SOPHOCLES Philoctetes - On Pity and Conscience Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2020-08-15 | This episode on Sophocles’ Philoctetes will be focused on the ways in which Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, evolves a conscience on encountering the extreme pain and anguish of Philoctetes. Philoctetes has been abandoned by the Greek army on the uninhabited island of Lemnos for nine years, and in the tenth year Neoptolemus is brought by Odysseus to try and retrieve through trickery Herakles’ magic bow and arrows that are in possession of Philoctetes for use in the Trojan War. Things start well for Neoptolemus but quickly unravel once he gets to know the full extent of Philoctetes’ condition.
TONI MORRISON: SONG OF SOLOMON, PART 2 Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2026-05-21 | Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon is at once a young man’s coming-of-age story and one of the most poignant stories of the discovery of Black heritage. At the heart of the story of discovery is Milkman, son of the Black entrepreneur Macon Dead and the mixed-race Ruth, long-suffering mother and wife. His sisters are First Corinthians and Magdalena, girls who occupy a jaded and almost sepia existence under the thumb of their bullying father. But the story of the Macon Dead family provides only one dimension of the novel. The second dimension is filled out by the family of Pilate, Macon Dead’s sister and the one that provides real moral compass both to Milkman and to the story in general. It is in Song of Solomon that Morrison introduces her first forays into magical realism, something that will become more explicit in Beloved. It is also in Song of Solomon that she deploys various narrative devices that require a different quality of reader participation than what pertained to reading The Bluest Eye and Sula. This and last week's episode explore these and other themes in the novel.
TONI MORRISON: SONG OF SOLOMON, PART 1 Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2026-05-17 | Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon is at once a young man’s coming-of-age story and one of the most poignant stories of the discovery of Black heritage. At the heart of the story of discovery is Milkman, son of the Black entrepreneur Macon Dead and the mixed-race Ruth, long-suffering mother and wife. His sisters are First Corinthians and Magdalena, girls who occupy a jaded and almost sepia existence under the thumb of their bullying father. But the story of the Macon Dead family provides only one dimension of the novel. The second dimension is filled out by the family of Pilate, Macon Dead’s sister and the one that provides real moral compass both to Milkman and to the story in general. It is in Song of Solomon that Morrison introduces her first forays into magical realism, something that will become more explicit in Beloved. It is also in Song of Solomon that she deploys various narrative devices that require a different quality of reader participation than what pertained to reading The Bluest Eye and Sula. This and the next episode will explore these and other themes in the novel.
TONI MORRISON: SULA, PART 2 Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2026-05-10 | Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye ought to come with a warning about reader discretion. Toward the end of the novel, it portrays the truly disturbing scene of the rape of the 11-year-old Pecola by her father Cholly. And yet Morrison’s novel is not the only one in World Literature to portray the violent destruction of the bond between parent and child. We have other unsettling examples in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon in the Oresteia as well as in Euripides’s Medea. In each instance, the challenge that is placed before us is that of the complex motivations for ethically consequential choices of any kind, with the destruction of the bond between parent and child providing an emotionally charged platform for reflecting on the issue of ethical choice. But The Bluest Eye also gives us much more than the rape scene. It poses the question as to why a black girl should be so self-revolted that she would desperately wish for blue eyes as a way of changing both herself and the attitude of the world toward her. The corrosive sources of this desire are arguably as damaging as the effect of the rape on her, and, read in parallel, raises further complex issues about the effects of race and racism in America. But The Bluest Eye is no propaganda document. It is first and last of work of literature and is crafted in such a way as to prevent us to settling on any conclusions without paying attention to its extraordinary craftsmanship. This and last week's episode are devoted to exploring these and other questions in the novel.
TONI MORRISON: SULA, PART 1 Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2026-05-03 | In The Politics, Aristotle uses the term oǐkos to refer to the family as the building block of Greek society. It was also understood to be composed of two parts, namely the household family, and the family’s house. But the term gathers to itself implications of the grounding of moral compass in the Nicomachean Ethics, when in discussing the elements that make for the good life, Aristotle states that among other things to be ethical requires access to philia, the reciprocal principle of affirmation that is provided by family and friends. It is thus from the family that one learns the basic tenets of both responsibility and the care of others. It was also the private and economic unit from which the polis (the political sphere) was formed. In the novel Sula, Toni Morrison provides us a reworked version of philia with another instalment of the women-only household in the novel Sula. The women-only household ruled over by the redoubtable Eva Peace provides the template for exploring several ethical considerations in the novel. Her granddaughter, for whom the novel is named, furnishes a contrary principle to the communalist principle provided by Eva. This and the next episode will be devoted to exploring Sula in terms both of this and the problematic quest for female autonomy and sexual freedom.Suggested ReadingsNamwali Serpell, On Morrison, London: Hogarth Press, 2026.La Vinia Delois Jennings, Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.Kelly L. Reames and Linda Wagner-Martin, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Toni Morrison, London: Bloomsbury, 2023.Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, London: Picador, 1992.
TONI MORRISON: THE BLUEST EYE, PART 2 Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2026-04-26 | Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye ought to come with a warning about reader discretion. Toward the end of the novel, it portrays the truly disturbing scene of the rape of the 11-year-old Pecola by her father Cholly. And yet Morrison’s novel is not the only one in World Literature to portray the violent destruction of the bond between parent and child. We have other unsettling examples in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon in the Oresteia as well as in Euripides’s Medea. In each instance, the challenge that is placed before us is that of the complex motivations for ethically consequential choices of any kind, with the destruction of the bond between parent and child providing an emotionally charged platform for reflecting on the issue of ethical choice. But The Bluest Eye also gives us much more than the rape scene. It poses the question as to why a black girl should be so self-revolted that she would desperately wish for blue eyes as a way of changing both herself and the attitude of the world toward her. The corrosive sources of this desire are arguably as damaging as the effect of the rape on her, and, read in parallel, raises further complex issues about the effects of race and racism in America. And yet The Bluest Eye is no propaganda document. It is first and last of work of literature and is crafted in such a way as to prevent us to settling on any conclusions without paying attention to its extraordinary craftsmanship. This and last week's episode are devoted to exploring these and other questions in the novel.
TONI MORRISON: THE BLUEST EYE Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2026-04-19 | Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye ought to come with a warning about reader discretion. Toward the end of the novel, it portrays the truly disturbing scene of the rape of the 11-year-old Pecola by her father Cholly. And yet Morrison’s novel is not the only one in World Literature to portray the violent destruction of the bond between parent and child. We have other unsettling examples in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon in the Oresteia as well as in Euripides’s Medea. In each instance, the challenge that is placed before us is that of the complex motivations for ethically consequential choices of any kind, with the destruction of the bond between parent and child providing an emotionally charged platform for reflecting on the issue of ethical choice. But The Bluest Eye also gives us much more than the rape scene. It poses the question as to why a black girl should be so self-revolted that she would desperately wish for blue eyes as a way of changing both herself and the attitude of the world toward her. The corrosive sources of this desire are arguably as damaging as the effect of the rape on her, and, read in parallel, raises further complex issues about the effects of race and racism in America. But The Bluest Eye is no propaganda document. It is first and last of work of literature and is crafted in such a way as to prevent us to settling on any conclusions without paying attention to its extraordinary craftsmanship. This and the next episode will be devoted to exploring these and other questions in the novel.Suggested ReadingSuggested ReadingsNamwali Serpell, On Morrison, London: Hogarth Press, 2026.La Vinia Delois Jennings, Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.Kelly L. Reames and Linda Wagner-Martin, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Toni Morrison, London: Bloomsbury, 2023.Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, London: Picador, 1992.
