Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya (Social History of Africa Series) [Hardcover]

Derek R. Peterson (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0325071306 | ISBN-13: 978-0325071305 | Publication Date: January 20, 2004

This book challenges the conventions that undergird the academic study of literature. Where literary scholars' method separates the book from its readership, Creative Writing explores how different kinds of texts were interpreted, used, and recomposed in real-life political discourse. Where social historians often disparage the study of literature as an elitist occupation, Peterson demonstrates how ordinary people used texts to act creatively in their own world.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“This is without a doubt one of the most important contributions to the historiography of colonial Africa....Here for the first time we have a concrete history of how one African people (the Northern Gikuyu) engaged colonialism in its own terms, adopted its tactics to their emergent needs, and appropriated its resources to secure an independent modern polity...Peterson brings new insights and methodologies to force us to rethink colonial history beyond the seductive binaries that have traditionally defined it and to dramatize the contradictory impulses that drove local agents as they sought to become both Gikuyu and modern. This is a great story, told with passion and flavor, and full of brilliant insights.”–Simon Gikandi, Professor of English Language and Literature, The University of Michigan

“Peterson's command of the Gikuyu language, no less than of historical method and literary theory, ensures that Creative Writing deepens our understanding of colonial African history on several different fronts. He shows, above all, that there was less a literate hegemonic, 'colonial encounter' with oral tradition than an engagement between internal African polemicists and the missionary bringers of a new grammar of debate....With this book colonial African history becomes altogether more interesting.”–John Lonsdale Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge University

About the Author

Derek R. Peterson is assistant professor of history at The College of New Jersey, Ewing, New Jersey.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Heinemann (January 20, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0325071306
• ISBN-13: 978-0325071305
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,413,125 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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