160049 PS Sozialgeschichte der Lit. (PS): Modernism, Postmodernism and Magical Realism in African Literature (2012S)

Relevant to study programmes: African Studies, Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Anthropology, Comparative Literature, Gender Studies, Transcultural Communication, Women’s and Gender History,

Content of the lecture (Inhalt):

From the time of the struggles for independence to the 1980s, African fiction and criticism were dominated by the realist form inherited from the Western 19th-century tradition. While African realism was politically engaged and accessible to readers, it tended to be co-opted into political orthodoxy, at the expense of an imaginative breadth and variety in perceiving reality. Experimental approaches from the 1980’s onwards reflect the necessity of new ways of expressing the (post)colonial experience, moving African literature beyond an action/reaction social paradigm. Its affinities with European modernism are a reminder that European modernism emerged from the unsettling encounter with the colonized Other which African writes look at from the other side of the mirror. The socio-historical developments in Africa in the 1990’s can no longer be apprehended through realist narrative strategies, giving way to magical realism. Exploring the uncanny, the wondrous, the taboo and the inspiring, it expresses both the desire to escape from entrapment and the playful and dangerous desire for the new and strange. Using techniques of defamiliarisation and extrapolation, African experimental authors enable readers to think more clearly and empathise more deeply through their imaginative entry into the African heterogenous experience. The course includes authors from Anglophone, Francophone and Arabophone backgrounds, such as Algeria, Ghana, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, and spans over 100 years, from 1899 to 2001.