Sex, Pleasure and African Literature

Learning Outcomes

Knowledge and Understanding

Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:

• Knowledge and understanding of how to discuss Africa and Africans without othering them unintentionally;
• the ability to discuss issues related to gender, sexuality and embodiment in a culturally, theoretically and politically informed manner.
• familiarity with a body of African literary texts in English, the critical debates around them, and the conceptual vocabularies these debates entail; and

Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Apprehension of the emancipatory political implications of a group of contemporary African texts in English;
• an appreciation of the formal innovativeness of a group of contemporary African texts in English; and
• an understanding of the relationship between form, genre and meaning in contemporary African texts in English.

Transferable and Generic Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Improved essay writing skills;
• improved critical thinking skills, and
• improved attentive reading skills.

The module will start by presenting in detail the literary debate about sex, gender and pleasure among three leading African authors - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chinelo Okparanta and Akwaeke Emezi - about the terms of gendered emancipation in Nigeria, Africa and (by extension) the world. We will analyse the global political resonances of this debate, its discursive consequences, and the pressure it has put on conventional literary-analytical vocabularies, especially with regard to genre.

The module will then move to texts emanating from other regions of the African continent and its diaspora, and scrutinise the social, historical, theoretical and formal implications of their representations of sexuality, gender and embodiment. Please note that the exact details of the primary and essential reading lists are likely to vary between academic sessions.

Teaching and learning methods

Teaching methods will include lectures, seminars, and workshops on research, using theory, working across disciplines, and writing process and practice.

Learning methods will include debating, working in small groups, formulating questions as well as answers, writing in class as well as independently.

This module includes a Learning Support Hour. This is a flexible contact hour, 5 in total, designed to support and respond to the particular cohort taking the module from year to year. This hour will include (but not be limited to) activities such as language, theory and research skills classes; group work supervisions; assignment preparation and essay writing guidance; assignment consultations; feedback and feed-forward sessions.

Resources & Reading list

Textbooks

Sylvia Tamale (2011). African Sexualities: A Reader. Oxford: Fahamu.

Frederick Cooper (2014). Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Sarah Ahmed (2006). Queer Phenomenology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2013). Americanah. London: Fourth Estate.

Keguro Macharia (2019). Frottage. New York: New York University Press.

Akwaeke Emezi (2020). The Death of Vivek Oji. London: Faber.

Chinelo Okparanta (2015). Under the Udala Trees. London: Granta.

V. Y. Mudimbe (1988). The Invention of Africa. Oxford: James Currey.

Summative

This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.

Referral

This is how we’ll assess you if you don’t meet the criteria to pass this module.

Repeat

An internal repeat is where you take all of your modules again, including any you passed. An external repeat is where you only re-take the modules you failed.

Repeat Information

Repeat type: Internal & External