Afro-European Literatures - Afro-europäische Literaturen - Detailseite

Fluency in English

This course is taught in English by the visiting professor from South Africa.

While Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind (1981) associates the figure of the Afro-European with African literatures written in colonial languages and neo-­‐colonialism, this seminar re-­‐theorizes the figure of the Afro-European within the context of contemporary Afrodiasporic literature. It associates Afro-European identities (citizens in Europe) with constructions of blackness – which are often contingent on different European colonial histories and waves of migration. Afro-European literary production is explored in the context of rising European nationalisms since the late 1990s and the “silent racialisations” (European Others, Fatima el Tayeb) which inflect the lived experience of racially-­‐marked subjects in Europe. The course traces the genealogy of the neologism “(Afropea: Utopie post- occidentale et post-raciste, Léonora Miano), as a politics of placemaking. The relational conception of unhyphenated Afropean (Afroeuropean) identity the ways in which it that connects to blackness in the broader African diaspora will be used to raise questions around binarity and valency of hyphenated identities in Europe, the pan-European ambition of Afropeanism, and the identitarian politics of European “others” within specific European national contexts. Students will be exposed to Afro-European narratives in or translated into English alongside theoretical texts that explore race, relationality and hyphenated identities.

Proposed set works include literary and texts by: Paul Gilroy, Amin Maalouf, Caryl Phillips, Fatima el Tayeb, Léonora Miano, May Aym, Johny Pitts and others.

Afrikanische Diaspora

Prüfungsart: Hausarbeit

advanced BA students