140280 VO Issues in African Literature: Past and Present (2015S)

This introductory lecture series will trace the birth and development of modern African literature in English (and partly in French), exploring a wide range of political, aesthetic, and philosophical issues reflected in this writing (including fiction, non-fiction, and poetry). The political issues include language choice; anti-colonial nationalism; post-independence disillusionment and the issues of decolonization; the history of criticism of African writing; the construction of ethnic identities; the clash between tradition and modernity and gender; diaspora and exile; the impact of neo-colonization and globalization on Africa; the process of canonization and the material aspects of publishing. The aesthetic issues include topics such as social realism versus experimental approaches; the imaginative framework of the nationalist novel; the representation of the colonial encounter; the structure of autobiographical narratives; Black writing model; the influence of African orality and Western forms on the African novel; the representation of trauma; the style of popular literature. The philosophical issues to be explored include African identity and the postcolonial self; the position of African literature in world literature; the universal versus local; the influence of liberal humanist, feminist, Marxist, post-structuralist, postcolonialist and postmodernist discourses on these identities. Framing the discussion will be the question of how African literature can be defined and whether the term 'African literature' is useful at all in approaching writing from the continent.