Comparative Africana Literatures and Criticism

Caribbean, African American and African literature has been called engaged literature with explicit commitments to memory, history and ways to think about the political. This course will explore a set of writers, their novels, critical essays and their practices of criticism. It will examine anti-colonial, post-colonial writers as well as African American writers who in the words of Toni Morrison, "rip that veil drawn over proceedings to terrible to relate." We will in this course read the works of George Lamming, Patrick Chamoiseau, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Edwidge Danticat, Yvonne Vera, Zoe Wicomb and Njabulo Ndebele.