African 203: Migration and Diaspora in African Literature

This course explores how contemporary African literature engages with and narrates migration and diaspora, giving fresh insights into notions such as identity, home, and belonging and how those notions interact with and are implicated by globalization and digitality. Through close reading of primary texts, students will also explore how “postcolonial trauma” frames and extends the identity category of Blackness for African immigrants in the West. Students will be exposed to why African immigrant characters in representative texts have certain relational characteristics towards other people, their new environment, and their natal home.

Primary Texts:

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Dinaw Mengestu)

Americanah (Chimamanda Adichie)

We Need New Names (Bulawayo NoViolet)

Ghana Must Go (Taiye Selasi)

Secondary Texts:

Louis Chude-Sokei, “The Newly Black Americans: African Immigrants and Black Americans,” Transition 113. 2014.

Goyal, Yogita. “We Need New Diasporas”: Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery. New York University Press, 2019.