Teaching the African Novel
- Editor: Gaurav Desai
- Pages: vii & 427 pp.
- Published: 2009
- ISBN: 9781603290388 (Paperback)
- ISBN: 9781603290371 (Hardcover)
“Overall this is a carefully edited volume which, due to the range of theoretical overviews and array of topics explored, will be very useful for teachers of African literature and of relevance to postgraduate students and academics interested in the complexities of the African novel.”
—African Studies Quarterly
What is the African novel, and how should it be taught?
The twenty-three essays of this volume address these two questions and in the process convey a wealth of information and ideas about the diverse regions, peoples, nations, languages, and writers of the African continent. Topics include
- Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s favoring of indigenous languages and literary traditions over European
- the special place of Marxism in African letters
- the influence of Frantz Fanon
- women writers and the sub-Saharan novel
- the Maghrebian novel
- the novel and the griot epic in the Sahel
- Islam in the West African novel
- novels in Spanish from Equatorial Guinea
- apartheid and postapartheid fiction
- African writers in the diaspora
- globalization in East African fiction
- teaching Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart to students in different countries
- the Onitsha market romance
The volume editor, Gaurav Desai, writes, “The point of the volume is to encourage a reading of Africa that is sensitive to its history of colonization but at the same time responsive to its present multiracial and multicultural condition.”
Cora Agatucci
Fernando Arenas
Louise Bethlehem
Nicholas Brown
Odile Cazenave
Brenda Cooper
Eleni Coundouriotis
Shirin Edwin
Dosinda García-Alvite
Harry Garuba
Olakunle George
Jarrod Hayes
Neville Hoad
Peter Kalliney
Mohamed Kamara
Lisa McNee
Onookome Okome
Tejumola Olaniyan
R. Radhakrishnan
Kimberly Wedeven Segall
S. Shankar
Zahr Said Stauffer
Christopher Wise
Acknowledgments (ix)
Introduction: Teaching the African Novel (1)
Part I: Theories and Methods
African Novels and the Question of Theory (19)
Marxist Approaches to the African Novel (37)
Why History Matters in the African Novel (53)
Political Critique and Resistance in African Fiction (70)
Women Writers and Gender in the Sub-Saharan Novel (87)
Translation and the African Novel: Reading as Re ⁄ Membering (102)
Part II: Regional Imperatives, Thematic Cartographies
Rethinking the Arab African Novel: A Case for Thematization (121)
Approaches to Teaching the Maghrebian Novel: Allegory at the Crossroads (131)
The Novel, Historiography, and the Griot Epic in the Sahel (154)
Approaches to Teaching Islam in the West African Novel (176)
Unveiling the African Legacy in Spanish: Novels from Equatorial Guinea (193)
Teaching Lusophone African Fiction (205)
The Pleasures of the Political: Apartheid and Postapartheid South African Fiction (222)
Language, Multiple Worlds, and Material Culture in the Teaching of African Migrant Fiction (246)
East African Fiction and Globalization (259)
Part III: Pedagogical and Institutional Contexts
The African Novel in a Course on the Twentieth-Century Novel in English (277)
The Francophone African Novel in the French-Language Classroom (290)
Introducing African Novels in a Web-Enhanced Community College Survey Course (311)
Between Three African Locations: Teaching Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart at the Universities of Ibadan, Zululand, and Cape Town (321)
The Blank Maps of Difficult Desires: Sexuality and African Literature in the Classroom (340)
Confessions of a Disinterested Didact: Teaching Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter (358)
Creating Contested Space through the “Nervous Conditions” of Postcolonial Theories (371)
Reading the Popular: Onitsha Market Romance and the Practice of Everyday Life (386)
Part IV: Resources
Further Resources for Teaching the African Novel (405)
Notes on Contributors (415)
Index (419)
“This is an important book, one that is going to become an indispensable theoretical and practical guide for teachers of the African novel and indeed of African literature in general.”
—Simon Gikandi, Princeton University
“We can only agree with Simon Gikandi when he considers this book as an essential tool for teachers of African literature. It is, we might add, a must-have not only for these teachers but also for any humanities program, and language and literature departments, and it will tremendously enrich anyone’s understanding of African literature.”
—Rocky Mountain Review
