The Literatures of Africa (Q3079)
John Masterson ([email protected])
Office: B329
Office hours Mondays 2-3pm & Thursdays 2-3pm
This course will sample the literary and intellectual work of a range of
African authors. Some writers endorse the concept of ‘African identity’
in their work and explore hard-hitting topics such as poverty,
(post)colonial history and political corruption; other authors question the
idea of ‘Africa’ itself and challenge unified identities; other writers
bypass continental models and focus on more mundane but equally
significant topics such as family life, gender identity, urbanisation and
migration.
Current debates about African identity, postcolonialism, sexuality, the
‘Black Atlantic’ and African cultural history will be studied alongside the
primary texts, and emphasis will be placed upon the different political
and cultural contexts of the material. We will look at the ways in which
the selected authors construct a locale in their texts to explore
geographical and cultural difference, as well as questions of sexual,
economic and political power. The course will also feature a popular
culture workshop designed by staff and students in the School of English.
Topics to be considered include the following:
• nationalism and cultural identity;
• writing the body, sexual identities and gender subversion;
• African oral cultures and art forms;
• cultural flows within African-defined spaces;
• the literary representations of migration, displacement and
diaspora;
• the literature of post-Apartheid South Africa.
Canonical novels from Africa, such as Ngugi wa Thiongo’s The River
Between and Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning will be studied alongside
texts by new African writers. Taken together, the authors on this course
will reveal the multiple, dynamic languages and styles of modern African
writers.
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Primary texts (you are advised to buy your own copy of these texts as
availability is very limited in the Library; try amazon.co.uk for cheap
second-hand copies):
Please buy any edition unless specified below:
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Contemporary African Plays (an anthology of plays by Wole Soyinka,
Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema and Barney Simon) Edited by Martin
Banham and Jane Plastow (London: Methuen, 1999)
J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The River Between
Amos Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard
Nuruddin Farah, Maps
Marlene van Niekerk, Triomf
Ken Saro-Wiwa, Sozaboy
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun
Yvonne Vera, Butterfly Burning
Petina Gappah, An Elegy for Easterly
NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names
You are encouraged to familiarise yourself with the following collections
of theory, available in the Library:
• Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse
and Postcolonial Theory
• Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds), The PostColonial Studies Reader.
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I. What is expected from you on this course?
a) This course emphasises student participation in order to encourage you to
be self-confident and articulate both in writing and in speech;
b) You will also be encouraged to develop research and writing skills;
c) You are expected to attend every seminar on this course unless you have
good reason to be absent;
d) Your attendance at and participation in seminars will form major
components of your tutorial report at the end of the course. Tutorial reports are
often used in the writing of academic and employment references.
II. The ideas underlying this course: The Literatures of Africa
a) That the aesthetic qualities of narratives by African authors should be
considered in relation to authors’ regional, cultural and historical contexts;
b) That the study of African literatures helps us to interrogate critical
assumptions about nationalism, postcolonialism, African identity and the
‘Black Atlantic’.
III. Outcomes of the course
By the end of the course, a successful student should be able to:
a) Undertake close, informed readings of literary and critical texts, paying
attention to genre, structure and theme and/or style and argumentation.
b) Show familiarity with a range of established and emergent critical
positions in the field of African literature.
c) Think critically about theories of globalisation and cultural identity.
IV. Skills imparted by the course
Additionally, by the end of the course, a successful student should have
acquired the following skills:
a) The ability to conduct independent and self-reflective research under
supervision, and to manage time in order to meet deadlines for each
task;
b) The ability to research, evaluate and critique key literary and
theoretical texts;
c) The ability to use a variety of academic resources and tools,
including Sussex University Library, the MLA bibliography, on-line
journals and databases;
d) The ability to work closely and collaboratively with members of a
small team, and be able to present ideas to the larger group;
e) The ability to critically evaluate a range of established and current
debates and concepts about gender and postcolonial identity;
f) The ability to express ideas cogently in a wide range of written and
oral forms, including oral presentations, class debates and essays;
g) The ability to develop reasoned arguments, and present them in
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accessible forms, both orally and in writing.
