A Roundtable for the African Literature Association Annual conference: Nairobi, June 25-28, 2025
In the past few years, much scholarly attention has been devoted to the African literary curriculum: what gets taught, what gets neglected, what it would mean to use African literature to decolonize literary studies, what it would mean to decolonize African literary studies itself, and whether teaching African literature as such risks reproducing imperial and ethnographic methodologies that have long haunted the field. This roundtable builds on this important work, and proposes that we are much better positioned to explore the question of what African literature to teach when we are also asking questions about where and how we are teaching. We welcome conversation from participants about how demographics, institutional contexts, and political and financial pressures inform our approaches to African literature pedagogy. What does “African literature” mean in curricula at different kinds of institutions, both on the continent and overseas? What do we learn about the field when we interrogate how the field is shaped by the teachers and students who convey value onto the texts in front of them in different kinds of classrooms, as Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan describe in The Teaching Archive (2021)? What are the raced, classed, national, and gendered dynamics that shape the meaning of African literature for our students and for ourselves as critics?
We seek a group of roundtable participants from a wide variety of institutional contexts and at different points in their teaching careers. Specific issues individual participants might choose to consider include:
- Teaching African literature at different institutions, and/or at different moments in time.
- Teaching on the continent vs teaching abroad.
- How class dynamics inform readings of texts and approaches to the field.
- Working with students who identify as part of the “new” and “old” African diasporas in North American classrooms.
- How university budgets, marking schemes, local and national politics, and departmental curricular imperatives affect the teaching of African literature - when and whether it is taught, and in what contexts.
- Teaching a single African literary text in multiple contexts - e.g., Things Fall Apart in a course on tragedy vs in an African literary survey vs in a seminar on comparative modernisms.
- How graduate programs in English or Comparative Literature approach African literature as a field of study.
Informal abstracts (~250 words) and brief bios (~100 words) should be sent to agulick@mailbox.sc.edu and ChiChiAyalogu@cmail.carleton.ca by November 10, 2025.