THE DOMESTIC AND PRIVATE SPHERES IN THE NOVELS OF TONI MORRISON, PART 2 Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2026-04-12 | Toni Morrison often places at their narrative and symbolic center of her novels examples of women-only households. Perhaps the most well-known is the women-only household of 124 Bluestone Road in Beloved. But in fact, there are other such powerful households scattered throughout her oeuvre, such as those of the three colorful sex workers in The Bluest Eye, the house ruled over by the one-legged and redoubtable Eva Peace in Sula, Pilate’s wine-making household in Song of Solomon, and of course Consolata’s convent in Paradise. This and the previous episode are devoted to exploring the dynamic relations in Morrison’s representations of the domestic and private spheres in her novels.Suggested ReadingsNamwali Serpell, On Morrison, London: Hogarth Press, 2026.La Vinia Delois Jennings, Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.Kelly L. Reames and Linda Wagner-Martin, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Toni Morrison, London: Bloomsbury, 2023.Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, London: Picador, 1992.
TONI MORRISON AND THE DOMESTIC AND PRIVATE SPHERES, PART 1 Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2026-04-05 | Toni Morrison often places at their narrative and symbolic center of her novels examples of women-only households. Perhaps the most well-known is the women-only household of 124 Bluestone Road in Beloved. But in fact, there are other such powerful households scattered throughout her oeuvre [u-vruh], such as those of the three colorful sex workers in The Bluest Eye, the house ruled over by the one-legged and redoubtable Eva Peace in Sula, Pilate’s wine-making household in Song of Solomon, and of course Consolata’s convent in Paradise. This and the next episode will be devoted to exploring the dynamic relations in Morrison’s representations of the domestic and private spheres in her novels.Suggested ReadingsNamwali Serpell, On Morrison, London: Hogarth Press, 2026.La Vinia Delois Jennings, Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.Kelly L. Reames and Linda Wagner-Martin, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Toni Morrison, London: Bloomsbury, 2023.Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, London: Picador, 1992.
THEMES IN TONI MORRISON Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2026-03-30 | I have been teaching Toni Morrison’s work for about 25 years now and have come to the firm conclusion that not only is she a phenomenal writer that everyone ought to read, but that she is also a very deep philosopher. This is the first of a new set of episodes on the work of Toni Morrison, starting with a description of the main themes in her writing. Subsequent episodes will be dedicated to individual novels but will also read these alongside other writers in World Literature, such as Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Aeschylus, Euripides, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, James Baldwin, and various others. We will also pay attention to her literary criticism, especially to Playing in the Dark, along with her many other writings on social issues.Suggested ReadingsNamwali Serpell, On Morrison, London: Hogarth Press, 2026.La Vinia Delois Jennings, Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.Kelly L. Reames and Linda Wagner-Martin, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Toni Morrison, London: Bloomsbury, 2023.Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, London: Picador, 1992.
THE AFRO-BRAZILIANS OF ACCRA, FROM 1836-PRESENT TIMES, PART 2 Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2026-03-04 | Viera, Gomez, Zuzer, Peregrino, Manuel, and Da Costa, Da Rocha, and Morton are some Afro-Brazilian names to be found in Accra. In Lagos you find names such as Verissimo, Antonio, Pinheiro, De Silva, and De Souza, among others. In Accra the descendants of the Afro-Brazilians that arrived in the city in the 1830s are known as Tabon, while in Lagos they are called Agudas. The most famous Afro-Brazilian family in Lome, is the Olympio family, which came to form perhaps the most important ruling dynasty in Togo for several decades from the 1960s. There are also Afro-Brazilians in Porto Novo and Ouidah in today’s Benin. The Afro-Brazilians of West Africa have made major contributions to cultural life, politics, and architecture, among various other areas. This is the second of two episodes focused on the Afro-Brazilians of Accra and the ways in which they exemplify the relations between the New World and Africa and also illustrate forms of transnational cosmopolitanism that evades the usual Global North circuits via which the two terms are normally defined. These revise an earlier episode on the same topic in 2022. We will see that the Afro-Brazilians introduced various forms of urban skills and livelihood that were not generally present before their arrival, and that by this means they helped to further diversify the hybrid cultural formation of Accra that had already been impacted by the rise of the mulatto (mixed race) offspring of European men and local women and their consolidation as the bridgehead between Europeans and locals from the seventeenth century onward.Suggested ReadingAto Quayson and Girish Daswani, “Introduction: Diaspora and Transnationalism: Scapes, Scales, and Scopes,” A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism, (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2013).Marco Aurelio Schaumloeffel, Tabom: The Afro-Brazilian Community in Ghana (Accra: Embassy of Brazil/Itamaraty, 2009).Amos, Alcione M. and Ebenezer Ayesu, “’I am Brazilian’: History of the Tabon, Afro-Brazilians in Accra, Ghana”, Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, ns (2003): 35-58.Ato Quayson, Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism, (Durham: Duke, 2014).Mae-Ling Lokko, The Brazil House, (Accra, : The Brazilian Embassy, n.d.).Samuel Quarcoopome, "Urbanization, Land Alienation and Politics in Accra," IAS Review, n.s., 8 (1992): 40-54.Hesse, Herman W. von, "A Brief History of the Afro-Brazilian Community of Accra," BA thesis, University of Ghana, 2011.