V. Modes of assessment (note that neither [a] nor [b] contribute formally to the final
grade):
a) Essay (1500-2000 words);
b) Oral presentation in class;
c) Dissertation (5000 words, excluding bibliography).
VI. Modes of evaluation of your progress on this course:
a) Week 8: 1500-2000 word practice essay which you will then
be able to revise and use towards your dissertation;
b) Week 10: feedback on practice essay;
c) End of course: tutorial report;
d) 2 dissertation supervision meetings.
VII. Why are these modes of assessment and evaluation appropriate to this course?
Oral presentations and essays will enable you to research and reflect upon a topic,
develop your skills in organising and presenting a coherent argument within a
designated word-length. The 5000-word dissertation is appropriate as a form because
this is a third-level, research-oriented course. It will enable students to manage their
own research under supervision and explore and test their own ideas at length.
VIII. Why is this course appropriate to the third year of study at Sussex?
In year 3, your courses involve an element of independent research, requiring you to
show (if you have not done so before) originality and independence of thought. You
will be able to work in detail on these qualities in this Special Subject course, giving
yourself the freedom to specialise with rigour and depth in areas of study and on
topics of your choice.
IX. Seminars:
Seminars will enable students to discuss their own ideas with others and respond to
creative and critical challenges to those ideas.
X. Workshops – new for 2015.
We will discuss the most effective way to run these additional 1 hour slots in our first
session.
The success of a seminar depends on the active and equal participation of all those
taking part and you will not have made the best use of the seminar if you have
remained uninvolved during the discussion. Equally, if you have definite ideas about
a text, use these to stimulate and provoke discussion.
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Weekly Schedule
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Week 1:
Introductory Session: Colonialism and the Idea of Africa
Please prepare some ideas on the following topics for discussion:
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What are your definitions of colonialism and postcolonialism?
How does Things Fall Apart convey anti-colonial sentiments?
There is a plethora of secondary material on Achebe! Dip in and read some of it. You
might like to ask yourselves why everyone includes Things Fall Apart in the canon of
‘postcolonial literature’, over and above other texts from the same period. Does TFA
exhibit archetypal ‘postcolonial’ qualities? What are these?
Primary text: Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Secondary/theoretical reading:
• Chinua Achebe, ‘The African Writer and the English Language’, in Patrick
Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds.), Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial
Theory: A Reader.
• Graham Huggan, The Post-colonial Exotic. (Chapter ‘African Literature and
the Anthropological Exotic’, discussing Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, pp.3457)
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Week 2:
Staging Africa
African theatre is often neglected from African literary studies, but the anthology of
plays for this session reveals the immense richness of African theatrical traditions.
This week we will focus on the following play from the collection Contemporary
African Plays:
1. Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman
You are encouraged to read at least one further play from this collection! Suggestion:
Ama Ata Aidoo, Anowa.
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Week 3:
Race and Rape
Think about the ways Disgrace holds white and black South Africa to account in
equal measure.
• What is the political significance of sexual abuse/rape in the novel?
Primary texts:
J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
Secondary/theoretical reading:
• Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee (eds), Negotiating the Past: The Making of
Memory in South Africa
• Sarah Nuttall, ‘Subjectivities of Whiteness’, in Raoul Granqvist (ed.),
Sensuality and Power in Visual Culture.
• David Attwell, J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing.
• Melissa E. Stein. 2001. “Whiteness Just Isn’t What It Used To Be’”: White
Identity in a Changing South Africa. New York: SUNY.
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Week 4:
Anti-Colonial Writing: Representing Kenya
Think about the concept of ‘resistance’ in Ngugi’s writing, and the ways in which he
represents Kenyan history and national culture.
• How does Ngugi dramatise the differences between pre-colonial and
postcolonial African cultural identities?
• How important is gender to the ethical and national debates that occur in this
novel?
