LIT 5235 Fall 2024 Okonkwo

With the attention paid in literature classes to African male novelists and to the younger female members of what has been dubbed the Third Generation of African writers, many of them living in and writing from Europe and the United States, it is easy to overlook many of the “older,” pioneering and less celebrated African women writers from different parts of the continent who not only paved the publishing way for their younger sisters but also inaugurated some of the race, class, gender, feminist, religion, and migration themes, as well as many of transgressive modernist techniques, that mark contemporary African women’s fiction. Given the historical and experiential ties that bind Africa, Europe, and the Americas, one could dare argue that studies in (postcolonial) African literature, women’s literature, and feminist, womanist, Africana womanist writings would unfortunately be incomplete if they occluded modern African women’s literary voices and intellectual contributions. This seminar is conceived as a space for students to not only gain (greater) familiarity with the representative women novelists from the 1960s to present but also rigorously inquire into their personal biographies, publishing struggles and successes, dominant thematic concerns, aesthetic innovations, and enduring literary, intellectual and cultural influence. The authors include Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, Ama Ata Aidoo, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Doris Lessing, Mariama Bȃ, Naawal El Sadawi, and Chika Unigwe.

Requirements: This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: African American Literary and Cultural Studies; Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and Colonial, Postcolonial, and Transnational Literary and Cultural Studies; a Literary Genre (Fiction). It also fulfills the Alterity requirement.