THE AFRO-BRAZILIANS OF ACCRA, 1836-PRESENT TIMES, PART 1 Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2026-02-23 | Viera, Gomez, Zuzer, Peregrino, Manuel, and Da Costa, Da Rocha, and Morton are some Afro-Brazilian names to be found in Accra. In Lagos you find names such as Verissimo, Antonio, Pinheiro, De Silva, and De Souza, among others. In Accra the descendants of the Afro-Brazilians that arrived in the city in the 1830s are known as Tabon, while in Lagos they are called Agudas. The most famous Afro-Brazilian family in Lome, is the Olympio family, which came to form perhaps the most important ruling dynasty in Togo for several decades from the 1960s. There are also Afro-Brazilians in Porto Novo and Ouidah in today’s Benin. The Afro-Brazilians of West Africa have made major contributions to cultural life, politics, and architecture, among various other areas. This episode and the next will be focused on the Afro-Brazilians of Accra and the ways in which they exemplify the relations between the New World and Africa and also illustrate forms of transnational cosmopolitanism that evades the usual Global North circuits via which the two terms are normally defined. These revise an earlier episode on the same topic in 2022. We will see that the Afro-Brazilians introduced various forms of urban skills and livelihood that were not generally present before their arrival, and that by this means they helped to further diversify the hybrid cultural formation of Accra that had already been impacted by the rise of the mulatto (mixed race) offspring of European men and local women and their consolidation as the bridgehead between Europeans and locals from the seventeenth century onward.Suggested ReadingAto Quayson and Girish Daswani, “Introduction: Diaspora and Transnationalism: Scapes, Scales, and Scopes,” A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism, (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2013).Marco Aurelio Schaumloeffel, Tabom: The Afro-Brazilian Community in Ghana (Accra: Embassy of Brazil/Itamaraty, 2009).Amos, Alcione M. and Ebenezer Ayesu, “’I am Brazilian’: History of the Tabon, Afro-Brazilians in Accra, Ghana”, Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, ns (2003): 35-58.Ato Quayson, Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism, (Durham: Duke, 2014).Mae-Ling Lokko, The Brazil House, (Accra, : The Brazilian Embassy, n.d.).Samuel Quarcoopome, "Urbanization, Land Alienation and Politics in Accra," IAS Review, n.s., 8 (1992): 40-54.Hesse, Herman W. von, "A Brief History of the Afro-Brazilian Community of Accra," BA thesis, University of Ghana, 2011.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE FORMERLY ENSLAVED IN WEST AFRICA, PART 2 Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2026-02-16 | It is important to remember that the time-frame of post-abolition in West Africa stretched over a roughly 80-year period, from the signing in 1835 of formal treaties between Britain, France, and Denmark to abolish the trade worldwide to its complete demise in the region by about the 1920s. The British wars against the kingdom of Ashanti in 1874 and again in 1876 were waged partly on the question of slavery, as was the annexation of Lagos in 1861. But the slave trade ended in Ashanti only on British occupation in 1896, and domestic slavery and debt bondage were only formally prohibited in June 1908. For men at least, slavery seems to have disappeared completely only by around 1918, when the local economy successfully made the transition from slave economy to legitimate trade. A similar timeframe is replicable for other parts of West Africa. More importantly, the abolition of transatlantic slavery did not actually encompass domestic slavery, a form that was considered by locals as well as the British to be different in both character and consequences. This the second episode in which we look at what happened to enslaved people after the Emancipation agreements in the nineteenth century. We will link the period after slavery to the expansion of West African cities and the creation of a reservoir of cheap labor that has not been addressed since.Suggested BibliographyRev. Samuel Johnson, The History of the YorubasTunji Osinubi, “Abolition, Law, and the Osu Marriage Novel,” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2.1 (2014): 53-71.Ato Quayson, Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).J.D.Y. Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).Harry Garuba, “Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing African Literature, Culture, and Society,” Public Culture 15.2 (2003): 261-285.
WHAT HAPPENED TO WEST AFRICAN ENSLAVED PEOPLE AFTER ABOLITION? Part 1 Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2026-02-10 | It is important to remember that the time-frame of post-abolition in West Africa stretched over a roughly 80-year period, from the signing in 1835 of formal treaties between Britain, France, and Denmark to abolish the trade worldwide to its complete demise in the region by about the 1920s. The British wars against the kingdom of Ashanti in 1874 and again in 1876 were waged partly on the question of slavery, as was the annexation of Lagos in 1861. But the slave trade ended in Ashanti only on British occupation in 1896, and domestic slavery and debt bondage were only formally prohibited in June 1908. For men at least, slavery seems to have disappeared completely only by around 1918, when the local economy successfully made the transition from slave economy to legitimate trade. A similar timeframe is replicable for other parts of West Africa. More importantly, the abolition of transatlantic slavery did not actually encompass domestic slavery, a form that was considered by locals as well as the British to be different in both character and consequences. This and the next episode will be looking at what happened to enslaved people after the Emancipation agreements in the nineteenth century. We will link the period after slavery to the expansion of West African cities and the creation of a reservoir of cheap labor that has not been addressed since.
THE AFRO-DANISH OF ACCRA, PART 2 Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2026-01-18 | Lokko. Lutterodt. Hesse.Malm.Swaniker.Pedersen.Christiansen. These are some well known Afro-Danish names at Osu in Accra.The history of Osu spells a complex interaction between Denmark and the locally population that spanned nearly two hundred years from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, when the interaction was discontinued on the purchase of Christiansborg Castle by the British in 1850, and Akyems in 1730, amply supported by all three European merchant groups on the coast. Akwamu vassalage was however quickly succeeded by Akyem overlordship, which in its turn was followed hard upon by Ashanti control over large swathes of the coastal populations across the Gold Coast, from the 1740s onward. This and the next episode will explore the evolution of the Afro-Danish community of Osu from the mid-seventeenth century to recent times.Suggested ReadingsKokó’s Daughters (2008) Pernille Ipsen Ray Kea, Kea’s Settlements, Trade and Politics in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast (1982)Leif Svalesen, The Slave Ship FredensborgSelen Winsnes, ed., A Reliable Account of the Coast of Guinea (1760) by Ludewig Ferdinand Romer (2000)Ato Quayson, Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
THE AFRO-DANISH OF ACCRA, PART 1 Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2026-01-11 | Lokko. Lutterodt. Hesse.Malm.Swaniker.Pedersen.Christiansen. These are some well known Afro-Danish names at Osu in Accra.The history of Osu spells a complex interaction between Denmark and the locally population that spanned nearly two hundred years from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, when the interaction was discontinued on the purchase of Christiansborg Castle by the British in 1850, and Akyems in 1730, amply supported by all three European merchant groups on the coast. Akwamu vassalage was however quickly succeeded by Akyem overlordship, which in its turn was followed hard upon by Ashanti control over large swathes of the coastal populations across the Gold Coast, from the 1740s onward. This and the next episode will explore the evolution of the Afro-Danish community of Osu from the mid-seventeenth century to recent times.Suggested ReadingsKokó’s Daughters (2008) Pernille Ipsen Ray Kea, Kea’s Settlements, Trade and Politics in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast (1982)Leif Svalesen, The Slave Ship FredensborgSelen Winsnes, ed., A Reliable Account of the Coast of Guinea (1760) by Ludewig Ferdinand Romer (2000)Ato Quayson, Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
SOME SCENES AND DRAMATIS PERSONAE OF CAPE COAST CASTLE HISTORY, PART 2 Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2025-12-21 | Cape Coast Castle was built by the English in 1664. It was originally a Portuguese trading post established in 1555 and in 1653 was taken over by the Swedish African Company as a center for their timber and gold trade. On possessing it from the Swedes the British expanded the castle and repurposed it specifically for the slave trade. In this second episode on the subject, we will be taking a further look at three people whose graves we are introduced to on visiting the Castle today: George Maclean, Philip Quaque, and one simply referred to as L.E.L. But L.E.L were the initials of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, a well-known poet in London in the early 1800s. We will take a look at the entanglements in the stories of George Maclean, who was Governor of the Castle from 1830 to 1844, his wife Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802-1838), and his mistress Ellen Bannerman, from one of the most illustrious mixed-race families in Accra. Using Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation, Landon will be used to focalize the contradictions at Cape Coast Castle during that period.Suggested ReadingAdeleke Adeeko (2009). “Writing Africa under the Shadow of Slavery: Quaque, Wheatley, and Crowther”. Research in African Literatures, 40.4, 1-24.- - -, ed. (2017). Philip Quaque’s Letters to London, 1765-1811, (Pretoria: UNISA Press). Andrew Apter, “History in the Dungeon: Atlantic Slavery and the Spirit of Capitalism in Cape Coast Castle, Ghana”. The American Historical Review, vol. 122, no. 1, 2017, pp. 23–54.Albert van Dantzig (1999). Forts and Castles of Ghana, (Accra: Sedco Publishers).Ray Kea, (1982). Settlements, Trade, and Politics in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).Louis P. Nelson (2014). “Architectures of West African Enslavement.” Buildings & Landscapes 21.1: 88-125.Stephanine Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery : A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press)St. Clair, William (2006). The Door of No Return: The History of Cape Coast Castle and the Atlantic Slave Trade. New York: Bluebridge.
