English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item Afropolitan Hackers: Redefining Anglophone African Literature(2022) Faradji, Sara; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the twenty-first century, we are witnessing a resounding boom in the production and reception of Anglophone African literature. Novelists like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole, Lauren Beukes, and Dinaw Mengestu have achieved critical acclaim in Africa, the U.S., Europe, and beyond. My dissertation examines how these writers are reshaping our understandings of African literature and criticism. I explore how “African Boom” writers resemble computer hackers that break existing conventions and actively rebuild those systems for the better. They adeptly learn the “code” of Anglophone literature, but then they “break into” the literary canon, steal the master’s tropes, and modify the literature to be even more effective and resonant among academic and popular audiences. My dissertation specifically engages with the writing of authors who I call Afropolitan hackers. These writers distinctively reflect Afro-cosmopolitan sensibilities in both their fictional and critical works. As they receive high praise from reputable academic and popular literary critics, Afropolitan hackers make bold, dynamic changes to the very literary canon they studied and disrupted. In order to demonstrate how African Boom writers are Afropolitan hackers, I consider how they challenge past and present concerns in postcolonial literature. Specifically, I examine how some of them are “hacking” three classic literary tropes: the flâneur, the griot, and the scammer. By simultaneously debunking and extending traditional theoretical expectations of the African narrative, select Africa-based and migrant Afropolitan authors challenge the notion that their writing must epitomize a single story if they seek to appeal to a global audience.Item TRANS WORLDING WITHIN: DECOLONIAL EXAMINATIONS OF TRANS OF COLOR INTERIORITY(2021) Aftab, Aqdas; Avilez, GerShun; Lothian, Alexis; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues for the importance of reading for interiority in trans of color cultural productions. With so many representations of racialized trans people foregrounding the violated body, the cultural imaginary around trans of color life is saturated with notions of corporeality. In this context, I develop a transworld hermeneutic that refuses an emphasis on the racialized and colonized trans body, which is fetishized by the medical industrial complex and by cultural productions, and instead, turns towards the interior. Examining Black and Dalit diasporic texts, from postcolonial classics such as Nuruddin Farah’s Maps to contemporary novels like Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater to Mimi Mondal’s speculative short stories, I argue that while the corporeal is surveilled by the cis colonial gaze, the interior shows glimpses of world-making practices that are protected from the pornotropic violence of spectacle. While Western epistemologies define trans identity through the lens of Enlightenment-based models of science that focus on the sexed body’s transitions, my emphasis on interiority reconceptualizes trans of color life as intuitive, ecstatic, speculative and spiritual. Using the affective interior as a central framework, my transworld reading strategy offers a departure from essentialist as well as performative understandings of gender: informed by the theories of the spirit, the interior strives to remain opaque to the external gaze, hence guarded from performative effects. Overall, my research reveals how Black and Dalit exclusions from the colonial Human create the possibility of trans becoming; in other words, colonial and racist violence forcibly constructs transness, an experience that is utilized strategically by Black and Dalit writers as a decolonial tool for challenging, dismantling, and rewriting scripts of humanness.Item Immigrant Literacies: Language and Learning in the African Diaspora Novel by Twenty-First Century Anglophone African Writers(2019) Okereke-Beshel, Uchechi Ada; Nunes, Zita C; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Immigrant Literacies: Language and Learning in the African Diaspora Novel by Twenty-First Century Anglophone African Writers” examines the fiction of contemporary African Diaspora writers that introduces new tropes of reading and writing in narrating the experiences of African migrants to Europe and the United States. The writers who are the focus of this dissertation—Teju Cole, Chimamanda Adichie, Brian Chikwava and NoViolet Bulawayo— grapple with the difficulties of migration and its impact on preconceived notions of the self and the world. Each writer links the different pathways that their immigrant characters must take to multiple forms of teaching and learning, demonstrating that literacy is a contextual cultural practice that fosters social connections across the African Diaspora, even as it takes power relations into account. Using the work of Brian Street and other New Literacy theorists, I explore four versions of literacy as a socially embedded cultural practice in novels mainly about Nigerian and Zimbabwean immigrants in the United States and Britain. These theorists are key to my understanding of how revised attitudes to self in an expanded community are being developed in the contemporary African novel because they enable a shift in attention from learning to read and write in order to master a stable and transferrable set of skills to teaching and learning to read and write using a range of codes that characterize hybrid environments. Early criticisms of the African novel focused on the integration of written and oral forms in literature that would nurture a nationalist and postcolonial agenda. Twenty-first century African Diaspora literature expands these goals in demonstrating the transnational and transcultural evolution of both writing and orality. My dissertation organizes each chapter around an exemplary novel to argue that contemporary African novelists writing in English and living in and outside of Africa address the defining question of literacy they have inherited from previous generations by suggesting that multiple and fluid forms of literacy characterize the experience of Africans in the context of migration in the Diaspora.Item AFRICAN LITERATURE AS WORLDLITERATURE: ALTERNATIVE GENEALOGIES AND SELF-REFERENTIALISM(2014) Hodapp, James Michael; Ray, Sangeeta; Nunes, Zita; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since the 1989 publication of The Empire Writes Back by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, discourse on seminal African literary texts has focused on their ability to "write back" to the European canon. Using this common trope, a seminal African text is understood as a response to demeaning representations of Africans in the European literary canon. However, writing back privileges European literature by treating it as the source, or "parent texts," of African literature. Within the last five years, critics like Evan Mwangi and Ode Ogede have begun to question whether African literature needs to be defined largely in reference to Western works. They have argued that the writing back paradigm forces African literature into an inequitable and asymmetrical relation to European texts. My dissertation, "African Literature as World Literature: Alternative Genealogies and Self-Referentialism," extends this project to offer theoretical and methodological alternatives by bridging African literary studies