Project MUSE®: Research in African Literatures - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/169
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Research in African Literatures.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 30 (1999) through current issueLatest Articles: Research in African LiteraturesTWOProject MUSE®Research in African Literatures1527-20440034-5210Latest articles in Research in African Literatures. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Introduction: Pluralism and the Engaged Humanities
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/969101
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The contributions gathered in this special issue stem from a symposium titled “Pluralism and the Engaged Humanities” that took place in February 2020 to honor the scholarship and activism of Eileen Julien, a foremost scholar of African, African diaspora, and Francophone literature and author of many groundbreaking works in her chosen fields. Julien served as Professor of Comparative Literature, French and Italian, and African Studies at Indiana University Bloomington between 1992 and her retirement in 2020 when she received the title of Professor Emerita. Her contributions to the profession and community have reached well beyond Indiana and the US. As the 16th President of the African Literature Association
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/169/image/coversmallIntroduction: Pluralism and the Engaged Humanities2025-09-06text/htmlen-USIntroduction: Pluralism and the Engaged Humanities2025-09-062025TWOProject MUSE®351152026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-09-06Conversation with Eileen Julien
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/969102
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Your work, your career, goes beyond Indiana University, although it is the place where you did much of that work. So, at that level, yes, it makes sense to center IU, but what’s of interest is rather the longer trajectory. How did you get to IU?Several years after Emile Synder’s retirement, I was recruited to Indiana University Bloomington by then Chair of the African Studies Program, Patrick O’Meara. I left Boston University where I was an associate professor in Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures (French, specifically) and came to IU in 1992–93 as a visiting faculty member. While my PhD was in French with a minor in African Studies, the Chair of the Department of French and Italian (FRIT) did not support my
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/169/image/coversmallConversation with Eileen Julien2025-09-06text/htmlen-USConversation with Eileen Julien2025-09-062025TWOProject MUSE®222702026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-09-06Decolonization, with or without the Mother Tongue: The Blinkards (1915) and Translations (1980)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/969103
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In 1952, in late colonial West Africa, in the city of my birth, Ibadan, Nigeria, in my first year of primary school, I began to speak and write English. With all my classmates, I was a very eager pupil of this language of the whites, our colonial masters. Every new word or phrase that I/we learned was a revelation, especially if the word was polysyllabic, difficult, and important-sounding, like “impossibility.” Around this word, we composed a song that was simultaneously a hymn of praise and a song of ridicule. To this day, I still remember every word of that song. In and out of the classroom, our adventures with both learning English and using it together with our mother tongues knew no bounds. Any pupil who
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/169/image/coversmallDecolonization, with or without the Mother Tongue: The Blinkards (1915) and Translations (1980)2025-09-06text/htmlen-USDecolonization, with or without the Mother Tongue: The Blinkards (1915) and Translations (1980)2025-09-062025TWOProject MUSE®381202026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-09-06Intergenerational Collaboration as Late Style: In Honor of Eileen Julien
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/969104
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Intergenerational conflict, rather than cooperation, is a dominant theme in the global scholarship on aging and later life and also in the leading research that documents the lives of younger people across Africa. Research on aging and later life is a rapidly growing field, much of this work written by scholars who are ourselves aware of the dangers of the later or late career stages. Edward Said’s reflections on what he called “late style,” work published after his own death, has been an influential template for thinking about late career. Said’s interest in this work is in the creative choices made by artists and writers at the end of their creative lives, and he finds a pattern in these works of lack of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/169/image/coversmallIntergenerational Collaboration as Late Style: In Honor of Eileen Julien2025-09-06text/htmlen-USIntergenerational Collaboration as Late Style: In Honor of Eileen Julien2025-09-062025TWOProject MUSE®589472026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-09-06Orality and the Writing Lesson: The Work of Vernacular Intellectuals
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/969105
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In retrospect, Eileen Julien’s monograph, African Novels and the Question of Orality (1992) can be read as an attempt to negotiate the gray zone between two versions of African literary history—one locating modern African literature within Western institutions of interpretation; the other insisting on orality as the foundation of cultural expression on the continent. Julien positioned herself carefully between these two versions of African literary history. She began her project by noting how African literatures in French and English were viewed as “satellite literatures of the literatures of the north” and read in an intertextual relation with the canon of European letters, of which they were considered