SOME SCENES AND DRAMATIS PERSONAE IN CAPE COAST CASTLE HISTORY, PART 1 Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2025-12-14 | Cape Coast Castle was built by the English in 1664. It was originally a Portuguese trading post established in 1555 and in 1653 was taken over by the Swedish African Company as a center for their timber and gold trade. On possessing it from the Swedes the British expanded the castle and repurposed it specifically for the slave trade. In this episode and the next episode we will be taking a look at three people whose graves we are introduced to on visiting the Castle today: George Maclean, Philip Quaque, and one simply referred to as L.E.L. But L.E.L were the initials of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, a well-known poet in London in the early 1800s. We will take a look at the entanglements in the stories of George Maclean, who was Governor of the Castle from 1830 to 1844, his wife Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802-1838), and his mistress Ellen Bannerman, from one of the most illustrious mixed-race families in Accra. Using Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation, Landon will be used to focalize the contradictions at Cape Coast Castle during that period.Suggested readingsAdeleke Adeeko (2009). “Writing Africa under the Shadow of Slavery: Quaque, Wheatley, and Crowther”. Research in African Literatures, 40.4, 1-24.- - -, ed. (2017). Philip Quaque’s Letters to London, 1765-1811, (Pretoria: UNISA Press). Andrew Apter, “History in the Dungeon: Atlantic Slavery and the Spirit of Capitalism in Cape Coast Castle, Ghana”. The American Historical Review, vol. 122, no. 1, 2017, pp. 23–54.Albert van Dantzig (1999). Forts and Castles of Ghana, (Accra: Sedco Publishers).Ray Kea, (1982). Settlements, Trade, and Politics in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).Louis P. Nelson (2014). “Architectures of West African Enslavement.” Buildings & Landscapes 21.1: 88-125.Stephanine Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery : A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press)St. Clair, William (2006). The Door of No Return: The History of Cape Coast Castle and the Atlantic Slave Trade. New York: Bluebridge.
THE EXTRAORDINARY LONELINESS OF PHILIP QUAQUE AT CAPE COAST CASTLE, PART 2 Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2025-12-07 | Philip Quaque is celebrated in Ghana as a pioneer in education, having been responsible for setting up the school at Cape Coast Castle in 1766. In reality his was not the first European school, for in 1722 the Danes had established a school for the mulato or mixed-race children of European company officials at Christiansborg Castle. And in the process of evangelizing among the native population, the Portuguese had also attempted many educational arrangements since the building of Elmina Castle in 1482, first for the children of royals, and then incorporating those of influential traders and other personages. Philip Quaque was born in 1741 in Cape Coast, then in the Gold Coast Colony (now Ghana) to Birempong Cudjoe, a prominent caboceer in the town. He became a chaplain at the Cape Coast Castle after returning from England with a theology degree from Oxford. This episode will is a continuation of the episode from last week, and will continue to look at the life and times of Philip Quaque, especially with what might be described as his loneliness as the pioneer Anglican chaplain among a sea of both European and African sceptics.Suggested ReadingsAdeeko, Adeleke (2009). “Writing Africa under the Shadow of Slavery: Quaque, Wheatley, and Crowther”. Research in African Literatures, 40.4, 1-24.- - -, ed. (2017). Philip Quaque’s Letters to London, 1765-1811. Pretoria: UNISA Press. Bakhtin Mikhail (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1984.Caretta, Vincent, and Ty M. Reese, eds. (2011). The Life and Letters of Philip Quaque: The First African Anglican Missionary. Athens: University of Georgia Press.Foucault, Michel (1997). “Self-Writing”, in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press, 1997. 207-222.Justesen, Ole (2005). Danish Sources for the History of Accra, 1657-1754, Vols. 1&2. Trans. James Manley. Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab.Kea, Ray (1982). Settlements, Trade, and Politics in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Nelson, Louis P. (2014). “Architectures of West African Enslavement.” Buildings & Landscapes 21.1: 88-125.St. Clair, William (2006). The Door of No Return: The History of Cape Coast Castle and the Atlantic Slave Trade. New York: Bluebridge.
THE EXTRAORDINARY LONELINESS OF PHILIP QUAQUE AT CAPE COAST CASTLE Part 1 Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2025-11-30 | Philip Quaque is celebrated in Ghana as a pioneer in education, having beenresponsible for setting up the school at Cape Coast Castle in1766 In reality his was not the first European school, for in 1722 the Daneshad established a school for the mulato or mixed-race children of European company officials at Christiansborg Castle. And in the process of evangelizing among the native population, the Portugues had also attempted many educational arrangements since the building of Elmina Castle in 1482, first for the children of royals, and then incorporating those of influential traders and other personages. Philip Quaque was born in 1741 in Cape Coast, then in the Gold Coast Colony (now Ghana) to Birempong Cudjoe, a prominent caboceer in the town. He became a chaplain at the Cape Coast Castle after returning from England with a theology degree from Oxford. This 2-part episode will be taking a look at the life and times of Philip Quaque, especially with what might be described as his loneliness as the pioneer Anglican chaplain among a sea of both European and African sceptics.Suggested ReadingsAdeeko, Adeleke (2009). “Writing Africa under the Shadow of Slavery: Quaque, Wheatley, and Crowther”. Research in African Literatures, 40.4, 1-24.- - -, ed. (2017). Philip Quaque’s Letters to London, 1765-1811. Pretoria: UNISA Press. Caretta, Vincent, and Ty M. Reese, eds. (2011). The Life and Letters of Philip Quaque: The First African Anglican Missionary. Athens: University of Georgia Press.Foucault, Michel (1997). “Self-Writing”, in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press, 1997. 207-222.Justesen, Ole (2005). Danish Sources for the History of Accra, 1657-1754, Vols. 1&2. Trans. James Manley. Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab.Kea, Ray (1982). Settlements, Trade, and Politics in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Nelson, Louis P. (2014). “Architectures of West African Enslavement.” Buildings & Landscapes 21.1: 88-125.St. Clair, William (2006). The Door of No Return: The History of Cape Coast Castle and the Atlantic Slave Trade. New York: Bluebridge.
