African Mythology: Historical and Speculative Worlds

Catalog description

African Mythology examines how contemporary African and diasporic writers use historical and speculative fiction to reconstruct and revitalize precolonial African cosmologies. Through novels, epics, and myth-based speculative texts, students will explore myth as a living archive and as a literary method for confronting colonial erasure. The course foregrounds African worldbuilding traditions and intellectual histories often excluded from Eurocentric literary periodization, offering students a non-European entry point into premodern and early modern global thought. Emphasis is placed on myth as philosophy, narrative strategy, and cultural memory across the African continent and the Black diaspora. (ENGL-GLS, ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)