LIT 4233 - Spring 2026 - Okonkwo

As a genre, “the novel” may not be indigenous to Africa. But since its arrival there decades and decades ago, the form has not only found existing fertile ground on which to sprout. It has also taken deep, wide, and aggressive roots, presently constituting the continent’s most practiced, recognized, and influential literary genre. While staying elementally true to its European origins, it has also been forced to morph, to assume new shapes and speak in multiple accents: ethnic, national and regional African languages, as well as the colonial inheritances of English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Telling their stories, read worldwide, and crafting some of the literary world’s astonishing prose fiction in the past hundred years, African writers have won many of the most prestigious literary awards. To some readers unfamiliar with the breadth and depth of African fiction, the African novel begins with the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe and his classic Things Fall Apart and ends with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie of TED Talk fame. This course aims to help change that misperception, that narrative. My goal is to offer students a broad yet rich overview of the history and diversity of the novel in Africa. We will illustrate the following “types”: “magical realism,” the diary novel, the colonial encounter novel, the epistolary novel, the bildungsroman, speculative (African-futurism, not Afrofuturism) novel, and the queer/coming-out novel.