THE WOMAN KING AND THE REPRESENTATION OF HISTORICAL TRANSITION Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2025-11-23 | To ask that Hollywood be faithful in depicting historical events is like asking that a fish prove its earnestness by riding a bicycle. A futile hope. And so it is with The Woman King, directed by Gina Prince-Bytherwood, and with the inimitable Viola Davis in the starring role. And yet, despite all its distortions, the film did strike an unerring note about the complex historical transition that the Kingdom of Dahomey was going through in the period in which it was set. This episode will explore elements of this historical transition and make some points about the significance of these for understanding the subsequent history of West Africa.Suggested ReadingsRobin Law, The Horse in West African History: The Role of the Horse in Pre-Colonial West African Societies, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).Robin Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving Port, 1727-1892, (Oxford: James Currey, 2005).
JAMES FORT AND THE HISTORY OF GA SOCIAL FORMATION Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2025-11-16 | The Jamestown district in today’s Accra is famous for being the original hub of the in Ga Mashie polity from the mid-16th century onward. This episode will delve into some of that history as well as the impact of the European forts and castles that were built on the coast of Accra, their social impact, and the changing spatial landscape that they have demarcated well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Suggested ReadingsJohn Parker, Making the Town: Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra, (Oxford: James Currey, 2001.Ato Quayson, Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).Mary Esther Kropp Dakubu, Korle Meets the Sea: A Sociolinguistic History of Accra, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).Eric Maclean Ntiamoah, The City of Accra: A Pictorial Visit, (Authorhouse Press, 2008). Ray Kea, Settlements, Trade, and Polities in the Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).Serena Owusu Dankwa, Knowing Women: Same Sex-Intimacy, Gender, and Identity in Postcolonial Ghana, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).Ione Acquah, Accra Survey: A Social Survey of the Capital of Ghana, (London: London Universities Press,1958).Nat Nuno Amarteifio, “Chairman’s Remarks”. Visions of the City: Accra in the 21st Century, (Accra: Woeli Publishers, 2002).Richard Grant, Globalizing City: The Urban and Economic Transformation of Accra, Ghana, (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008).
THE EPISTEMIC AND SOCIAL UPHEAVALS OF ELMINA CASTLE, 1482 Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2025-11-09 | This is the introduction to a new set of episodes on the West African Encounters with Europe from the 15th century to the early 20th century. In each episode I will be exploring a facet of these encounters and will be offering some reflections on various epistemic, social, and material aspects of the encounters. I will be drawing inspiration for these reflections from Saidiya Hartman’s highly productive concept of “critical fabulation.”Much has been written about the connection between Elmina Castle on the coast of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and slavery but there has been no reflection on the epistemic upheaval that it must have represented for the people of the township when it was first built in 1482. This episode will explore that circumstances surrounding the building of the fort (later castle) in that year and will speculate on the forms of epistemic and social upheavals that it must have represented in 1482 and after that.Suggested ReadingsJames K. Acquandah, Castles and Forts of Ghana, (Brussels: Atlante,1999)Ato Ashun, Elmina, the Castle and the Slave Trade (Cape Coast: Nyakod Printing Works, 2004).K. Y. Daaku, Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast 1600-1720, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).Brodie Cruickshank, Eighteen Years on the Gold Coast of Africa, Volume 1 (2nd Ed.) (London: Frank Cass, 1966; first published 1853).Kwasi Konadu, ed., Africa’s Gold Coast through Portuguese Sources, 1469-1680, (Accra: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2023).Pieter De Marees, Description and Historical Account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987; first published 1602).J. Sylvannus Wartemberg, São Jorge d’El Mina: Its Traditions and Customs, (Ilfracombe: Arthur H. Stockwell, 1951.)
ROBBEN ISLAND AND SOUTH AFRICAS PALSIED POLITICAL HISTORY Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2025-11-02 | The history of South Africa’s Robben Island generates something of its own peculiar symbolic resonance because of the strong association it has had with apartheid oppression and the resistance against it. As Oliver Tambo was to put it in 1980: ‘The tragedy of Africa, in racial and political terms is concentrated in the southern tip of the continent - in South Africa, Namibia, and, in a special sense, Robben Island.’ Holding up the Island as a meta-narrative and rhetorical space runs the risk of telescoping its history to coincide firmly with the period when it held apartheid’s famous political prisoners such as Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathadra, and others. For despite serving as a place where criminal and political undesirables were detained from at least the 1650s, it was from the mid-19th century a place where the sick poor, persons with leprosy, and lunatics were also kept. Indeed, the General Infirmary of Robben Island operated as one of the instruments of colonial public health policy from 1846 to 1931, when the last of its three medical institutions - the hospital for people with leprosy - was closed down. The chronic sick hospital had been shut down in 1891, with the lunatic asylum following suit in 1931. This episode will re-route Robben Island’s history through the prism of disability to show how the confinement of people with diverse disabilities prefigures the very logic of political apartheid itself.SUGGESTED READINGSSaul Dubow, Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in South Africa (1989)Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies (1994)De Villiers, Robben Island: Out of Reach, Out of Mind (1971) Harriet Deacon, The Island: A History of Robben Island (2003)
ATHOL FUGARDS THE ISLAND: Ironizing Nelson Mandela* as Apartheid’s Creon Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2025-03-23 | This is the first of a two-part episode on the socio-political history of Cape Town’s once infamous Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was jailed by the apartheid regime for 18 of the 27 years in which he was incarcerated. But here I want to celebrate the life of Athol Fugard (1932-2025) by paying attention to his play The Island, which is a famous South African adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone. Even though the play is not about disability, as we shall see in next week’s episode, Robben Island encompasses a long history of leper colony before it became a prison to hold political prisoners. Indeed, the General Infirmary of Robben Island operated as one of the instruments of colonial public health policy from 1846 to 1931, when the last of its three medical institutions - the hospital for people with leprosy - was closed down. The chronic sick hospital had been shut down in 1891, with the lunatic asylum following suit in 1931. This episode will re-route Robben Island’s history through the prism of disability to show how the confinement of people with diverse disabilities prefigures the very logic of political apartheid itself. Thus, the racial economy of apartheid which forms the backdrop to the play also has behind it the longer history of disability and differentiated embodiment that was at the core of Robben Island.*CORRECTIONI claim in the recorded episode that the first performance of The Island was held on Robben Island and that it had Nelson Mandela as Creon. This is factually incorrect and represents a conflation of two distinct plays and performances.The Island was first produced with the title Die Hodosche Span at The Space Theatre in Cape Town in July , 1973. In December 1973, the play now titled The Island, had its international debut at the Royal Court in London. It was then also staged in November 1974 at The Edison Theatre in New York and, in 1976 was performed at the Seymour Center in Sydney. Sophocles' Antigone (and not the play by Fugard with Kani, and Ntshona as his collaborators and the actors in the play) was dramatized by the Robben Island prisoners in the late 1960s with Mandela in the role of Creon in the play. This performance has nothing to do with Fugard's play. In Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela's autobiography, he writes of his role in Antigone:At the outset, Creon is sincere and patriotic, and there is wisdom in his early speeches when he suggests that experience is the foundation of leadership and that obligations to the people take precedence over loyalty to an individual.But Creon deals with his enemies mercilessly. He has decreed that the body of Antigone’s brother, who had rebelled against the city, does not deserve a proper burial. Antigone, who is grieving, rebels on the grounds that there is a higher law than that of the state. Creon will not listen to Antigone; neither does he listen to anyone but his own inner demons.Antigone symbolized our struggle; she was, in her own way, a freedom fighter, for she defied the law on the ground that it was unjust.I would like to thank Oluwapelumi Olufolajimi of Louisiana State University for pointing out my error, and for very generously pointing me to the relevant sources to correct it.Suggested ReadingGeorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).Harriet Deacon, The Island: A History of Robben Island: 1488-1990, (Cape Town: David Phillip, 1996).De Villiers, Simon A., Robben Island: Out of Reach, Out of Mind, (Cape Town: C. Struik, 1971).Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, (London: Routledge, 2004).Saul Dubow, Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in South Africa, 1919-1936, (London: Macmillan, 1989). Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards and Corporeal Feminism, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).Gussow, Zachary, Leprosy, Racism, and Public Health: Social Policy in Chronic Disease Control (Boulder: Colorado: Westview Press, 1989).Foucault Michel, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan, (New York: Vintage, 1995).Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).Harris, Ashleigh. ‘‘‘The Island Is Not a Story in Itself.’ Apartheid’s World Literature.’’ SAFUNDI: The Journal of South African and American Studies. Vol. 19, No. 3 (2018). 321–37.M.W. Swanson, “The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and Urban Native Policy in the Cape Colony, 1900-1909”, Journal of African History, 18: 387-410.Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Boston and New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1994.
