UBa E-Learning: All courses

12 Courses

Modified 2 April 2020

ENGG6109 ARTICULATORY PHONETICS AND TRANSCRIPTION

English Modern Letters

ENGG6108 LANGUAGE TESTING AND EVALUATION

Teacher: Comfort Numfor
Teacher: Evangeline Seino

English Modern Letters

ENGG6104 POSTCOLONIAL AND AFRICAN LITERATURE

ENGG6105 POSTCOLONIAL AND AFRICAN LITERATURE 4 credits (l= 45, T - 15)

Course objectives

This course enables students not only to engage critically with varied aspects of oral, written and emerging forms of literature in Africa, but also to explore the intersection between these forms and their complex postcolonial landscapes, contexts and histories. African literature is not created in a vacuum, but is constructed by the social experiences of (neo)imperialism and (neo-)colonialism. The course will also enable students to critically examine the ‘writing back’ strategies in postcolonial metanarratives through theoretical, critical and historical narratives, as well as by problematizing their representations in content marketing.

Course description

The course seeks to demonstrate how literature can be an effective tool of pedagogy. It increases students’ social consciousness and raises their awareness of representations of the cultural, social, political and economic crises that the African continent is facing. The course will stimulate new thinking on possible creative ways of extricating the continent from them. It explores a wide range of texts from canonical African writings to artefacts of audio, visual and popular culture, revealing the role literature plays as a form of exchange and expression. It also entails visits to various African literature websites.

Learning outcomes

At the end of this course, students will:

1. gain in-depth understanding of the interconnectedness of literature and the increasingly globalised world of imperialism and dependency in order to craft out new ‘writing back’ strategies

2. gain insights into African and black intellectual traditions, cultural forms, as well as their transmission and transversality over diasporic geographies, and new transnational elsewheres such as digital spaces.

3. develop critical skills in research, documentation and publication of literary findings

Review of narratives in African literature

Slave narratives,

Colonial authors and protests against colonization,

Calls for decolonization and independence,

African pride, hope for the future, and dissent.

Thematic streams:

Apartheid, Negritude, Assimilation, Racism, lack of education, dual identity of elites

African oral literary themes:

Mysticism, human values, ancestral religion, the concept of creator God, deities and the living and unborn (e.g. ogbanjes), ritualization of nature, negritude, personal relationships, anticolonialism, pan-Africanism, neocolonialism, urbanism, migration, exile, the African diaspora, and patriarchy, communalism

Classification of African literature

By language of expression (anglophone, francophone, Hausa, Swahili, etc.)

By oral genre (religious poetry, incantations, proverb, lullabies, folktales and fables, epic

histories and narrations, myths, legends, born house songs, elegies/dirges, panegyrics, oral drama, etc)

The language debate

Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Chinua Achebe

Achebe's argument that the writer can “Africanize” the English he or she is using (by

infusing words, phrases, idioms, songs, proverbs, stories, dialogue, etc.

Contexts of African literatures and traditions:

African traditional religion, Christianity and Islam, African music, art, dance and sculpture,

colourful beadwork and festivals like the Mombasa Carnival in Kenya and the Gerewol

Festival in Chad, courtship dance of the Wodaabe, lip plates of the Mursi, bull jumping

of the Hamar, the red ochre of the Himba, the spitting of the Maasai, the healing dance of

the San.

Postcolonial Literature common motifs and themes

Appropriation of Colonial Languages.

Metanarrative.

Colonial Discourse.

Rewriting History.

Decolonization Struggles.

Nationhood and Nationalism. ...

Valorization of Cultural Identity.

'Cultural dominance,' 'racism,' 'quest for identity,' 'inequality'

Postcolonial theories and foundational works

Orientalism

Hybridity,

Subalternity, etc

Postcolonial feminist studies

African feminism: Motherism, Femalism, Snail-sense Feminism, Womanism/women palavering, Nego-feminism, and African Womanism

Examples :

Adelaide Casely-Hayford, the Sierra Leonian women's rights activist referred to as the “African Victorian Feminist” who contributed widely to both pan-African and feminist goals, Charlotte Maxeke who in 1918 founded the Bantu political movement against imperialism. Early 20th-Century African Feminist Roots.

What is decolonization and its effects in literature?

Decolonization as the undoing of colonialism,

Representations of causes of decolonization in Africa :

The role of the Second World War as a catalyst for African political freedom and independence, its impact on Africa militarily, psychologically, politically, and economically.

