ENGL 23050 - Intro to African Lit: Imagining Africa

Course Credit: 1
INTRODUCTION TO AFRICAN LITERATURE: IMAGINING AFRICA Often heralded as the ‘first African novel,’ Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart offers a vision of precolonial Nigeria that projects new possibilities for Nigerian history. But Achebe’s was just the latest in a long history of African writers reimagining social formations. In this class, we will examine how African writers since 1900 have mobilized literature to political ends. Students will explore the representations of Africa through digital mapping projects that engage the relationship between literary texts and geopolitical inequality. Writers studied include Chinua Achebe, Lauren Beukes, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Nuruddin Farah, Yaa Gyasi, and Wole Soyinka. [AH, GE]