World Literatures 240 - Childhood in African, Afro-American and Carribbean Literatures

Childhood, intimately tied to social, political and cultural histories, to questions of self and national identity, entails specific crises in Africa and the African diaspora, focused on loss of language, exile and memory. How does the enforced acquisition of colonizer's language affect children as they attempt to master the codes of an alien tongue and cluture? How do narratives told from the point of view of children represent and deal with such alienation, and what are the relationships between recollections of childhood and published autobiography? Texts will include Camara Laye's "The African Child," Tahar Ben-Jalloun's "The Sand Child," Julia Alvarez's "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents," Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye." Open to students at all levels.