Kamau Braithwaite’s “Angel/Engine”: Religious Conversion as Nervous Condition Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2025-03-09 | This week’s episode is simply a reading of Kamau Brathwaite’s “Angel/Engine,” from the collection The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy, first published in 1973. We will also provide some commentary on it. The poem is set in a post-plantation community and is about a young woman called Christophene, who is an impoverished and distressed single mother who ends up attending a church in the neighborhood where she undergoes religious conversion. But the process of religious conversion also brings to the surface many unstated fears, some personal but many also deriving from communal consciousness. At the heart of what becomes the confluence of religious conversion and psychological collapse is her inability to mention the names of either the Christian God or the god Shango (or Changó or Xangô in Latin America), who after being transferred across the Atlantic into the New World, is a syncretic god of metalwork and thus also of trains, transport, and technology, among other things.
SAMUEL BECKETT’S ENDGAME AND THE PLAY OF DISABILITY Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2025-03-02 | Unlike what we saw with Murphy last week, with Endgame the physical manifestation of disability is perpetually before us on stage, and its specificity is only assuaged by the elusive play of language that we are made alert to as if pursuing the threads of an inexhaustible game. But also central to the play is the question of the body-in-pain, which as we shall see, is crucial for linking Beckett directly to concerns in Disability Studies.Suggested ReadingsPierre Chabert, “The Body in Beckett’s Theatre,” Journal of Beckett Studies No. 8 (1982): 23-28.Simon Baron-Cohen, “Is Asperger’s Syndrome Necessarily a Disability?”, Development and Psychopathology 12 (2000): 489–500. Simon Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1995) Simon Baron-Cohen, Helen Tager-Flusberg and Donald Cohen, eds. Understanding Other Minds: Perspectives from Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1993).John Haynes and James Knowlson, Images of Beckett, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: Life of Samuel Beckett, (London: Bloosmbury, 1997).Neil Taylor and Bryan Loughrey,“Murphy’s Surrender to Symmetry,” Journal of Beckett Studies, 11/12 (1989): 5. Thomas J. Cousineau,“Demented vs. Creative Emulation in Murphy,” SamuelBeckett Today/Aujourd’hui, vol. 18 (2007): 355–365.Ato Quayson, “Distressed Embodiment and the Burdens of Boredom: Samuel Beckett’s Postcolonialism,” in Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 264-297.Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
SAMUEL BECKETT AND DISABILITY: Distressed Embodiment and the Quest for Meaning Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2025-02-23 | In this episode we will explore the degree to which what might be described as Beckett’s aesthetics of disability is generated out of the different relations between the body, distressed embodiment, and the futility of meaning-making and thus of boredom. These can be seen as the inescapable building blocks of the elusive meanings of his texts. While we shall place specific focus on Murphy, this novel must be understood in the context of the wider body of Beckett’s work, where his disability aesthetics is worked out in different dimensions.Suggested ReadingsSimon Baron-Cohen, “Is Asperger’s Syndrome Necessarily a Disability?”, Development and Psychopathology 12 (2000): 489–500. Simon Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1995) Simon Baron-Cohen, Helen Tager-Flusberg and Donald Cohen, eds. Understanding Other Minds: Perspectives from Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1993).Patrick Bixby, Samuel Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).Neil Taylor and Bryan Loughrey, “Murphy’s Surrender to Symmetry,” Journal of Beckett Studies, 11/12 (1989): 79-90.Thomas J. Cousineau,“Demented vs. Creative Emulation in Murphy,” SamuelBeckett Today/Aujourd’hui, vol. 18 (2007): 355–365.Ato Quayson, “Distressed Embodiment and the Burdens of Boredom: Samuel Beckett’s Postcolonialism,” in Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021): 264-297.
A BRIEF TYPOLOGY OF DISABILITY REPRESENTATIONS (2) Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2025-02-09 | In this episode we will continue to explore a typology of literary representations of disability that we started last week. As we noted before, place of disabled characters in the literary and aesthetic domain is assigned within a structure of relations. Even though generalizations might be possible with respect to representations of people with disability in literature, the literary relations through which they are manifested differ from text to text. The point is that the structure of such literary relations enjoins us to isolate the disabled character for examination only as a preliminary step towards re-inserting them into the interrelated thresholds of meanings that are established in their relationship to other characters and to images, motifs, social settings, and to broader ethical concepts that are seen within the literary text. In other words, disability is to be read as a fulcrum or pivot out of which various discursive details emerge, gain salience, and ultimately get transformed within the literary aesthetic field. We will refer to works by Ralph Ellison, Harper Lee, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Toni Morrison, and Thomas Mann, among various others.
Disney’s Finding Nemo: Dory’s Short-Term Amnesia and the Enactment of Erasure Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2025-02-02 | Children’s genres provide a useful way for understanding the subtle variations in the use of disabled characters to raise wrinkles in the representational domain. In Disney’s 2003 film Finding Nemo we see a quite remarkable and contradictory use of disability. On the one hand the fish called Dory, who suffers from short-term amnesia, is clearly a superior guide to the paranoid and petulant Marlin, father of the lost Nemo for whom he is out searching the ocean. It is Dory who gets Marlin through many close dangers, as much by her superior wit as by her sheer ability not to have a sense of danger. Hers is a moment-by-moment existence that does not bother either with the immediate past or the imminent future. And yet something peculiar happens at a critical turning point in the film, when, amidst the turtles swimming in the East Australian Current, Marlin is persuaded to tell the story of their adventures in the sea up to this point. In the account that follows, we are presented with a synopsis of what we have just seen in the film up to the moment of Marlin’s narration, and yet something peculiar happens regarding Dory’s place in it. This episode will be looking at this peculiar erasure to link it to one of the features of disability representation in general.