Primary text: Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The River Between
Secondary/theoretical reading:
• Frantz Fanon, ‘On National Culture’, in Williams and Chrisman, op.cit.
• Lazarus, Neil.. Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction.
• James Ogude,, Ngugi’s Novels and African History, London: Pluto
• Simon Gikandi, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• G. D. Killam, An Introduction to the Writings of Ngugi, London: Heinemann.
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Week 5:
Alternative Foundations, Alternative Visions
Think about the ways Tutuola’s novel resists and reformulates key positions in
postcolonial discourse.
• Describe the ways in which The Palm-Wine Drinkard is different from
Achebe’s and Ngugi’s novels?
Primary text:
Amos Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard
Secondary/theoretical reading:
• Julien, Eileen. African Novels and the Question of Orality.
• Nuttall, Sarah, ‘Reading, Recognition and the Postcolonial’. Interventions 3
(3): 391-404.
• Barber, Karin, ‘Time, Space and Writing in Three Colonial Yoruba Novels’.
The Yearbook of English Studies 27: 108-129.
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Week 6:
Real Magic/Magical Realism? Or, The PoMo into the PoCo Doesn’t Go?
Think about the narrative techniques in Maps. How does it correspond with the other
texts we have looked at on this module?
• Can you ‘locate’ this novel in Africa, or is it more dislocated and global in
reach?
• How appropriate is it to label this text as ‘postmodern’?
Primary text:
Nuruddin Farah, Maps
Secondary/theoretical reading:
• Emerging Perspectives on Nuruddin Farah, ed. Derek Wright.
• John Masterson, The Disorder of Things: A Foucauldian Approach to the
Work of Nuruddin Farah.
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Week 7: Reading Week
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Think Dissertation Thoughts!
In week 8 you will be expected to submit a 1500-2000 word practice essay which you
will then be able to revise and use towards your dissertation. These practice essays
will be given feedback (in week 10) but not marks. It is very important that you write
this essay and start thinking about your dissertation: it is greatly to your advantage!
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Week 8:
White South Africa at its Worst: Urban geographies and Damaged
Masculinities
This session focuses on the way in which national, post-apartheid identities in South
Africa may be expressed in terms of violence, abuse, and damaged masculinities.
Primary texts:
Marlene Van Niekerk. 2000. Triomf. London: Abacus.
Secondary/theoretical reading:
Lis Lange, White, Poor and Angry: White Working-Class Families in Johannesburg.
London: Ashgate.
Richard Tomlinson et al (eds.), Emerging Johannesburg : Perspectives on the
Postapartheid City. London: Routledge.
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Week 9:
‘Nation language’
This session focuses on the way that Saro-Wiwa experiments with ‘pidgin english’ to
articulate a more complex political position than anticolonialism or nationalism.
• Do ‘grand narratives’ such as nationalism and anti-colonialism stifle the
expression of ordinary African experiences such as unemployment, personal
relationships and political oppression?
Primary text:
Ken Saro-Wiwa, Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English
Secondary/theoretical reading:
• Kamau Brathwaite, ‘Nation language’, in Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin (eds.),
The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, pp.309-314.
• Chinua Achebe, ‘The African Writer and the English Language’, in Williams
and Chrisman (eds.), Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, pp.428434.
• Ngugi wa Thiong’o, ‘The Language of African Literature’, in Chrisman and
Williams, op.cit.
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Week 10:
Translating the Biafran War
In this session, we will consider the ways in which Adichie’s popularly and critically
acclaimed novel ‘writes’ the Biafran War.
- How does Half of a Yellow Sun (cor)respond to Saro-Wiwa’s text?
- How does the novel translate in filmic terms?
- How are debates about Adichie’s novel informed by those concerned with the
‘postcolonial’ writer as commodity?
- Is it enabling to frame a reading of the novel in relation to trauma studies?
Primary Text:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun
Secondary/theoretical reading:
- For a comprehensive list of secondary sources, look at Adichie’s official
website: http://www.l3.ulg.ac.be/adichie/
Week 11:
Writing Zimbabwe (1)
Think about the ways in which Vera’s novel corresponds with some of the issues we
have addressed throughout this course. Why might it be a fitting text with which to
conclude?