Intersections of African and postcolonial literature

Controversies over definition of terms

Possible research questions

The scramble for Africa and the resilience of indigenous kingdoms

Power, hegemony and savagery in postcolonial fiction

Internal colonialism and the case of South Africa

Against the Grain: Introducing Benita Parry’s and Vivek Chibber’s Intellectual Itineraries

Postcolonial/African literature and embeddedness of the social and the materialist

Postcolonial/African literature and Bourdieu

Postcolonial criticisms and development

Neoliberal capital and the postcolonial discontent

Postcolonial development and gendered forms of representation, Othering and silencing

Archeology of knowledge/power in Postcolonial/African literature

Enlightenment and postcolonial resilience of indigenous knowledge communities

Indigenous knowledge and exoticism of postcolonial data

Postcolonial geographies of specificities beyond core/periphery

Postcolonial criticism and the West African city, as a case study https://books.google.cm/books?id=TavaAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA8&dq=alfred+ndi+postcolonial+cit&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj-ifKBveHwAhWDB2MBHes-ADIQ6AEwAHoECAgQAg#v=onepage&q=alfred%20ndi%20postcolonial%20cit&f=false

Historicizing typologies of postcolonial subjecthoods

Changing subjectivities in postcolonial and African narratives

Postcolonial race, hybridity and the undecidabilities of identity manicheanism

Postcolonial race and trauma

An example can be selected for illustration either from Sonne Dipoko’s A Few Nights and Days or from a Maghrebin text like Abdelkebir Khatibi's autobiography piece La Memoire tatouee (1971),

Postcolonialism and interstitialities of national metanarratives

case studies: Homi Bhabha's nation and narration

orientalizing the imperial nation, Edward Said

case study: Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities of the nation

The postcolonial, digital capitalism and epistemes of the market

The postcolonial, negritudism and narratives of 'blogging back'

African literature, the postcolonial and the new publication industry e.g. Saraba Magazine in Nigeria, Jalada, a poems-and-stories magazines in Kenya, initiatives like Bute, Okadabooks, US-based Brittle Paper,and digital publishers of African literature, such as Nigeria-based Cassava Republic, Ankara Press, ABC, etc

Postcolonial gender, sexuality and difference

Case studies from Nollywood or Camwood films

Suggested Readings

Abraham, Taisha. Introducing Postcolonial Theories: Issues and Debates. New Delhi: Macmillan Publishers India Ltd., 2009. Print.

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. New York: Routledge, 2002.

---. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. New York: Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1990.

----Nation and Narration. New York: Routledge, 1990

Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial & Postcolonial Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto Press, 2008.

---. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Helen, and Joanne Tompkins. Post-colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics. New York: Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. PDF file. Grotowski, Jerzy. Towards A Poor Theatre. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1968.

Habib, M. A. R. A History of Literary Criticism. Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2005.

Innes, C. L. The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. New York: Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. UK: Manchester University Press, 2007.

Morton, Stephen. “Marginality: Representations of Subalternity, Aboriginality and Race.” A Concise Companion to Postcolonial Literature. Eds. Shirley Chew and David Richards. United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2010. 162-181.

Nair, Rama. “The Concept of Identity in Indian Immigrant Women in America: A Literary Prospective.” Studies in Postcolonial Literature. Eds. M. Q. Khan and Bijay Kumar Das. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers & Distributers, 2007. 74-83.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2001.

Said, Edward (1993). Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books

Sircar, Badal. On Theatre. Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2009.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. C. Nelson and S. Grossberg. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988. 271-313.

Ngugi wa Thiongo’o. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Zimbabwe: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1994.

Ali Mazrui The Re-Invention of Africa: Edward Said, VY Mudimbe and Beyond, Research in African Literatures

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Edward W. Said’s Orientalism

Wevers, Lydia. “Globalising Indigenes: Postcolonial Fiction from Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific.” JASAL 5 (2006): 121-132. Web. 9 June 2014.

Early African Literature: An Anthology of Texts from 3000 BCE to 1900 CE

Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford first African novel written in English, Ethiopia Unbound: Studies in Race Emancipation. 1911

David Diop's poem "Africa"

Chinua Achebe. Things Fall Apart

David Dabydeen. Disappearance

Moshin Hamid.The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Jamaica Kincaid.A Small Place

Ben Jama Twilight of Misty Foliage

Ngugi.Devil on the Cross

Jean Rhys. Wide Sargasso Sea

John M. Coetzee Nobel Prize winner in South Africa. All of his writings

Ayi Kwei Armah, Nadine Gordimer, Alain Mabanckou, Ben Okri. All of their writings