Decolonizing African Literature

What if you survey African literature professors to find out which works and writers are most regularly taught? Literary scholars Bhakti Shringarpure and Lily Saint sought to find out for their article “African Literature is a Country”, the first in a series on the site that asks how we decolonize African Literature studies. The co-authors sent out a survey to their colleagues and found they mostly teach works by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and J.M. Coetzee. The majority of writers that make the cut are from Nigeria and South Africa. In short, only a few canonical texts continue to dominate curricula.Join us as we speak with Bhakti Shringapure and Lily Saint to discuss their findings.Later in the program, they will be joined by Mukoma wa Ngugi, himself a novelist (author of six books) and Associate Professor at the newly renamed department of Literatures in English at Cornell University.