Vanishing Timidity: A Roundtable on African Literature and Culture in the Language and Literature Classroom

Abstract

Vanishing Timidity: A Roundtable on African Literature and Culture in the Language and Literature Classroom Thefollowinground-tablediscussiontookplaceat theUniversityofMissouri-ColumbiainNovemberof2003amongselectedfacultyandgraduate studentswhoseresearchandteachingdealwithvarious aspectsofAfricancultureandcivilization.Theparticipants were as follows: JuanamarÃ-a Cordones Cook Gabriela DÃ-az Cortez Rangira Bea Gallimore Chris Okonkwo Margaret Olsen Cristina RodrÃ-guez Cabrai Michael Ugarte Flote Zephir MichaelUgarte(MU)(Spanish,ModernPeninsularLiterature ):ManyofusdoingresearchinHispanicLiteratureattheUniversityofMissourioftenpointout thelackofattentiontotheHispanicworldoutsideof Spanishdepartments.Yetthelackofattention,we must admit, is exacerbated when we think of Africa and the little known about that continent both among students and colleagues. I have gathered together a group of professors at the University of Missouri-Columbia whose professional and experiential familiarity with African culture might give us insights on remedies to that absence both in general and with specific regard to the Spanish language and literature classroom . Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 8, 2004 206 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies MU: Tell us first what your role is at the University and describe the courses you teach that focus on Africa either as the main target of the course or as a specific unit within a course. Chris Okonkwo (CO) (English, African, and African-American Literature): I teach twentieth -century Anglophone African literature and Afro-American literature with emphasis on the novel. I have taught "Literature of the Black Diaspora: The Mystical as Theme and Model" and "The Colonial Encounter: Major African Authors" concentrating on Chinua Achebe. I also teach "African American Literature of the Twentieth Century." Most of these are Afro-centered, but not all. Some are topics courses dealing with world issues. Margaret Olsen (MO) (Spanish, Colonial Latin American Litetature): Due to the exigencies of our department I teach courses predominantly in Spanish language and literature , thus there is not a great deal of opportunity to deal exclusively with African themes. But my research deals entirely with runaways and the African presence during the first two centuries of colonization of Latin America. In terms of undergraduate coût ses, I try to incorporate works of the African diaspora into our introductory Hispanic literature courses, "Latin American Minority Women Writers in Translation ," "Afro-Latin American and Indigenous Writing," and in seminars on colonial litetature in which I incorporate my research on Alonso de Sandoval, letters and chronicles of conquest. MU: For the last four years or so I have had a growing interest in the African presence in Spain and Spain in Africa as a research focus as well as a theme (one of many) in my undergraduate classes, particularly Peninsular Spanish civilization. Rangira Bea Gallimore (BG) (French, African Francophone Literature): I teach French language and literature. My focus on Africa is in two geographical areas: Sub-Saharan Africa and the Mahgreb. I incorporate African themes into our civilization and culture course. Also, in our undergraduate composition coutse, we analyze a work of literature, so I choose to analyze a novel, Une si kngue lettre, by an African woman writer from Senegal, Mariama Ba. Since Francophone literature from Africa is my primary area of research, in virtually all of my graduate seminars I deal with related issues. JuanamarÃ-a Cordones Cook (JC) (Spanish, Latin American, and Afro-Hispanic Literature ): I teach contemporary Latin American literature. I started doing research on Afro-Hispanic literature when I discovered a great deal of activity in my native Uruguay in the area of theatet. Soon after this research I met Nancy Morejón and thus began very timidly to incorporate her writing in the courses I taught, surveys etc., until finally my timidity vanished and I started teaching and researching almost exclusively in Afro-Hispanic literature. I regularly incorporate a lot of this research in a course in English I teach for rhe Honors College, "Emerging Canons of the Americas ." This coming semester I am teaching a graduate seminar on the works of Nancy Morejón. Pedagogical Perspectives 207 Cristina RodrÃ-guez Cabrai (CR) (PhD in Spanish, 2004, Afro-Uruguayan poet, specialist in the narratives of Manuel Zapata Olivella): I am a graduate student in Spanish literature. This department's interest in Afro-Hispanic literature is the reason I'm here. I have experience conducting workshops on Afro-Hispanic literature in my native Uruguay and in Brazil. These were summer courses for graduate students...