(Department of European Studies, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria, 2010) Olayinka, E. B.Item Religio-cultural and poetic constructions of the subaltern African woman(Faculty of Arts, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria, 2012) Sanusi, R.; Olayinka, E. B.The colonial experience, particularly the introduction of Christianity and Islam in Africa., altered the African socio-cultural equation and ways of life. Europeans and Arab missionaries diligently spread their religious beliefs which fused with some African cultural practices and subsequently determined the status of African women, in particular. Suffice it to say that colonialism, Christianity and Islam masculinised any territory upon which they inflicted themselves and dismantled the matriarchal system that mutually coexisted with patriarchy in some pre-colonial African societies. They also provided an ideological framework for the social roles of women, which subordinated them to their male counterparts. Besides, the poetic constructions of African women on the literary platform of Negritude largely contributed in reinforcing this subaltern image and secondary roles ascribed to African women, heightened by colonialism and promoted by new religious doctrines and practices. The textual representation of African women as mothers, in terms of their nurturing capacities, placed them in an essentially problematic position, and conferred on them a purely domestic role. It is quite cheering to note, however, that this unhealthy subordination of the African woman is rapidly giving way to the notion of gender equity, founded on new religio-cultural principles, and facilitated by women's access to western education, modernization, and the systematic 'eboulement' or dismantling of the African partriarchal culture.Item Blind devotion, violence and trauma in the works of Ka Maiga, Bassek and Mpoudi-Ngolle(The Linguistics Association, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, 2012) Sanusi, R.; Olayinka, E. B.Item Madness and free association in Evelyne Mpoudi Ngolle's Sous la cendre le feu(Department of European Studies, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria, 2007) Olayinka, E. B.Psychoanalytic insight facilitates the analysis of works of art through which literary analysts are able to access the psyche of authors and their character. (M.M. Schwartz and D. Willbern:1982). One of such psychoanalytic device is free association. Free association technique applied during psychotherapy sessions provides a royal road into a psyche of humans as can be observed in Mina’s case in Mpoudi Ngolle’s Sous la cendre le feu. This paper concludes that repression of negative and unpleasant experiences lived within patriarchal limitations as promoted by African male hegemonic traditions, subjects women-victim of oppression to anxiety disorder which may occur in the form of depression, schizophrenia, obsessive disorder, depersonalization, derealisation among others. It seems natural to think about literature in terms of dreams. Like dreams, literary works are fictions, inventions of the mind that, although based on reality, are by definition not literary true. Like a literary work, a dream may have some truth to tell, but, like a literary work can be grasped. (R.C. Murfin, (internet article: accessed 30 May, 2011: 502)Item Narrating juvenile mental disorders in Calixthe Beyala's selected novels(School of Human Sciences at the Polytechnic of Namibia, 2014) Olayinka, E. B.Critics of Calixthe Beyala's feminist discourse have located her narratives within the walls of radicals feminism. For instance, her feminist language is often labelled with linguistics violence. Beyala's outcry against oppression is voiced through adolescent girls who she refers to as femme-fillette and whose gloomy world is characterised by parental violence. The social and psychological degradation of the children Beyala presents in her novels are instances of immeasurable misery impregnated with aggression of adults towards children. Through these same children, Beyala impugns various forms of disintegration eating into postcolonial Africa. Introducing a psychological paradigm into the readings and interpretations of Beyala's radical feminist works using Freudian psychoanalytic approach to literary criticism and Nietsche's theory of resentment clearly shows that Beyala is a feminist author whose anger is directed towards male hegemony, and it forms the avenue through which she aptly portrays that young girls living under oppression decline into psychological wrecks.Item Corps feminin, corps saccage, corps mutile: la vie sans fard de la femme opprimee dans Je suis nee au harem de Choga Regina Egbeme(Faculty of Arts, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria, 2016) Olayinka, E. B.The theory of objectification of female body highlights the question of the subjugation of woman. This phenomenon causes a virulent violence done to women by men, reducing the former to her body without regard for her personality and integrity. For decades, feminists oppose this challenge of making the woman an object of sexual desire and re / production . Choga Regina Egbeme’s Je uis nee au harem ( I was born in harem) highlights the appalling damage that men do to women and raises the principle of the oppression of women in a notoriously hegemonic society. The experience of papa David’s wives and daughters throughout the autobiographic narrative is the testimony of many African women. Following her forced marriage to a downright aggressive man, who raped her, and consequently infected with HIV by him and the baby resulted from the rape, Choga, the eponymous protagonist of the novel, secretly fled the prison home where she lives with her co-wives to help children and women who fall victims of this scourge. This article is based on a purely autobiographical novel which bitterly denounces the subjugation of the African woman caught in an ethos gearing, of diseases and even thorny traditions. Despite years of anti-hegemonic feminist campaigns that emphasises revalorisation of the female body, it is found that the female body remains a political site of patriarchal force.