A Brief Typology of Disability Representations (1) Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2025-01-25 | In this episode we will be drawing up a typology of literary representations of disability, that is to say, on the varied ways in which persons with disability are represented in literature and film. The place of disabled characters in the literary and aesthetic domain is assigned within a structure of relations. Even though generalizations might be possible with respect to representations of people with disability in literature, the literary relations through which they are manifested differ from text to text. The point is that the structure of such literary relations enjoins us to isolate the disabled character for examination only as a preliminary step towards re-inserting them into the interrelated thresholds of meanings that are established in their relationship to other characters and to images, motifs, social settings, and to broader ethical concepts that are seen within the literary text. In other words, disability is to be read as a fulcrum or pivot out of which various discursive details emerge, gain salience, and ultimately get transformed within the literary aesthetic field.Suggested ReadingMargaret Pelling, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupatios and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1998)Paul Slack, The English Poor Law, 1531-1782 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)Henri-Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press,1999)David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder , Narrative Prosthesis: Disabilities and the Dependencies of Discourse, (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2001).Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London: Verso, 1995).Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture, (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2004)Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).Tom Shakespeare, The Disability Reader: Social Science Perspectives, (London: Cassell Publishers, 1998).Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, (New York: NYU Press, 1996).Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
Disability and Literature: Introduction Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2025-01-19 | This is the introduction to a new series on Disability and Literature. While the aging process typically comes with different forms of both physical and cognitive impairments, it is also true that many families all over the world live with family members that suffer different kinds of disability, such as mobility impairment, autistic spectrum disorders, cognitive disorders, and various forms of debilitating diseases that have either been inherited from their family or otherwise got through chance and accident. This generates both suffering as well as great acts of courage on the part of those families. The ways in which forms of disability have been depicted in literature and film will be the subject of this series and will touch on a range of writers such as Shakespeare, Toni Morrison, Samuel Beckett, Mark Haddon, J.R.R. Tolkien and Chinua Achebe, among various others. In this episode we will be exploring a brief history of disability studies and the ways in which scholars in the field have moved debates on impairment and disability from the medical model to the social model of disability studies.Suggested ReadingMargaret Pelling, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupatios and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1998)Paul Slack, The English Poor Law, 1531-1782 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)Henri-Jacques Stiker’s A History of Disability, (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press,1999)David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disabilities and the Dependencies of Discourse, (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2001).Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, (London: Verso, 1995).Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture, (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2004)Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, (New York: NYU Press, 1996).Tom Shakespeare, The Disability Reader: Social Science Perspectives, (London: Cassell Publishers, 1998).Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
JUNOT DÍAZS The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: Magical Realism and the Tragic Intertext Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2024-12-29 | The narrative of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a family saga strung across different generations of the Cabral Leons as well as across different geographical locations: Oscar, Lola, Belicia, La Inca, and Abelard are the key dramatis personae, and the main events of the novel shuttle between the Dominican Republic and New Jersey. There are two connections between the family saga and the two geographical locations: the Dominican Republic is generally the source of all the characters’ nightmares (note: not dreams) and New Jersey is the source of all their confusion as immigrants. The immigrant confusion is laid out primarily in the form of teenage and young adult angst about being a true Dominicano/a that is asserted in the idioms of the constitution of masculinity and femininity and in relation to amorous self-fashioning. The anchors of these processes in the novel are Oscar himself and his sister Lola, with Yunior the narrator exemplifying an extreme form of hyper-masculinity in speech, actions, and sexual behavior. Thinking about the tragic intertext of the novel, we are bound to ask first of all what is fukú, which seems at once to be curse, bad luck, and simply the ill-fate of the Cabral Leon family. As we shall see, zafa is fukú’s counterspell, and the two have specific magical realist objective correlatives in the mongoose and the man-without-a-face that appear at different points of the novel to signal the dominance of either one or the other of the terms.Suggested ReadingJosé David Saldívar, Junot Díaz: On the Half-Life of Love, Durham: Duke University Press, 2022.Christopher Gonzalez, Reading Junot Díaz, Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 2015.Monica Hana, Jennifer Hayford Vargas, and José David Saldívar, Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination, Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
PEPETELAS The Return of the Water Spirit: Magical Realism as Mystery Thriller Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2024-12-22 | Unlike other African magical realist texts we have seen, Pepetela’s The Return of the Water Spirit, marries magical realism to elements of the mystery thriller. The story is set in a period just after Angola’s violent civil wars in 2002, when the earlier communist government is transforming itself into a post-war capitalist bureaucratic regime. The main realist emphasis in the story is placed on the progressive bourgeois tendencies of the character of Carmina Evangelista, who was a former cadre in the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA)’s Youth Wing and in the novel represents the disturbing transformation of the Angolan revolutionary class into a modern-day capitalist elite. Her husband João provides a lazy and skeptical counterpoint to the narrative of this elite. Interrupting the progress of this frame story is the baffling collapse of various apartment buildings around Kinaxixi Square.Suggested ReadingAto Quayson, “Fecundities of the Unexpected: Magical Realism, Narrative, and History,” in The Novel vol 1: History, Geography, and Culture, Franco Moretti, ed., (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).Ato Quayson, “Magical Realism and African Literature,” in The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel, Abiola Irele, ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).Christopher Warnes and Kim Anderson Sasser, eds., Magical Realism and Literature, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).Christopher Warnes, “Magic and Otherness,” in The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel, pp. 13-29.Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds., Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).Brenda Cooper, Magical Realism in West African Fiction, (London: Routledge, 1998) Pietro Deandrea, Fertile Crossings: Metamorphoses of Genre in Anglophone West African Literature, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002).Stephen Slemon, “Magic as Postcolonial Discourse,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, pp. 407-426.Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World, (Cambridge UniversityPress, 1976).Harry Garuba, “Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/WritingAfrican Literature, Culture, and Society,” Public Culture, 15.2 (2003), 261–285.
