Chronicling the rise and the development of postcolonial agency since Africa’s encounter with Western modernity, Lokangaka Losambe uses African and African diasporic imaginaries (creative writings, autobiographies, polemical writings, and filmic media), to show how African subjects have resisted enslavement and colonial domination over the past centuries, and how they have sought to reshape “global modernity”.

Authors and filmmakers whose works are examined in detail include Olaudah Equiano, Haile Gerima, Amma Asante, George Washington Williams, William Sheppard, Wole Soyinka, Dani Kouyaté, Chris Abani, Chimamanda Adichie, and Leila Aboulela. Providing a critical study of nativism, hybridity and post-hybrid conjunctive consciousness, Postcolonial Agency in African and Diasporic Literature and Film will be of interest to students and scholars of African and African diasporic literature, history, and cultural studies.

LOKANGAKA LOSAMBE is the Frederick M. and Fannie C.P. Corse Professor of English at the University of Vermont and former president of the African Literature Association. He has taught at universities in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Swaziland, and South Africa. His publications include Postcolonial Agency in African and Diasporic Literature and Film: A Study in Globalectics; Borderline Movements in African Fiction; An introduction to the African Prose Narrative; Literature, the Visual Arts and Globalization in Africa and Its Diaspora (edited with Maureen Eke); Pre-colonial and Post-colonial Drama and Theatre in Africa (edited with Devi Sarinjeive); and The Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature (edited with Tanure Ojaide, forthcoming in August 2023).

Time: 11:00 AM EST/ London, 4:00 PM/ Lagos, 5:00 PM/ Johannesburg, 6:00 PM/ Nairobi, 7:00 PM

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Illustration by Miles Cole