Princeton University
In this class, we will explore literature and films about African vampires, zombies, mermaids, witches, and ghosts as a way of thinking about how Africa is constructed in the global imagination as well as how African and African diasporic artists use magic to analyze the dynamics of power. In this interdisciplinary anthropology, political science, literature and history course, students will be introduced to several bodies of literature (twentieth-century African American and Francophone fiction; twenty-first century African science fiction; West African popular film); as well as the latest in theorizing about magic, culture, and the state. Among the readings and viewings will be novels by Paula Hopkins, Octavia Butler, Sony Labou Tansi, Ishmael Reed, D. A. Fagunwa, Chris Abani, Ben Okri, and Lauren Beukes; films by George A. Romero and Neill Blomkamp; and analytical works by Louise White, Achille Mbembe, Jean and John L. Comaroff.
General
Readings
Required Novels
[\c] Sony Labou Tansi, A Life and a Half (orig. La vie et demie: Roman), Congo, 1974, 132 pages
[\o] Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo, USA, 1972, 220 pages
[\o] Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood, USA, 1902–1903, 224 pages
[\o] Ben Okri, The Famished Road, Nigeria, 1991, 500 pages
[\c] D. O. Fagunwa, Forest of a Thousand Daemons, Nigeria, 1939, 153 pages
[\c] Chris Abani, Secret History of Las Vegas, USA, 2014, 336 pages
Required Films
[\c] Victor Halperin, White Zombie, USA, 1932, 67 minutes
[\c] Jacques Tourneur, I Walked with a Zombie, USA, 1943, 69 minutes
[\c] Neill Blomkamp, District 9, South Africa, 2009, 112 minutes
[\c] George A. Romero, Night of the Living Dead, USA, 1968, 96 minutes
[\o] Bill Gunn, Ganja and Hess, USA, 1973, 110 minutes
[\c] Tunde Kelani, Thunderbolt, Nigeria, 2000, 110 minutes
[\o] Tobias Wendl, Ghanaian Video Tales, Ghana, 2004, 58 minutes
[\c] Howard J. Ford, The Dead (shot in Ghana), 2009, 105 minutes
[\c] Wes Craven, The Serpent and the Rainbow, USA, 1988, 98 minutes
Ugezu J. Ugezu, Sexy Vampires 1 and 2, Nigeria, 2013, 100 minutes
Socrate Safo, Jezebel (Mammy Wata film), Ghana, 2007–2008 (screened in class)
Required Secondary Reading
[\c] Christopher M. Moreman and Cory James Rushton, introduction in Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition (2011), pp. 1–14
[\a] Achille Mbembe, “The Aesthetics of Vulgarity,” in On the Postcolony (UC Press, 2001), pp. 102–141
[\a] Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, “Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony,” American Ethnologist 26, no. 2 (1999): 279–303
[\a] Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, “Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millennial Capitalism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 779–805
[\a] Elias Kifon Bongmba, Chapter 2, “Toward a Hermeneutics of Wimbum Tfu,” in African Witchcraft and Otherness: A Philosophical and Theological Critique of Intersubjective Relations (2001), pp. 17–53
[\a] Tabish Khair and Johan Höglund, introduction in Transnational and Postcolonial Vampires: Dark Blood (Palgrave, 2012), pp. 1–9
[\c] Luise White, Chapter 1, pp. 3–56, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (UC Press, 2000)
[\o] Tobias Maria Wendl, “Wicked Villagers and the Mysteries of Reproduction: An Exploration of Horror Movies from Ghana and Nigeria,” Postcolonial Text 3, no. 2 (2007): 1–21
[\a] Katrina Daly Thompson, “Swahili Talk about Supernatural Sodomy: Intertextuality, the Obligation to Tell, and the Transgression of Norms in Coastal Tanzania,” Critical Discourse Studies 11, no. 1 (2014): 71–94
[\c] Chimaraoke O. Izugbara, “Sexuality and the Supernatural in Africa,” in African Sexualities, edited by Sylvia Tamale, pp. 533–558 (Fahamu/Pambazuka, 2011)
[\c] Misty Bastian, “Irregular Visitors: Narratives about Ogbaanje (Spirit Children) in Southern Nigerian Popular Writing,” in Stephanie Newell, ed., Readings in African Popular Fiction (Indiana, 2001), pp. 59–67
[\o] David McNally, Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (Haymarket Books, 2011) [BUY AT LABYRINTH]
[\a] Lindsey Green-Simms, “Occult Melodramas: Spectral Affect and West African Video-Film,” Camera Obscura 27, no. 2 (2012): 25–59
[\c] Barbara Frank, “Mami Wata, Wealth-Owning Spirits, and Changing Economic Morals in West Africa,” in Sacred Waters: Arts for Mami Wata and Other Divinities in Africa and the Diaspora, edited by Henry John Drewal (Indiana University Press), pp. 115–122
[\o] Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40