Collector, Curator, Creator: Nigerian folktales and their colonial appropriation, feminist intervention, and contemporary re-appropriation.

本文将从后殖民女性主义的视角分析尼日利亚民间故事的收集和传播，并探讨这种民间故事形式如何在当代讲英语的非洲小说中被重新挪用。我计划从尼日利亚前地区专员埃尔芬斯顿·戴雷尔和安吉拉·卡特的档案中，调查殖民时代女性讲述的尼日利亚民间故事--以及关于女性的故事--安吉拉·卡特出版了戴雷尔收集的叙事精选，作为她对童话和民间故事进行女权主义干预的一部分。重要的是，我的项目还将通过探索Nnedi Okorafor、Irenosen Okojie、Lesley Nneka Arimah和Akwaeke Emezi如何在他们的小说中融入并创造性地改编民间故事形式和比喻来展示尼日利亚民间故事的当代相关性。20世纪初，戴雷尔收集并翻译了尼日利亚民间故事；随后，戴雷尔收藏的民间故事被收录在卡特的两本《S童话》(1990,1993)中。虽然卡特的作品被广泛研究，但她的民间故事选择方法却被忽视了。我将调查卡特选集的语境意义，并评估它们的交叉局限性。然后，我将探讨当代尼日利亚女作家如何重新利用民间故事形式，她们在小说中创造性地将民间故事形式和主题纳入其中。为此，我将考察Nnedi Okorafor的《谁害怕死亡》(2010)，赤形女巫(2011)和宾蒂三部曲(2019)，Irenosen Okojie的《说出千篇一律》(2016)和Lesley Nneka Arimah的《当一个人从天上掉下来意味着什么》(2017)，以及Akwaeke Emezi的中篇小说《淡水》(2018)。通过强调档案材料可以加深我们对当代文学的理解，该项目将为非洲文学史提供一种创新的批评方法。我提出的论文是基于我最后一年的后殖民文本模块的项目(被评为一等，因此我获得了霍普路奖)和我的MREs论文(我被预测为优等级)。基于我的学术本科成绩，我获得了一项竞争激烈的南大研究途径奖学金；这笔奖学金支持那些表现出非凡前途的研究生成为未来的研究人员。在2018年南大英语研究博览会上，我是第一个介绍后殖民文本项目的学生；这次经历增强了我继续研究生研究的决心。我目前是诺丁汉当代大学的一个小组安置的一员，利用我对后殖民和性别理论的知识为一系列面向公众的事件提供信息。学者们的民间故事研究侧重于欧洲的多样性，主要接近于诸如“非历史的”和“普遍的”这样的叙事(Haase 2010)。然而，欧洲以外的民间故事的收集和翻译过程与殖民文化的侵占是分不开的。从南亚的角度来看，奈塔尼(1997；2006；2010)调查了英国的殖民者-民俗学家如何剥削完成了大部分收藏和翻译工作的未获信任的当地助手。然而，专门针对尼日利亚民间故事的研究很少。这种缺乏学术干预的问题将通过研究戴雷尔作为“殖民者-民俗学家”的工作(奈塔尼，1997年)来解决，包括查阅他出版的民间故事卷(1910,1913年)和在皇家人类学研究所举行的笔记本手稿。

This thesis will analyse the collection and dissemination of Nigerian folktales from a postcolonial feminist perspective, and explore how the folktale form has been reappropriated in contemporary Anglophone African fiction. I plan to investigate the colonial-era appropriation of Nigerian folktales as told by women - and about women - from the archives of Elphinstone Dayrell, former district commissioner of Nigeria, and Angela Carter, who published a selection of Dayrell's collected narratives as part of her feminist intervention in fairy tales and folktales. Importantly, my project will also demonstrate the contemporary relevance of the Nigerian folktale by exploring the ways in which Nnedi Okorafor, Irenosen Okojie, Lesley Nneka Arimah, and Akwaeke Emezi incorporate and creatively adapt folktale forms and tropes in their fiction.In the early 1900s, Dayrell collected and translated Nigerian folktales; subsequently, folktales from Dayrell's collections were included in Carter's two Virago Book[s] of Fairy Tales (1990, 1993). Whilst Carter's work has been extensively researched, her folktale selection methods have been overlooked. I will investigate the contextual significance of Carter's anthologies and assess their intersectional limitations. I will then explore how the folktale form is being reappropriated by contemporary Nigerian women writers who creatively include folkloric forms and themes in their fiction. For this, I will examine Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death (2010), Akata Witch (2011) and the Binti trilogy (2019), short stories from Irenosen Okojie's Speak Gigantular (2016) and Lesley Nneka Arimah's What it Means When a Man Falls from the Sky (2017), and Akwaeke Emezi's novella, Freshwater (2018). By emphasising the ways in which archival material can deepen our understanding of contemporary literature, this project will offer an innovative critical methodology for African literary history. My proposed thesis builds on my project for the final-year Postcolonial Texts module (graded as First Class and for which I received the HopeRoad Prize) and on my MRes dissertation (for which I am predicted a Distinction grade). On the basis of my academic undergraduate record, I won a highly competitive NTU Research Pathway Scholarship; this bursary supports postgraduates who show exceptional promise as future researchers. At NTU's 2018 English Research Fair, I was the first student to present on a Postcolonial Texts project; this experience added to my determination to pursue postgraduate research. I am currently part of a group-placement at Nottingham Contemporary, using my knowledge of postcolonial and gender theories to inform a series of public-facing events.Scholarly folktale research focuses on European varieties, largely approaching such narratives as 'ahistorical' and 'universal' (Haase 2010). Yet the collection and translation processes of folktales from outside of Europe is inextricable from colonial cultural appropriation. From a South Asian perspective, Naithani (1997; 2006; 2010) investigates how British 'colonizer-folklorists' exploited uncredited, native assistants who completed most of the collection and translation work. However, research specifically concerning Nigerian folktales is scarce. This lack of scholarly intervention will be addressed through examining Dayrell's work as a 'colonizer-folklorist' (Naithani 1997), involving consulting his published folktale volumes (1910, 1913) and notebook manuscripts, held at the Royal Anthropological Institute.