Simon Gikandi: “Between Realism and Romance: “Rethinking the Problem of the Novel in Africa”

March 22, 2012

Simon Gikandi: “Between Realism and Romance: “Rethinking the Problem of the Novel in Africa”

Thursday, March 22 at 4:00, LC 317. The English Department presents: Simon Gikandi is Robert Schirmer Professor of English at Princeton University and editor of PMLA, the official journal of the Modern Languages Association. He was born in Kenya and graduated with a B.A [First Class Honors] in Literature from the University of Nairobi. He went on to earn a M.Litt. in English Studies at the University of Edinburgh and a Ph.D in English from Northwestern University. His major fields of research and teaching are the Anglophone Literatures and Cultures of Africa, India, the Caribbean, and Postcolonial Britain, the “Black” Atlantic and the African Diaspora.  He is the author of many books and articles, including Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o (a Choice Outstanding Academic Publication for 2004), and co-author of The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English Since 1945. He is the co-editor of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature and the editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of African Literature. His latest book is The Aura of Blackness: Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton University Press, 2011). He is currently working on This Thing Called English: The Colonized and their Books and Modernism and Early Postcolonial Style and editing vol 11 of The Oxford History of the Novel in English: The Novel in Africa and the Atlantic World.

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