140015 VO Race, Gender and Sexuality in African Literature (2017W)

Aims (Ziele):
• Identify and analyse the operations of race and gender categories in African nationalist discourses as reflected in Anglophone African literature from Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe and South Africa
• analyse key African literary works in terms of their social and historical context
• apply close reading skills and critical thinking to a variety of literary texts
• reflect critically on the relations between primary texts and relevant secondary texts

Content (Inhalt): This course will explore the many ways in which “race”, “gender” and “sexuality” have come into being through each other and governed political identities and relationships in (post)colonial Africa, as reflected in African Anglophone and British imperial writing of the last two centuries. “Race”, “gender” and “sexuality” will be seen as interchangeable terms in the patriarchal enterprise of colonialism and the resistance against it, and as over-loaded concepts that continue to impact upon the understanding of what it means to be “African” and who is allowed to hold this identity.
Topics to be discussed include the sexist and racist imagination of British imperial adventure novels; the marginalization of femininity by both colonial and African nationalist discourses; the sexualized perception of mixed-raced identities; the pathologization of gay and lesbian sexuality across Africa; sexual violence against women legitimized by tradition and nationalism; white and albino African identities; the negotiation of black identities in post-apartheid South Africa; and others. Dissident desire will be explored as both a destructive force and a boundary-breaking energy that can redefine both the body and the nation through an imaginary encounter with otherness, leading to creolisation and hybridity. The course will engage with postcolonial, feminist, queer and other literary theories, as well as notions from the history and criticism of African literature in English.

Methods: Lecture and discussion