ENG9PW: Colonial and Postcolonial Imagination: Africa

Please find below details on the module I will convene at the department of English Studies at University of Stirling in Sprin 2010:

Department of English Studies
ENG9PW: Colonial and Postcolonial Imagination: Africa
Convenor: Brian Rock
(Spring 2010)
This module explores some of the major writings from Africa of the period from independence from colonialism to the present. It will begin with Achebe’s classic text of historical and cultural reconstruction of a pre-colonial Nigerian society on the eve of colonisation. The module will then look at two major African poets (Soyinka’s epic mythologies, and Senghor’s Senegalese negritude poetics), before examining Ama Ata Aidoo’s play Anowa and Soyinka’s major tragic drama Death and the King’s Horseman. Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s controversial novel is an overtly political response to the post-colonial betrayal of the ideals of the struggle for Kenyan independence, and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel of a young woman’s coming of age mirrors wider issues in Zimbabwean society. The course will end with Okri’s disturbing visionary narratives of an African postcolonial present.
We will seek to examine the relationship between oral forms and literary texts, strategies of representing cultural histories, and the relationships between national and ethnic identities in emergent postcolonial states. The course will also encounter alternative and dissenting voices which express political and social discontent: insurgence, revolution, gender conflict, and the mythologies of the dispossessed. The aim of the course, first and foremost, is to introduce students to the vibrant, various, and accomplished literary culture of contemporary, postcolonial Africa. In addition, students taking this course will practise close readings of the set texts, engage with the critical positions within the field of postcolonial writing and theory, and encounter complex debates about how national and postcolonial identity is reflected in these writings.
Set Texts:
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Penguin)
Ama Ata Aidoo, The Dilemma of the Ghost and Anowa (Longman)
Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman (Methuen)
Ngugi wa Thiong’o Matigari (Heinemann)
Tsitsi Dangarembga Nervous Conditions (Ayebia Clarke)
Ben Okri, Incidents at the Shrine (Vintage)
Course Reader includes:
Poetry from: Wole Soyinka, Idanre; Leopold Sédar Senghor, Nocturnes
Essays on colonial and postcolonial theory and topics.
A list of secondary reading will be issued at the beginning of the course, but the following are helpful and provocative introductions to the subject:
John McLeod 2000, Beginning Postcolonialism, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Ania Loomba 1998. Colonialism/Postcolonialism, London: Routledge
Stephanie Newell 2006, West African Literatures: Ways of Reading, Postcolonial Studies Series, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Caroline Rooney 2000, African literature, animism and politics London: Routledge.