Susan Andrade (Pitt)

"Representing Slums Non-Magically: Chris Abani and Rohinton Mistry"

Thursday, April 22, 2010, 3:30-5pm

CHAT Seminar Room

 

About her paper, Susan writes:

This talk explores the question of genre or narrative mode with special attention to realism, which I read as a complex form. Anxious about the reception of literatures of Africa or South Asia as anthropological artifacts rather than works of the imagination, contemporary postcolonial literary studies has focused on the unsayable of text and celebrated anti-mimeticism. This is one reason that magical realist novels by Rushdie and Okri have done so well. Through readings of Graceland (2004) by Chris Abani and A Fine Balance (1995) by Rohinton Mistry, I seek to reclaim realist writing from the critical assumption that magical realism and novels with overtly symbolic content best represent the relation between human beings and the spaces of impoverishment they inhabit.

About the speaker: Susan Z. Andrade is associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and is affiliated with the programs in Cultural Studies and Women’s Studies.

Her book on gender politics, public sphere politics, and women’s literary traditions, The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms, 1958-1988, is forthcoming from Duke UP, and she co-edited Atlantic Cross-Currents/Transatlantiques (Africa World Press, 2001). She has published essays on Aphra Behn, Maryse Conde, and Franz Fanon, V. S. Naipaul, and literary and intellectual materials from Africa and the Caribbean and has guest edited a recent double issue of NOVEL on The Form of Postcolonial African Fiction (2008). Her current research project focuses on realism and literary history in Africa.