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/169/image/coversmallOrality and the Writing Lesson: The Work of Vernacular Intellectuals2025-09-06text/htmlen-USOrality and the Writing Lesson: The Work of Vernacular Intellectuals2025-09-062025TWOProject MUSE®645202026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-09-06It’s Eileen’s Time: Traces of Life with Kalidou Sy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/969106
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In 1997, when I moved to the American continent, my approach to painting changed. I began connecting modern acrylic painting with the basic materials of the earth—mud, pigments, metal, cloth, wood, water. Only then did I realize that this work was inspired by the Malian technique of bogolan. This technique brings together natural materials such as clay, water, iron, vegetable extracts, etc. to create unique patterns on cloth. To me, bogolan means life present, past, and future. By using this approach, I strive to bring together the subtle yet real traces of life present in color, matter, and texture.Some time ago, in 2006, Eileen Julien set the stage for an extensive discussion over whether African literature was
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/169/image/coversmallIt’s Eileen’s Time: Traces of Life with Kalidou Sy2025-09-06text/htmlen-USIt’s Eileen’s Time: Traces of Life with Kalidou Sy2025-09-062025TWOProject MUSE®496952026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-09-06Africa’s Cultural Unconscious in the making of Modern Culture: Revisiting the Trope of Return in African Literature
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/969107
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This paper is framed by that desire to understand the place of Africa in the discourse of modernity. Since this debate has been undergirded by the spectacle of the Black Atlantic, let me state from the outset that the issue for me is not so much about the claim that the modern black subject was produced by and was a major shaping element in the cultural formation that Paul Gilroy calls the Black Atlantic. The issue for me remains, what are the terms and conditions of encounter between blackness and modernity? As Simon Gikandi has reminded us, “There is, some uneasiness about the haunting shadow of Africa in the making of modern culture, a feeling that the continent is both within the grand narrative of modernity
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/169/image/coversmallAfrica’s Cultural Unconscious in the making of Modern Culture: Revisiting the Trope of Return in African Literature2025-09-06text/htmlen-USAfrica’s Cultural Unconscious in the making of Modern Culture: Revisiting the Trope of Return in African Literature2025-09-062025TWOProject MUSE®684392026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-09-06How Worlds are Made: Literatures, Translation, and the Question of the Universal
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/969108
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In 2016, Eileen Julien served as the discussant for a panel Michelle Decker and I organized for the annual conference of the African Studies Association titled “African Literature and the Question of the Universal.” The conference theme that year was “Imagining Africa at the Center” and our panel approached the topic from that orientation—asking what thinking with the term might offer to writers and literary expressions frequently relegated to the margins and in what ways African artists’ conceptions of the world might demand a re-centering of the idea of universality itself. We were reacting in part to a keynote that had been given by novelist Taiye Selasi a couple of years before at the International
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/169/image/coversmallHow Worlds are Made: Literatures, Translation, and the Question of the Universal2025-09-06text/htmlen-USHow Worlds are Made: Literatures, Translation, and the Question of the Universal2025-09-062025TWOProject MUSE®701402026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-09-06Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson’s Activist Literature
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/969109
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For decades after her death in 1935, if writer, activist, and educator Alice Dunbar-Nelson was known, it was usually as the widow of the famous African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. That is changing, but the person and her writing warrant far more attention than they have received. After giving a brief account of both, this essay identifies three customary approaches to the study of literature that have not served her well: an-over-reliance on diachronicity when engaging with an author’s life, a restricted understanding of “literature,” and the assumption that an author is a unitary, essentially consistent being. All of these approaches presume that history—biographical, literary, national—is composed of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/169/image/coversmallAlice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson’s Activist Literature2025-09-06text/htmlen-USAlice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson’s Activist Literature2025-09-062025TWOProject MUSE®490852026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-09-06Afterword: Whither Orality? Echoes of an Event in World Literature
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/969110
