This seminar explores the different ways in which the interplay of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ has been negotiated in anglophone West African literature since the early twentieth century. The course also theorises and problematizes the concepts of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, especially with regard to colonial and neo-colonial discourse patterns, the problems of cultural binarisms, and contemporary theories of transculturalism, globalisation and multiple modernities.
The course welcomes students who are new to African literature, as well as those who already have some previous knowledge of the subject. Depending on students’ previous knowledge, the seminar begins (if required) with an introduction to the general social, cultural and literary history of West Africa, followed by a more specific focus on the colonial and postcolonial period, and more specialised study of the themes listed above.
Specific patterns of cultural contact and change will be studied through older texts as well as texts which remember or re-construct the colonial period from a later vantage point. We will trace the flowering of anglophone postcolonial literature in different West African countries since World War 2, at the transcultural meeting point between colonial/European/international influences on the one hand and the continuing importance (and dynamic transformation) of indigenous traditions on the other. The course considers such issues as literary form, language use, local and international audiences, publishing and marketing, anticolonialism, nativism vs. cosmopolitanism, independence, nation-building and politics, gender, emigration, diaspora, and the recent emergence of Africanfuturism as a globally successful cultural phenomenon. Close readings of literary texts from different genres will be connected to relevant theoretical approaches, for instance from postcolonialism, feminism/ womanism, transnationalism and globalisation studies.
We will read two books in their entirety; these are Chinua Achebe’s classic novel Things Fall Apart (1958) and Nnedi Okorafor’s novel Lagoon (2014). Student should purchase these in advance (no prescribed editions). In addition, we will read a wide range of shorter texts to be chosen in consultation with students. Possibilities include life writing, short fiction, drama, poetry, history, criticism, and literary and cultural theory, to be made available via our online course platform.
Students will gain a good overview of anglophone West African Literature and will be able to relate in-depth analysis of individual primary texts to wider cultural and social debates on tradition and modernity, colonialism and postcolonialism, and transculturalism, both in the region itself and in a wider continental and transcontinental framework.