with postcolonial theory and the current world literature debate to create previously obscured cultural, political and literary genealogies of African novels. I argue that complex intertextual genealogies generated from specific knowledge provide African source material for more complete readings of African novels. This project critiques the temporally and geographically myopic approaches of Mwangi and Ogede to reposition African literature in a globalized context by not only dismantling the theoretical assumptions of a center/margin paradigm but also positioning African literature as a sovereign entity in world literature.Item Rewriting the Letter: Women and Epistolary Forms in Post-Independence African Fiction in English(2013) Okparanta, Chinenye; Nunes, Zita; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Document: REWRITING THE LETTER: WOMEN AND EPISTOLARY FORMS IN POST-INDEPENDENCE AFRICAN FICTION IN ENGLISH Chinenye I. Okparanta, Doctor of Philosophy, 2013 Directed by: Dr. Zita Nunes, Associate Professor Director, Center for Literary and Comparative Studies This project advances an argument about the significance of epistolarity and other such personal forms of writing in African novels for research in African literary studies and African feminist literary criticism. Although not a widespread form as yet, the epistolary novel is increasingly taken up by writers to represent marginalized figures who are often silenced or unable to tell their stories--most frequently women, the undereducated or underemployed members of society, or those who refuse to live by the mandates of their social world. My project suggests a new frame through which to consider this form in order to contribute to existing work in postcolonial studies on political and social identities, especially in relation to gender and sexuality. I argue that African epistolary novels subvert a range of generic conventions in the process of rendering visible the perspectives of those too-often marginalized by social stigma. The subject of this project is a selection of postcolonial African epistolary novels in English that use letter-writing protagonists to interrogate national, gender, and sexual identity. The critical impulse of this work is the study of the particular techniques used in the chosen works to represent the coming-to-self of the letter-writing characters. In this dissertation, I extend discussion about epistolary forms in African literature in English by exploring the messages they make visible about individual processes of self-making and the place of unconventional identities and intimacies in the post-independence nation. By emphasizing narrative moments that show the letter-writing protagonist coming to consciousness about her or his "unconventional" identity, these epistolary novels highlight the value of reading through the multiple layers of mediation that impact identity. These narratives of intimacy and desire are ultimately about knowing and embracing one's self enough to present that self to another. The African epistolary novel negotiates the tension between what is expected of the individual and what the individual ultimately chooses to do or become; by so doing, it introduces new possibilities for postcolonial identity and simultaneously broadens the critical frame through which African literature in English is read. This project introduces the possibility of an African literary epistolary genre, heretofore largely unexplored in the field of African literary studies, but one which may provide innovative paradigms for critical work in African fiction and African feminist literary studies. Epistolarity or the study of epistolary forms in African fiction need not be limited to epistles or letters but can include related narrative forms, for example, journals, e-mails, or blog entries that similarly disturb the general narrative stream, testifying to personal revolutions by the characters that correspond to formal revolutions by the authors. To underscore the value of these formal revolutions in African literature, Abiola Irele's work has examined the unique way the oral tradition and writing are bridged in African literature. He emphasizes the value of orality, for example, through his analysis of the function of proverbs, chants, and other forms of "speaking" in African literature. The "speaking" passages interrupt the flow of the narrative in the same way letters do, emphasizing moments of self-declaration for the speaking or writing individuals. Attention to these narrative moments, Irele suggests, ensures that African literary criticism embraces a critical perspective informed by the specific nuances of African cultures and history. Evan Mwangi has similarly drawn attention to formal innovations in African literatures, spotlighting the significance of metafiction, whereby East African novels write back to one another as a way of de-emphasizing the West's role in the production of African literature (i.e., African novels writing for and to themselves, rather than for or to a Western readership). Mwangi further suggests that the recurrence of these "writing back" patterns in African literature, specifically East African in his analysis, is a way to encode subversive messages about the restrictive practices of various African nations. Metafiction, Mwangi argues, challenges the `masterfictions' of traditional African societies that violently control individual expression. A similar type of literary challenge is made in the novels I consider in upcoming chapters, which contain letters that disrupt the novel's narrative sequence. I analyze those moments of narrative split that occur through the appearance of letters and consider what they signify for the involved characters. I read those fractures or narrative disruptions as pivotal moments of self-declaration and as signals of the writing characters' process of self-making. Inspired by these and other works that engage with formal experimentation in African literature, my project invites African feminist literary critics and African literary scholars to evaluate epistolary forms that appear in post-independence novels as a way to map changing postcolonial identities. This epistolary framework illuminates messages advanced about enduring restrictions in the postcolonial states against marginalized populations--for example, against women who create intimacy with women, men who create intimacy with men, women who reject "traditional" African female identities, and men who do the same. Indeed, such attention to the forms and functions of African literatures, specifically narratives that emphasize identity, may over time have transformative extra-literary social and political impact.Item I forgive you but it is my Christian duty to punish you(2013) Majanja, Annette Lutivini; Norman, Howard; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This is a collection of stories about Kenyan characters that are the public face of homegrown success. They are obedient children and responsible working adults. For many of these characters it becomes clear that there is a big gap between voiced facts about their lives and the unspoken truths about what they are. Rumors, gossip, letter writing and private prayer undermine this public face. During Daniel Arap Moi's Presidency between 1978 and 2002, Kenyan children were taught in school that Moi was the generous Baba wa Taifa or father of the Nation who supplied them with free school milk. He was the number one farmer, teacher, headmaster and chancellor of all universities in Kenya. This is where the characters in this story collection live.