The Historical Novel and European Colonialism in East Africa - Detailseite

Please note that the course will be taught as a weekly three-hour course, with the two-hour seminar followed by a short break and the one-hour reading course. Students enrolled in the MA European Literatures are welcome to join this class.

The Historical Novel has never really fallen out of fashion, and, in some sense, historical fiction has always been written. And yet, the genre is often said to have emerged in the nineteenth century with Sir Walter Scott’s novels. Scott certainly coined a phrase when he added the subtitle to his famous novel: Waverley, or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since. Historical fiction always implies a significant temporal distance and some sense of a fundamental rupture. Decolonisation arguably meant one of the most significant ruptures in more recent history, and it had an enormous impact on the genre.
 
We will begin with a short survey of the history of historical fiction and then establish a specific regional focus for its most recent developments. We will read classic as well as more recent criticism on the historical novel; but, first and foremost, we will study in detail three widely celebrated novels centered on East Africa: Nadifa Mohamed’s Black Mamba Boy (2010, long-listed for the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction), Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives (2020, Nobel Prize 2021 in Literature), and Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (2019, short-listed for the 2020 Booker Prize). Together the novels range across a large and culturally diverse region that has been heavily affected by European colonialism: Deutsch Ostafrika / Tanganyika / Tanzania, Egypt, Ethiopia, Palestine, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, and the UK. The historical novel has often been framed through ideas of the nation, but these novels frequently move across national borders. They are as much about ways to remember and the difficulty of processing traumatic memories as they are invitations to immerse oneself in the past and see it through the eyes of people whose versions of events have frequently been discredited, drowned out, or ignored. Gurnah’s novel is one of the few English-speaking accounts of German colonialism in East Africa; Mohamed shows us how a Somali boy navigates the contested borders in and around his homeland working first with the Italians, then with the British. And Mengiste’s novel foregrounds the role of Ethiopian women in the war against Italian fascism.
 
Overall, the course offers an opportunity to discuss in detail features and developments of the historical novel, as well as an opportunity to get a glimpse of the complexities of European colonialism and its aftermath in different parts of East Africa. The course will start with more general, introductory texts, before turning to the novels by Gurnah, Mengiste, and Mohamed. This is also to allow enough time for participants to read and reflect on the novels before we discuss them in class.

Please get hold of the primary literature as soon as possible (list in order of discussion):
Gurnah, Abdulrazak. Afterlives. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.
Mohamed, Nadifa. Black Mamba Boy. London: HarperCollins, 2010.
Mengiste, Maaza. The Shadow King. New York: W. W. Norton, 2019.