Topic: Supernatural African Literature

Catalog description

This course will focus on the ways select African writers use the supernatural as a literary device to pay critical attention to the sociopolitical dynamics of religion and spirituality in different contemporary contexts. Considering the complex historical trajectory that came out of colonial encounters with indigenous belief systems in Africa, this course will especially pay attention to how these African writers, filmmakers and visual artists grapple with gendered corporeality and embodiment, creaturely lives, specters of post/coloniality, and futures of queer after/lives. Texts read and discussed in this course may include Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching and Things They Lost; Eloghosa Osunde’s Vagabonds and their other longform works; as well as the works of Nikyatu Jusu, Wangechi Mutu, and Akwaeke Emezi, among others; select short stories based on African folklore, and Alain Mabanckou’s Memoirs of a Porcupine.