3.0

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This course reaches beyond the much-taught postcolonial African realist canon to explore less-studied, more formally challenging works from across the continent, focusing on long-form prose and poetry. While texts will be clearly placed in an historical context, the emphasis in our readings will be on the inception, evolution, and intermingling of literary genres. How do seminal moments in African literary history complicate our received understandings of periodicity, mimesis, and the relation among selfhood, collectivity, and narration? What possibilities exist for theorizing African literature as a corpus, and what, conversely, are the descriptive and institutional limitations of “African Literature"? Primary texts will include “Ethiopia Unbound” (J.E. Casely Hayford); “Chaka” (Thomas Mofolo); “The Wrath of the Ancestors” (A.C. Jordan); “Song of Lawino” (Okot p’Bitek); and "“The Promised Land” (Grace Ogot), as well as poetry by Shaaban bin Robert and H.I.E. Dhlomo, among others. We’ll pay some attention, too, to critical trends and contextualization.