The Program of African Studies at Northwestern University is hosting Ghanaian literature professor and critic Ato Quayson to a virtual literary event to discuss his new book Tragedy and Post-colonial Literature.

Prof Quayson is a distinguished academic and literary critic, currently Professor of English at Stanford University. He has published numerous books Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism (2014) and Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (Columbia University Press, 2007).

The event is themed “The Ambiguities of Colonial Modernity: Tragedy, History and African Literature.” Looking at Achebe’s village novels, Soyinka’s plays, Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, and to Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, among various others, Pros. Quayson will look at characters in African fiction who had to make touch decisions in the face of a corrupt colonial system.

The event is virtual, so anyone can attend, though registration is required.

Date: April 20, 2022.

Time: 4-5 pm Chicago time

Venue: Virtual (Register here)

Read an abstract from the event below:

“Historians have told us how unevenly infrastructural development was distributed during phase of colonial modernity, with much of it being concentrated in certain urban areas and deliberately biased toward resource extraction.  Another aspect of colonial modernity was the ways in which Reason was assumed to be concentrated in the colonial bureaucratic apparatus of courts, administrative procedures, and the legislative councils, among many other features of the colonial system…”  Read more here.

For more enquiries, contact the Program of African Studies via (847) 491-7323 or email them at: [email protected]