Richard Ajah | Digital Mapping of Culpability and the Culpable in African War Text
Channel: MSU Digital Humanities
Date: 2020-04-24

Richard Ajah | University of Uyo, Nigeria

Presentation description: 

Studies on African war texts have been approached from traditional close reading methods of enquiry, subjected to trauma, memory and psychoanalytical theories and less scholarly attention given to distant reading through digital tools. This study establishes the possibility of corpus building of African war narratives despite digital infrastructural shortcomings in Africa. It combines qualitative and quantitative methodologies in the digital mapping of culpability and the culpable in African civil war represented in these corpora. With AntConc and Voyant, Ahmadou Kourouma’s trilogy and Scholastique Mukasonga’s autobiography were mined and examined using an eclectic framework of postcolonial theory and onomastics. The corpus analysis investigates how outputs of both digital tools of concordance, clusters, Keywords, Word Cloud, collocation and visualisations help in the analysis of the portrayal of guilt and the guilty in these corpora. Anthroponyms, ethnonyms and toponyms, and their collocates are subjected to the postcolonial dynamics of otherness, subalternity and identity to underscore how they reflect authorial postcolonial ideology and judgement on African wars. In Kourouma’s trilogy, appropriation of culpability is postcolonially negotiated and contextually indicated through word frequencies and ranking. Boigny, Gbagbo, Doe, Koroma, tribal toponyms have common word frequencies same as the Tutsi and Hutu in Mukasonga’s genocidal autobiography. Numbers and curves are used to illustrate culpability chart that indicates the levels of guilt appropriated to historical figures and tribes represented in these corpora. 

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