African Women’s Literature
Course Description
“I hope that I am telling stories that are more than stories. I also want to capture a history,” states Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera, who goes on to add that she uses “the isolated individual to explore how they are connected to everything else….I am writing, in a way, the biographies of unknown women, but I’m also interested in [Zimbabwean’s] national history, so they are always against the backdrop of a particular time.”
In this course, we will explore the texts and contexts of four novels that represent each region of sub-Saharan Africa and that chart the “biographies of unknown women.” Emphasizing the historical development of novels written by African women, this discussion-based, 3-credit course fulfills one of the university breadth requirements for history and cultural change. In documenting the African woman’s experiences during colonialism, imperialism, and nation-building, these tales, which have too often fallen outside of the perspective of sanctioned historical tellings, confront the provocative and sensitive topics of female circumcision, abortion, rape, incest, masturbation, prostitution, polygamy, infertility, infanticide, and suicide. We will study these novels in their historical and cultural contexts to see how the female characters have resisted colonial and patriarchal domination and how these novels collectively have developed an African feminist aesthetic. Issues surrounding sex and gender are examined to see how feminism in African literature is recast in different and complex ways from that of the US/Western feminism.
For the complete syllabus, click here.
For a model annotated bibliography, click Efuru.
For student comments, click here.
To learn more about the novels, click on the images below.