CMS Circulation: Africa and its Diasporas and Mobilities Research Groups are pleased to host a talk titled “History and Symbol in Africa and China Relations” by Duncan M. Yoon.
RSVP below. Light refreshments will be served.
Abstract
China in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century African Literature unpacks the long-standing complexity of exchanges between Africans and Chinese as far back as the Cold War and beyond. This scope encompasses how China, which emerged as a main engine of the world economy by the end of the twentieth century, has transformed patterns of globalization across the continent. In this ground-breaking work on cultural representations, Duncan M. Yoon examines the controversial symbol of China in African literature. He reads acclaimed authors like Kofi Awoonor, Henri Lopes, and Bessie Head, as well as contemporary writers, including Ufrieda Ho, Kwei Quartey, and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. Each chapter focuses on a genre such as poetry, popular fiction, memoir, and the novel, drawing out themes like resource extraction, diaspora, gender, and race. Yoon demonstrates how African creative voices grapple with and make meaning out of the possibilities and limitations of globalization in an increasingly multipolar world.
Speaker Bio
Duncan M. Yoon is an assistant professor at NYU – Gallatin. His book, China in 20th and 21st Century African Literature, was published in 2023 with Cambridge University Press. The manuscript received the American Comparative Literature Association’s (ACLA) Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Award. His articles have appeared in journals such as Comparative Literature, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Publications of the Modern Language Association (PMLA), Journal of World Literature, Research in African Literatures, and The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry. He chaired the executive committee for the Modern Language Association’s forum African Literature to 1990 in 2022. He also served as a Fulbright Scholar to South Korea in 2004 and was a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress in 2018.
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