Fall 2026
Prereq: none
Units: 2-0-4 Can be repeated for credit
(First half of semester) African writers are at home in libraries across the world, even where those libraries have yet to make more room for them. African literature is as old, as wounded, as resilient, as visionary, as complex as the continent itself. It reaches into memory to imagine alternative futures, confronting power and inequality while searching for forms of poetic justice. African writers have been major players of African world-making. Their fiction explores how to live, how to love, how to heal, how to fight, how to survive, and how to engage as global players. It invites readers to encounter a literary tradition that is rhizomatically connected to its diasporas across the globe. This course explores African literature through the lens of some of the most distinguished literary prizes while engaging the tools of intersectional narratology. Together, we examine diegesis, focalization, and affective knowledge, attending to the ways stories transform lived experience into aesthetic form. At its heart, the course considers storytelling as both an act of beauty and a practice of hope—one that can turn pain into understanding and solidarity and that celebrates the beauty of aesthetic knowledge.