African Literature

Catalog description

This course focuses on modern and contemporary African literature. We will examine fiction, drama, and poetry from a variety of Sub-Saharan African locations (such as Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and South Africa). We will discuss several major concerns of African literary studies, concerns that are necessarily interdisciplinary: e.g., the appropriation of the colonizer’s language and literary traditions, colonial racism’s legacies in the postcolonial era, the role of indigenous thought in modern and contemporary writing, the relationship between the sacred and the secular in African modernity.