143341 PS Introductory Seminar in African Literatures (2023S)

Proseminar Topic: Kintu - sexuality, family and politics in an African context.
"Kintu" (2014) is a novel by Ugandan author Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi that made literary history upon its publication. It is a fascinating family saga, several hundred pages long, that stretches from the Kingdom of Buganda to contemporary Uganda, redefining relationships between genders, generations, and between community and nation. Beyond Uganda, it is a literary and historical project through which Makumbi demonstrates African systems of knowledge and belief and their translation into an African modernity. "Kintu" offers a wealth of points of connection for developing an alternative understanding of modernity, sexuality, of the relationship between family and national community, of spiritual health, and of dealing with a traumatic past.
In this course we will first read the novel together in the form of a guided reading and discuss it in the context of feminist, Afrocentric and decolonial discourses in particular. In a second step, students will develop their own themes from it, present them and write a proseminar paper on them.