Segu through a Historic and Cultural Perspective
Segu, by Maryse Conde is a five-part prose centered around four brothers born into the prestigious Traore family. It is a novel gravely satiated with the history of a kingdom in Mali during the late 17 to early 1800s, a time of immense cultural refinement. These alterations depicted in the novel are: the spread of Islam, the slave trade, and the mutation of identity due to such refinements. Due to this, the lenses of New Historicism, Cultural Studies will be associated to my research paper to prove that identity is malleable. Maryse Conde exemplifies this theme with one of the main characters, Tiekoro; as he was the first to venture out of Segu to experience the new religion. Being as she is …show more content…
As it relates, New Historicism, which developed in the 1980s is an approach to literary criticism/theory that seeks to find denotation in a text by viewing the work within the context of the prevailing concepts and postulates of its historical era than as a solitary work of art or text. Historicist charge themselves with the political function of literature and with the notion of power, the abstruse means by which cultures cultivate and reproduce themselves. The approach owes much of its momentum to the work of Michel Foucault, who based the idea on his theory of the limits of cumulative cultural discernment followed by his technique of examining an extensive array of documents to understand the episteme of a time thus, illustrating a literary text as an expression and/or reaction to the power-structures of the encompassing society. Cultural criticism, also known as Cultural studies, is like New Historicism but instead it takes the framework seriously and probes the social, economic, and political circumstances that effect communities and products such as, literature and it questions the traditional value of hierarchies such as gender, class, and race about them being high or low in culture (Newton, 1988). The aim of Cultural studies is to check cultural practices as it relates to power. Segu tells the story of present
Segu, by Maryse Conde is a five-part prose centered around four brothers born into the prestigious Traore family. It is a novel gravely satiated with the history of a kingdom in Mali during the late 17 to early 1800s, a time of immense cultural refinement. These alterations depicted in the novel are: the spread of Islam, the slave trade, and the mutation of identity due to such refinements. Due to this, the lenses of New Historicism, Cultural Studies will be associated to my research paper to prove that identity is malleable. Maryse Conde exemplifies this theme with one of the main characters, Tiekoro; as he was the first to venture out of Segu to experience the new religion. Being as she is …show more content…
As it relates, New Historicism, which developed in the 1980s is an approach to literary criticism/theory that seeks to find denotation in a text by viewing the work within the context of the prevailing concepts and postulates of its historical era than as a solitary work of art or text. Historicist charge themselves with the political function of literature and with the notion of power, the abstruse means by which cultures cultivate and reproduce themselves. The approach owes much of its momentum to the work of Michel Foucault, who based the idea on his theory of the limits of cumulative cultural discernment followed by his technique of examining an extensive array of documents to understand the episteme of a time thus, illustrating a literary text as an expression and/or reaction to the power-structures of the encompassing society. Cultural criticism, also known as Cultural studies, is like New Historicism but instead it takes the framework seriously and probes the social, economic, and political circumstances that effect communities and products such as, literature and it questions the traditional value of hierarchies such as gender, class, and race about them being high or low in culture (Newton, 1988). The aim of Cultural studies is to check cultural practices as it relates to power. Segu tells the story of present