- What vision of township life do we get in the novel?
- How influential has Vera’s work been for succeeding generations of
Zimbabwean women writers (consider Petina Gappah and NoViolet
Bulawayo)
Primary text:
Yvonne Vera, Butterfly Burning, plus selected stories from Gappah’s An Elegy for
Easterly
Secondary/Theoretical Reading:
- Emerging Perspectives on Yvonne Vera. Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo and Helen
Cousins (eds) 2012.
- Eleni Coundouriotis, ‘Self-Inflicted Wounds in Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly
Burning,’ in World Literature Today, Vol. 79 (2005)
- Grace Musila, ‘Embodying Experience and Agency in Yvonne Vera’s
Without a Name and Butterfly Burning’ in Research in African Literatures,
Vol. 38 (2007).
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Week 12:
Writing Zimbabwe (2)
In what ways are both Gappah and Bulawayo ‘writing back’ to Vera? Is there
anything identifiably 21st century in their representations of life in contemporary
Zimbabwe?
Primary Texts:
Petina Gappah, An Elegy for Easterly & NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names
Secondary Material
(in addition to works listed above)
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing (Columbia
University Press, 2014)
Simon Gikandi, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
Brendon Nicholls, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Gender and the Ethics of Postcolonial
Reading (Ashgate, 2010)
Sydney Onyeberechi, Critical Essays: Achebe, Baldwin, Cullen, Ngugi and Tutuola
(2013)
Caroline Rooney, African Literature, Animism and Politics (Routledge, 2006)
Gail Low, Publishing the Postcolonial: Anglophone West African and Caribbean
Writing in the UK 1948-1968 (Routledge, 2012)
John Masterson, The Disorder of Things: A Foucauldian Approach to the Work of
Nuruddin Farah (Wits University Press, 2013)
F. Fiona Moola, Reading Nuruddin Farah: The Individual, the novel and the idea of
home (James Currey, 2014)
Emerging Perspectives on Nuruddin Farah, ed. Derek Wright (Africa World Press,
2002)
Emerging Perspectives on Yvonne Vera, ed. Helen Cousins and Pauline DodgsonKatiyo (Africa World Press, 2012)
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Arlene Elder, Narrative Shape-Shifting: Myth, Humor and History in the Fiction of
Ben Okri, B. Kojo Laing and Yvonne Vera (James Currey, 2009)
Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera, eds. Robert
Muponde and Mandivavarira Maodzwa-Taruvinga (James Currey, 2003)
Madhu Krishnan, Contemporary African Literature in English (Palgrave Macmillan,
2014)
Biodun Jeyifo, Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, and Postcolonialism (Cambridge
University Press, 2009)
Ivor Agyeman-Duak and Ogochukwu Promise, Essays in Honour of Wole Soyinka at
80 (Ayebia Clarke, 2014)
Derek Wright, Wole Soyinka Revisited (Twayne, 1992)
Anjali Gera Roy, Wole Soyinka: An Anthology of Recent Criticism (Pencraft
International, 2006)
Peter Hitchcock, The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form (Stanford
University Press, 2009)
Rita Barnard, The Cambridge Companion to Nelson Mandela (CUP, 2014)
David Attwell and Derek Attridge, The Cambridge History of South African
Literature (CUP, 2012)
F. Abiola Irele, The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel (CUP, 2009)
The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Graham Huggan (OUP, 2013)
Postcolonial Audiences: Readers, Viewers and Reception, eds. Bethan Benwell,
James Procter and Gemma Robinson (Routledge, 2012)
Shane Graham, South African Literature After the Truth Commission: Mapping Loss
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
Njabulo Ndebele, Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature
and Culture (UKZN Press, 2006)
Andrew Van der Vlies, South African Textual Cultures: White, Black, Read All Over
(Manchester University Press, 2011)
Rita Barnard, Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place
(OUP USA, 2006)
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