Kursinformation

This seminar focuses on Africa and Europe as represented in 20^th and 21^st century diasporic literature. Prominent literary and cultural scholars of African and Caribbean origins such as Paul Gilroy, Caryl Phillips, Ato Quayson, Simon Gikandi or Achille Mbembe have given a new impetus to African anglophone literatures, histories and cultures. Without ignoring the colonial history of Africa, contemporary scholars have tried to address the postcolonial phenomenon, as manifested in terms like Afro-Europe (Brancato 2008) or African Europeans (Otele 2020) in scholarly discourse on Africa. Indeed, such terms not only indicate the cosmopolitan aspects of African diaspora in the West but also signal the fact that Afro-Europeans is not a neat and clean category. Rather, these terms invite us to look at both African and European/Western histories as ambivalent and entangled constructs that require a new approach and perspective in the age of global mobility and modernity. In fact, a significant number of contemporary African diasporic writers such as Abdulrazak Gurnah, Helon Habila, Diran Adebayo, David Dabydeen, including a number of women writers, such as Bernardine Evaristo, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Yaa Gyasi, or Chibundu Onuzo address history, race, and identity from a global perspective, engaging with fiction as an alternative archive, a repository of history in progress, a vehicle of “post-colonial transformation” (Ashcroft 2001) and a mode of re-membering against forgetting; thus, their texts shed new light on the fraught relationship between Europe and Africa, which will be a major focus in the seminar. The main objective of the course is to explore how African and European histories intersect and how Africa is not Europe’s permanent or ‘invisible Other’, but that Africans as the New Europeans are as much Africans as Europeans. For these New Europeans, whom Johny Pitts calls ‘Afropeans’ (2019), the notions of identity and belonging, home and homeland are porous and blurry, since they tend to navigate between Africa and Europe literally and metaphorically, inhabiting transcultural spaces and life-worlds. Upon completion of the course, it is expected that students can show their understanding of Africa and Europe in literature through a postcolonial and transnational lens in class presentation and in the exam or term-paper.