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It was in the early 1970s in an African literature class at the University of Wisconsin that I encountered Soundjata ou l’épopée mandingue. Held in high regard by West Africans, this epic narrates the rise and eminence of the 13th-century Mali empire, one of three successive West African empires (Ghana, Mali, and Songhai) dating from 300 to 1600 CE, when trade, wealth, and written texts—at Timbuktu, for example—were at their peak. This version of the epic had been performed in Mandinka by Djeli Mamadou Kouyate, historian, praise-singer, and musician— more commonly known perhaps by the French term, griot. The performance was recorded and transcribed from Mandinka by Djibril Tamsir Niane, the Guinean scholar of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/169/image/coversmallAfterword: Whither Orality? Echoes of an Event in World Literature2025-09-06text/htmlen-USAfterword: Whither Orality? Echoes of an Event in World Literature2025-09-062025TWOProject MUSE®247012026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-09-06Skin as Psyche: Epidermal Modes of Narration in Nigerian Diaspora Literature
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/969111
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In the early 2000s, a collective of Nigerian literature critics sensed that change was on the horizon. Pius Adesanmi and Chris Dunton pointed to a proliferating “transnational idiom” that reflected the realities of “an increasing number of Nigeria’s . . . writers” (19). In his essay “Home and Exile,” Afam Akeh spied the seeds of an “exiled writing” rooted in a productive tension between the “aspirational location” of inhabitance and “inspirational location” of Nigeria. However, since “it [was] morning yet on creation day for these writers” in 2006, Akeh concluded that a review of such a “shifting aesthetic” was inherently provisional (“Home”). Fifteen years on, a consolidated genre of “Nigerian diaspora literature”
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/169/image/coversmallSkin as Psyche: Epidermal Modes of Narration in Nigerian Diaspora Literature2025-09-06text/htmlen-USSkin as Psyche: Epidermal Modes of Narration in Nigerian Diaspora Literature2025-09-062025TWOProject MUSE®827982026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-09-06Postcolonial Trauma, Memory and Care in Bodunrin B. Sasore’s Breath of Life
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/969112
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Trauma and memory connects people across historical as well as collective and personal levels. Memory accentuates trauma because it is a (continuous) search or remembering of a prominent distressing (collection of) event(s) or experience(s) that constitutes it. Memory is thus an awareness or consciousness of the past or a regular resurgence of the past in a manner that impacts the present. It is the vivid recollection of events and difficulties of facing them and the signs that point to the past including the legacies and impact of the past on the present. Trauma is a psychological and emotional response to a distressing or threatening experience. Care is contextualized here as meeting the needs of ourselves or
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/169/image/coversmallPostcolonial Trauma, Memory and Care in Bodunrin B. Sasore’s Breath of Life2025-09-06text/htmlen-USPostcolonial Trauma, Memory and Care in Bodunrin B. Sasore’s Breath of Life2025-09-062025TWOProject MUSE®795342026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-09-06The Wound and the Womb: The Politics of Reproduction and Repair in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Tambudzai Trilogy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/969113
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While “[h]ope was in the air” in 1980, when Zimbabwe gained its independence from a settler-colonial regime and “apartheid-type social control,” the nation has now become “one of the most abused societies in Africa” (Orner and Holmes 16; Bond and Manyanya 5; Bond). Post-independence Zimbabwe was quickly led to economic collapse under a neoliberal paradigm. The country has since been ruled by an authoritarian political regime—first President Robert Mugabe and then others from his Zimbabwean National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party. Despite the continued pretense of “democratic” leadership, Mugabe’s authoritarian regime has become notorious for brutal repression against civil liberties even as the constant
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/169/image/coversmallThe Wound and the Womb: The Politics of Reproduction and Repair in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Tambudzai Trilogy2025-09-06text/htmlen-USThe Wound and the Womb: The Politics of Reproduction and Repair in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Tambudzai Trilogy2025-09-062025TWOProject MUSE®1328062026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-09-06Staging and Undoing Apartheid’s Spatial Injustice: Heterotopias in Athol Fugard’s The Island
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/969114
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South African apartheid was a system of racial segregation enforced to maintain white dominance and control over blacks. From its start in 1948 to its end in 1994 when Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) was elected president, great efforts have been made to redress apartheid’s spatial injustice, but its legacy still persists in the post-apartheid decades.1 As a fundamental aspect of apartheid, spatial injustice mainly works on the mechanism of creating racially segregated townships, the residential areas that were located on the impoverished outskirts of cities and where blacks were expelled to live. Athol Fugard (1932–2025), acclaimed in 1985 as “the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world”2 by Time
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/169/image/coversmallStaging and Undoing Apartheid’s Spatial Injustice: Heterotopias in Athol Fugard’s The Island2025-09-06text/htmlen-USStaging and Undoing Apartheid’s Spatial Injustice: Heterotopias in Athol Fugard’s The Island2025-09-062025TWOProject MUSE®824672026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-09-06