Background
Simon Eliud Gikandi was born on September 30, 1960, in Nyeri, Kenya to Eliud and Charity (Maina) Gakure.
University Way, Nairobi, Kenya
Simon graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Literature from the University of Nairobi.
Old College, South Bridge, Edinburgh EH8 9YL, United Kingdom
Simon was a British Council Scholar at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland from which he graduated with a Master of Letters in English Studies.
633 Clark St, Evanston, IL 60208, United States
Simon has a Ph.D in English from Northwestern University.
(Though best known as a novelist, Achebe is also a critic,...)
Though best known as a novelist, Achebe is also a critic, activist, and spokesman for African culture. This reference is a comprehensive and authoritative guide to his life and writings. Included are several hundred alphabetically arranged entries. Some of these are substantive summary discussions of Achebe's major works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Entries are written by expert contributors and close with brief bibliographies.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Chinua-Achebe-Encyclopedia-Keith-Booker/dp/0325070636/?tag=prabook0b-20
2000
(This history offers new perspectives on African and Carib...)
This history offers new perspectives on African and Caribbean literature. It provides the general coverage and specific information expected of a major history. Chapters address the literature itself, the practices and conditions of its composition, and its complex relationship with African social and geopolitical history. The book provides an account of the entire body of productions that can be considered to comprise the field of African literature, defined both by imaginative expression in Africa itself and the black diaspora. The book accounts for the specific historical and cultural context in which this expression has been manifested in African and the Caribbean: the formal particularities of the literary corpus, both oral and written, that can be ascribed to the two areas, and the diversity of material and texts covered by the representative works. This magisterial history of African literature is an essential resource for specialists and students.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cambridge-History-Caribbean-Literature-Hardback/dp/0521594340/?tag=prabook0b-20
2004
(The most comprehensive reference work on African literatu...)
The most comprehensive reference work on African literature to date, this book covers all the key historical and cultural issues in the field. The Encyclopedia contains over 600 entries covering criticism and theory, African literature's development as a field of scholarship, and studies of established and lesser-known writers and their texts. While the greatest proportion of literary work in Africa has been a product of the twentieth century, the Encyclopedia also covers the literature back to the earliest eras of story-telling and oral transmission, making this a unique and valuable resource for those studying social sciences as well as humanities. This work includes cross-references, suggestions for further reading, and a comprehensive index.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/routledge-encyclopedia-african-literature/dp/0415549620/?tag=prabook0b-20
2009
(In Simon Gikandi’s view, Caribbean literature and postcol...)
In Simon Gikandi’s view, Caribbean literature and postcolonial literature more generally negotiate an uneasy relationship with the concepts of modernism and modernity―a relationship in which the Caribbean writer, unable to escape a history encoded by Europe, accepts the challenge of rewriting it. Drawing on contemporary deconstructionist theory, Gikandi looks at how such Caribbean writers as George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, Alejo Carpentier, C. L. R. James, Paule Marshall, Merle Hodge, Zee Edgell, and Michelle Cliff have attempted to confront European modernism.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Writing-Limbo-Modernism-Caribbean-Literature/dp/1501719904/?tag=prabook0b-20
2018
(It would be easy to assume that, in the eighteenth centur...)
It would be easy to assume that, in the eighteenth century, slavery and the culture of taste - the world of politeness, manners, and aesthetics - existed as separate and unequal domains, unrelated in the spheres of social life. But to the contrary, Slavery and the Culture of Taste demonstrates that these two areas of modernity were surprisingly entwined. Ranging across Britain, the antebellum South, and the West Indies, and examining vast archives, including portraits, period paintings, personal narratives, and diaries, Simon Gikandi illustrates how the violence and ugliness of enslavement actually shaped theories of taste, notions of beauty, and practices of high culture, and how slavery's impurity informed and haunted the rarified customs of the time.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Slavery-Culture-Taste-Simon-Gikandi/dp/069116097X/?tag=prabook0b-20
(Why did the novel take such a long time to emerge in the ...)
Why did the novel take such a long time to emerge in the colonial world? And, what cultural work did it come to perform in societies where subjects were not free and modes of social organization diverged from the European cultural centers where the novel gained its form and audience? Answering these questions and more, Volume 11, The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean since 1950 explores the institutions of cultural production that exerted influence in late colonialism, from missionary schools and metropolitan publishers to universities and small presses. How these structures provoke and respond to the literary trends and social peculiarities of Africa and the Caribbean impacts not only the writing and reading of novels in those regions, but also has a transformative effect on the novel as a global phenomenon.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Africa-Caribbean-Oxford-History-English/dp/019976509X/?tag=prabook0b-20
Simon Eliud Gikandi was born on September 30, 1960, in Nyeri, Kenya to Eliud and Charity (Maina) Gakure.
Simon graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Literature from the University of Nairobi. He was a British Council Scholar at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland from which he graduated with a Master of Letters in English Studies. He has a Ph.D in English from Northwestern University.
Simon is the author of many books and articles including Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (1992), and Ngugi wa Thiong', (2009) which was a Choice Outstanding Academic Publication for 2004, and co-author of The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English Since 1945 (2007). He is the co-editor of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature (2004) and the editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of African Literature (2003). His latest book is Slavery and the Culture of Taste (2011). This text was widely acclaimed, earning many academic awards. He is currently editing Vol. 11 of The Oxford History of the Novel in English: The Novel in Africa and the Atlantic World.
From 1991 until 2004, Gikandi taught at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, as a faculty member in the Comparative Literature department. He began teaching at Princeton in 2004, as a faculty member in the English department. Gikandi has also held positions at University of Massachusetts-Boston (1987-1991), Harvard University (1989-1990), and California State University-Bakersfield (1986-1987).
(Why did the novel take such a long time to emerge in the ...)
(In Simon Gikandi’s view, Caribbean literature and postcol...)
2018(It would be easy to assume that, in the eighteenth centur...)
(The most comprehensive reference work on African literatu...)
2009(Though best known as a novelist, Achebe is also a critic,...)
2000(This history offers new perspectives on African and Carib...)
2004Simon married Juandamarie Josephine Gikandi on July 17, 1993. They have three children: Samani, Ajami and Halima.