African Lit: Arts/Lit/ Film Postcolonial Africa

(4 Credits)

A look at contemporary African Literature, film and art as a way of examining different outcomes of postcolonial cultural policies in Africa. The main topics include 1) a discussion of the Negritude Movement and the artistic legacy of Leopold Sedar Senghor; 2) a close look at the Guinean Cultural Revolution and the attempts in Marxist Socialist revolutionary art in Africa; and the Pan-African Film Festival of Ouagadougou. The aim of the class is to provide students with a sense of the context of artistic productions in Africa; some of the major trends in African literature and film; and the politics, aesthetics and reception theories of African imaginative works.