Oral communication is quite different in its spontaneity and communicative power from textual and visual communication. Culturally-bounded expectations of ways of speaking and individual creativity provide the spark that can ignite revolution or calm the soul. This book explores, from a cross-cultural perspective, the centrality of orality in the ideological processes that dominate public discourse, providing a counterbalance to the debates that foreground literacy and the power of written communication.

African oral literature, like other forms of popular culture, is not merely a form of entertainment but a medium for commenting on contemporary social and political events. It can also be a significant agent of change capable of directing, provoking, preventing, overturning, and recasting social reality. The contributors to this collection are anthropologists, linguists, historians, and ethnomusicologists, who present fresh material on oral literature to paint a lively picture of current real life situations in Africa.

Throughout Africa, oral literature is flourishing, though it is perceived by some as anachronistic to the modern world. This work refutes this idea in its entirety by presenting 22 chapters, which firmly place the study of oral literature within contemporary African existence. The study analyzes how oral literature relates to media, music, technology, text, gender, religion, power, politics and globalization.

This book delivers an admirably comprehensive and rigorous analysis of African oral literatures and performance. Gathering insights from distinguished scholars in the field, the book provides a range of contemporary interdisciplinary perspectives in the study of oral literature and its transformations in everyday life, fiction, poetry, popular culture, and postcolonial politics. Topics discussed include folklore and folklife; oral performance and masculinities; intermediated orality, modern transformations, and globalisation; orality and mass media; spoken word and imaginative writing. The book also addresses research methodologies and the thematic and theoretical trajectories of scholars of African oral literatures, looking back to the trailblazing legacies of Ruth Finnegan, Harold Scheub, and Isidore Okpewho. Ambitious in scope and incisive in its analysis, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of African literatures and oral performance as well as to general readers interested in the dynamics of cultural production.

Ethnosensitive Dimensions of African Oral Literature: Igbo Perspectives is a collection of nineteen essays spanning all genres of African Oral literature, from the poetic genre to the rhetorical genre. Part One of the book is introductory, and includes three essays that are of a general kind, touching all aspects of the genres, while Part Two includes six essays concerned with the poetic genre. Part Three, made up of two essays and concern the prose genre while Part Four, of two essays, examines the drama genre. Part Five, made up of three essays, addresses the rhetorical genre, and Part Six has three essays that cut across all the genres. The contributions examine the implications of ethnocentric imperatives of oral literature in relation to nationalistic demands.

Considered by many to be the greatest Irish song poet of her generation, Máire Bhuí Ní Laeire (Yellow Mary O’Leary; 1774–1848) was an illiterate woman unconnected to elite literary and philosophical circles who powerfully engaged the politics of her own society through song. As an oral arts practitioner, Máire Bhuí composed songs whose ecstatic, radical vision stirred her community to revolt and helped to shape nineteenth-century Irish anti-colonial thought. This provocative and richly theorized study explores the re-creative, liminal aspect of song, treating it as a performative social process that cuts to the very root of identity and thought formation, thus re-imagining the history of ideas in society.