Playful Blasphemies

Aderemi Raji-Oyelade

Playful Blasphemies. Postproverbials as Archetypes of Modernity in Yorùbá Culture

ISBN 978-3-86821-380-5, 168 pp., paperback, € 22,50 (2012)

(LuKA - Literaturen und Kulturen Afrikas, Vol. 3)

This book is a discourse in transformative paremiology, that is the critique of the ascendancy of new sets of contemporary proverbs of (post)modernist temper in African culture. Using the Yoruba as African example, it highlights the essential blasphemous and deconstructive nature of the transformed proverb, otherwise named as postproverbials, in comparison with the relatively fixed form of the traditional proverb. In 'Playful Blasphemies', Raji-Oyelade brings inventive theorising and original analysis to the understanding of the radical proverb text. This is a provocative and painstaking work in African studies and popular culture.

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