In Africa, hip hop music is now undoubtedly the fastest growing form of expressive art in terms of availability, dissemination and acceptability. Nigeria not an exception, the genre in recent times has become the mainstream music representing the identity and socio-cultural aspirations of the teeming Nigerian urban youth population. Through incursion into the origin of hip hop, this paper examines the inter-connectivity and the inter-relationship between the street and hip hop music with a comparison of the Nigerian and the American street culture in hip hop music discourse. It is quite evident that hip hop music and the street are inseparable with manifestation which are visibly perceived through the Nigerian rap star- Olamide’s hip hop philosophy, his choice of language for dissemination, message and didactic use of the genre as an alternative and legitimate hustle as opposed to the now common internet fraud becoming a plaque among Nigerian teeming youths.

This article entitled “Some Perspectives on Overcoming Communication Challenges in the Selected Novels of Fatou Diome, Gloria Naylor, Leanora Miano, Pamela Jooste and Walter Mosley”, analyses both genetic and biological disparities from childhood that characterize the lives of boys and girls till adulthood in society. Thus, Le Ventre de l’Atlantique (Diome), The Women of Brewster Place (Naylor), Tels des astres éteints (Miano), Dance with a poor man’s Daughter (Jooste), and RL’s Dream (Mosley), motivated their use to raise an awareness campaigns on female conscientization against a male conspiracy built on the law of silence against the female gender, resulting in male marginalization, of women in gender relationships through diverse cultural and religious practices represented by the corpus. In order to achieve this goal, the following analytical tools were used: feminist criticism, post-colonialism and Africana Womanism. The hypothesis is based on the fact that the corpus underscores gender conflicts that rock power is exercised against women through the channel of communication by men. The analysis concluded that female consciousness raising is a tool that women use to counteract any form of subjugation in patriarchal societies that struggle to their emancipation and freedom. Consequently, the analysis highlights the philosophical and ideological vision that all five authors have of their respective African and African-American societies, concerning gender equality.

Banana Yoshimoto (the pen name of Mahoko Yoshimoto, born in 1964) is a Japanese writer who, like her contemporary Haruki Murakami, is distinguished by her desire to question and problematize aspects of modern Japanese society in her fiction. Banana Yoshimoto is regarded as a representative figure in contemporary Japanese fiction, foregrounding the experiences and self-questioning of a younger generation struggling to find its place in a society torn between conservatism and the contingencies of a radical, dynamic, globalized, but at the same time, consumer culture. The elusiveness of relationships, of intimacy, of love and life, the difficulty of defining and finding happiness, and the inscrutability of one’s self are some of the central themes in her writing. This paper looks at Yoshimoto’s widely acclaimed novella, Kitchen (1987), and the manner in which Mikage Sakurai, the protagonist, manoeuvers through death, loneliness and healing to arrive at a secure sense of self. This happens through the primary metaphor of the kitchen, and the gendered associations that it elicits. At the same time, Yoshimoto’s representation of this space, as well as of food in general, challenges certain stereotypes associated with these. In the process, interpersonal relationships as well as the conventional idea of family also come to be reconstituted in the novella.