Continental Criticism: Contemporary African Thought.

In the wake of Cultural Studies, Black Atlantic, Diaspora and Post-Colonial Criticism and Theory, and on the tail end of a continental resurgence
of fiction and visual art, the literary and cultural criticism of Africa has been undergoing something energetic enough to dare call itself a renaissance. Yet it continues to be marginalized by first-world academic and racial formations that find it hard to imagine Africa as a crucial zone for ideas pertinent to a global/transnational world of debate, theory and academic/scholarly production. This course will directly engage this emergent tradition and situate it both within and against contemporary Western discourses of race, politics and cultural production. Materials will be drawn from Eastern Africa to West Africa, and from post-Apartheid South Africa to the North. Writers and critics may include Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Breyten Breytenbach, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Wole Soyinka, Dambisa Myo, George Ayittey, Ngugi Wa Thiong'O, Koigi wa Wamwere, Oyeroke Oyewunmi, Manthia Diawara, V.Y. Mudimbe and Olu Oguibe.