LIT 4233 – Spring 2027 – Okonkwo

For many an English major and for the Law School admissions committees that annually evaluate their graduate applications, the discipline, our field, is one of the most logical paths to studies in Law. The affinities of literature and law have not only drawn the attention of scholars. They have also captured the imagination of storytellers, in this case African fiction writers, for generations. For instance, in African literature's most widely read novel, Chinua Achebe's classic Things Fall Apart (1958), the interlinked subjects of law's varieties and contexts, its makers, enforcements, and purposes, the degrees of crime, the drama of litigation, the appellate and carceral systems, citizens' reactions to drastic changes to their jurisprudence, the question of justice and/or its miscarriages in both precolonial and imperial-era Umuofia/Igboland, are major but often under-interrogated preoccupations of that work, especially in high schools. In this interdisciplinary course--the undergraduate version of an anticipated graduate seminar next fall on African literature and law--we will explore representative, law-topicalizing and law-stylizing texts by female and male African writers from different parts of the continent: Achebe's Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease (1960), Ngugi wa Thiong’o's Weep Not, Child (1964), Flora Nwapa's Efuru (1966), Lewis Nkosi's Mating Birds (1986), and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Dream Count (2025). It is my hope, the course's goal, that, whether or not they continue to law school, the students that take this course will be disciplinarily more grounded, intellectually deepened, critically sharpened, and overall bettered by it. Word!