Part 1 (4 credits)
A short illustration of nineteenth-century colonialism and racial discrimination will be followed by the analysis of works by two late-Victorian novelists: Rider Haggard and Joseph Conrad. More specifically, the class will analyse three short stories by Haggard characterized by racial stereotypes and by a strong realistic approach: “Hunter Quatermain’s Story”, “Long Odds” and “Black Heart and White Heart”. These stories will be compared with “Heart of Darkness” by Conrad, whose dramatization of colonial tensions is coupled with specific early Modernist experiments. Part 1 also includes a discussion of F. F Coppola’s film "Apocalypse Now", freely adapted from Conrad’s novella, with a theoretical reflection on the process of filmic adaptation.

Part 2 (1 credit)
This part focuses on the following postcolonial key concepts, which have significantly influenced Anglophone culture and literature in the last fifty years: alterity, ambivalence, anti-colonialism, black consciousness, catachresis, centre/margins, colonial desire, colonialism, comprador, contrapuntal reading, cultural diversity/difference, decolonization, double colonization, essentialism, Fanonism, feminism and post-colonialism, hybridity, imperialism, mimicry, neo-colonialism, Orientalism, othering, postcolonialism, race, slavery, universalism, worlding.

Part 3 (2 credits)
After an illustration of Nigerian history and culture between colonialism and decolonization, this Part will offer an anlysis of “Things Fall Apart” (1958) by Chinua Achebe, which is considered a classic of the new African literature in English. Main objects of focus will be the novel’s historical, social and anthropological references, as well as its linguistic and aesthetic peculiarities.

Part 4 (3 credits)

In addition to introducing the historical and cultural reality of postcolonial Nigeria, classes will investigate the peculiarities of "Dangerous Love" (1996), a novel by Ben Okri pivoting around the formation of a young painter and the challenges met by young Nigerians in a society corrupted by their fathers. The analysis will cast light onto the fuction aof art, here meant a socio-political instrument, and the distinctive elements of the African novel in English. Films and documentaries on today’s Africa will be shown and discussed.