Peter Nazareth

 
Nazareth Peter

Birthdate: April 27, 1940

 Place of birth: Kampala, Uganda

Language spoken: English Writing language: English

Education: Of Goan origin, Peter Nazareth obtained a BA. (Hons) in English from Makerere University College in 1962 before going on to complete a postgraduate diploma in English studies at the University of Leeds, England. On the basis of his first novel, In a Brown Mantle (it predicted the expulsion of Asians which was announced by Idi Amin nine days after the book's launch), Nazareth was awarded the Seymour Lustman Fellowship, Yale University, in January 1973.

Employment: On return from Leeds, Nazareth worked seven years in Uganda's ministry of finance until 1973. And from Yale, Nazareth moved to the University of Iowa as Honorary Fellow in the International Writing Programme (IWP) and visiting lecturer in the African-American Studies Programme. He has never left. He is currently professor of English, chair of the African-American World Studies Programme and advisor to the IWP He was president of the African Literature Association 1985/ 86. Since 1992, Nazareth has taught "American Popular Arts: Elvis as Anthology", which sparked off a great deal of media attention beginning with an article in The Wall Street Journal on January 8.

Bibliography: In a Brown Mantle (novel) Nairobi: EALB, 1972. Two Radio Plays. Nairobi: EALB, 1976. The General Is Up (novel)  Calcutta: Writers Workshop 1984 Reprint Toronto: Toronto South Asian Books, 1991. (Extracts from this novel have been published in Journals and anthologies in nine countries).

Non-fiction, An African View of Literature. Evanston: Northwestern University press, 1974. First published as Literature and Society in Modem Africa. Nairobi: EALB, 1972 (reprinted by KLB, 1980).

The Third World Writer: His Social Responsibility. Nairobi: KLB, 1978. Critical Essays on Ngugi wa  Thiong'o, edited by Nazareth, will soon be published by G.K.Hall & Co., New York. His other scholarly work has appeared in over 30 anthologies. Studies on Peter Nazareth include African Literature in the Twentieth Century (by O.R.Dathorne). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975. Nazareth was the first East African to have a play broadcast by the DEC African Service. His short stories have appeared in several anthologies.
 

Comment:  Nazareth believes, with Ngugi wa Thiong'o, that the mind must be decolonized and some of his works are about how to recognize the way the mind has been conditioned, and how to deconstruct the media to find out what is going on. He is thus helping rewrite history.

Nazareth further believes that the key battle is taking place in the field of literary criticism, that is, in the zone of the power to control interpretation. He breaks through the barriers in In the Trickster Tradition: The Novels of Andrew Salkey, Francis Ebejer and Ishmael Reed. London: Bogle-L'Ouverture Press, 1994.
His influences include Bertholt Brecht, comic books, Mad Magazine, cartoons, Anton Chekhov, Henry Mifier, Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, V.5. Naipaul, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Okot p'Bitek, Elvis Presley, David Rubadiri, Ishmael Reed and Andrew Salkey. He follows Goan tradition in being a cultural broker, taking from one culture to another, and he is in the Ugandan tradition of writing frankly and using whatever genre suits the message of the work.