ENG 6939 Spring 2023 Okonkwo

At a time we’re told not to look back at the dead, or to do so selectively, this seminar adopts a Sankofa posture, retrieving and centering as its concern this significant thesis: the sometimes vexed relationship between Africa and its diaspora—particularly between Africans/African immigrants and African America. Often at the heart of that pesky family quarrel is the always contemporaneous question of “the past,” its afterlives and commemoration; in this case the subject of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade and Africans’ participation in them. There’s also the allegation that post-1900, modern, and post-independence African literary and cultural production has been so preoccupied with Africa’s experience of colonization and its aftermaths it sparsely engages with that broader racial trauma. In this course, we will address those two premises. Grounding our discussion in scholarship, we will explore representative, canonical and recent African fiction spanning over half a century. Our goal is to examine the works’ contextual, thematic, aesthetic, and philosophic (in)attention to that horror that binds and continues to haunt Africa, Europe, and the Americas. My hope is that this course will appeal to students in any area of specialization in which history matters; in which the dead remain, inescapably, alive. In their seminar papers, students will have the opportunity to approach the subjects from various literary genres, disciplinary registers, and/or critical methodologies.