BEN OKRIS The Famished Road: Leakages and Transpositions Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2024-12-15 | This episode will focus on the ontological leakages and transpositions in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road. To turn from What the Crow Said that we encountered in our previous episode The Famished Road is to be forced into a major readjustment regarding the primary sources for magical realism. From the Africanist perspective represented by the Nigerian Ben Okri, magical realism turns on forms of African orality and the techniques and devices that it provisions for the enchantment of the familiar. The enchantment of the familiar however does not merely denote the investment of the everyday with fantasy, but the assertion that “there is more to the ordinary than meets the eye” and that the phenomenal world has an important continuing impact on the way everyday reality unfolds. The world is believed to be inherently liminal and thus requires that people be prepared for dualities, contradictions and the essential changeablity of things. In traditional African societies, this implies a belief in animist materialism, or that the world is infused by the presence of the ancestors and the worlds of the yet-unborn in sometimes volatile proximity to reality. This is what we see encapsulated in the ontological leakages and transpositions of Ben Okri’s The Famished Road.Suggested Readings• Ato Quayson, “Fecundities of the Unexpected: Magical Realism, Narrative, and History,” in The Novel vol 1: History, Geography, and Culture, Franco Moretti, ed., (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).• Ato Quayson, Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing (Bloomington, IN: James Currey and Indiana University Press, 1997).• Ato Quayson, “Magical Realism and African Literature,” in The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel, Abiola Irele, ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).• Christopher Warnes and Kim Anderson Sasser, eds., Magical Realism and Literature, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).• Franz Roh, “Magical Realism: Post-Expressionism,” in Zamora and Faris.• Theo D’haen, “Magical Realism: The European Trajectory,” The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel, pp. 117-130.• Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds., Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).• Stephen Slemon, “Magic as Postcolonial Discourse,” in Zanira ans Faris, pp. 407-426.• Theo D’haen, “Magic Realism and Postmodernism: Decentering Privileged Centers,” in Zamora and Faris, pp. 191-208.
ROBERT KROETSCHS, What the Crow Said: Ontological Juxtapositions and Proliferations Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2024-12-08 | As we have seen in our episodes on Amos Tutuola and Lauren Buekes the depiction of interspecies ontology and the blurring of boundaries becomes a central device for establishing the equivalence between the fantastic and the real that defines magical realism. A contrastive handling of the blurring of boundaries between the human and the animal/insect worlds is provided in Robert Kroetsch’s What the Crow Said where the description of the potentially disconcerting rape of the young Vera by a swarm of bees inaugurates a whole series of boundary transgressions between the animal and the human worlds. But Kroetsch goes much further by introducing a vast gallery of disabled characters and making it unclear whether they are simply indexical of real-life conditions in the Canadian prairie setting or rather iconic representations of a sense of liminality.Keywords: Robert Kroetsch, What the Crow Said, indexical, iconic, liminality, Canada, Canadian magical realism, Canadian prairie, animals and humans, interspecies ontology Suggested ReadingRobert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 2004).Henri-Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability, trans. William Sayers (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1999).Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). Ato Quayson, “A Typology of Disability Representation,” Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 32-53.Stephen Slemon, ‘Magical Realism and Post-Colonial Discourse’, Canadian Literature, 116 (1988).Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press).Wendy B. Faris, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative, (Vanderbilt University Press, 2004). Christopher Warnes, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence, (London: Palgrave, 2009). Ato Quayson, “Fecundities of the Unexpected: Magical Realism, Narrative and History” The Novel Vol. 1 History, Geography, and Culture, ed. Franco Moretti, (Princeton University Press, 2006), 726-758. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).
LAUREN BUEKES Zoo City: Animals, Muti, and Transformation Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2024-12-01 | Today’s episode will focus on Lauren Buekes’s Zoo City. The novel starts off by being an exploration of the idea and principles of the mashavi, or the animalled. Several theories of aposymbiosis are proffered and the novel appears to be centered mainly on that. Aposymbiosis when two different species live independently of each other but is each affected by the life cycle of the other. This is illustrated in the novel by people carrying animals, insects, and birds typically on their shoulders that are somehow taken to be an expression of their inner essence. They are the animalled. However, as the novel progresses, it veers increasingly into question of muti, or black magic. Here, the main interest is in how the power of the animals, once separated from their human hosts, can be harnessed by an individual – in this case the music mogul Odi Huron – to augment his already fearsome power. The idea of harnessing spirit animals has already been explored in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, where it is the Magisterium that wants to separate the daemons from their hosts in order to capture the daemons’ energy to augment the Magisterium’s hegemonic authority and power. In the universe of His Dark Materials, however, the world is divided into different dimensions that require passage through special portals. The Magisterium believe that by harnessing the power of the daemons they will also be able to control the portals, and thus all the intersecting dimensions. As we shall see, the relationship of animals and humans is extraordinarily complicated but at heart it obliterates the sharp distinctions between species and rather illustrates a form of inter-species ontology in echoes of what we saw in Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.
Theoretical Interregnum: Chronotopes, Indexicality, and Iconicity in Magical Realism Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2024-11-24 | This episode is a theoretical interregnum that will focus on showing how the principle of equivalence between the fantastic and the real in magical realism also turns specifically on the constitution of space and time, both in terms of the conflation or juxtaposition of different chronotopes and ontologies of space-time and of the transposition or leakage of different spatio-temporal categories into one another. What to a reader of realist literature might appear an odd event, such as the melting of the ‘taciturn Armenian’ into a ‘pestilential puddle’ right before Jose Arcadio Buendia’s eyes as he desperately searches for Melquíades the gypsy in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude or Salim Sinai’s uncanny capacity for turning his mind into a meeting place for the gathering of the midnight’s children in Salman Rushdie’s novel are only one aspect of what makes them magical realist texts. We shall see how the different chronotopes of space and time also entail different principles of indexicality and iconicity, such that the mixture of these principles can also help us discern the different emphases adopted in individual magical realist texts.Suggested ReadingWendy B. Faris, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative, (Vanderbilt University Press, 2004)Christopher Warnes, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence, (London: Palgrave, 2009)Ato Quayson, “Fecundities of the Unexpected: Magical Realism, Narrative and History” The Novel Vol 1: History, Geography, and Culture ed. Franco Moretti, (Princeton University Press, 2006), 726-758Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press), pp. 243; 250.
SALMAN RUSHDIES MIDNIGHTS CHILDREN: OF FORGETTING AND RE-MEMBERING Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2024-11-17 | This episode will focus on Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. We will see how Rushdie places questions of narrative perspective and narration at the center of his mode of magical realism. Unlike Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Allende’s The House of Spirits, the reader is persistently invoked by the novel as an implied interlocutor inside of the novel itself, either in the person of Padma, or as someone in a position to approve or disapprove of various parts of the narrative. The implied interlocutor or reader takes the place of the audience listening to an oral storyteller. Taking the moment of the birth of the nation of India as its organizing conceit, the novel is about the children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15th, 1947. These are the midnight’s children of the title, and they all have different magical powers. The narrator Salim Sinai’s power is that he can read the mind of others. His mind is like a radio station and is the meeting place of the midnight’s children, where they meet regularly to debate the many strange things that have happened to them and also to their country. The novel also raises the question of the national longing for form, and Rushdie suggests that Indians penchant for omens and the taking of signs for wonders is a reflection of that longing. Midnight’s Children is full of predictions and anticipations, as well as variant reversals of fortunes that afflict all the central characters. It is also very funny, with many laugh-out-loud moments that make it the most light-hearted magical realist texts in the genre.Suggested ReadingMikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press.Wendy B. Faris, "Scheherezade's Children: Magical Realism and Postmodernist Fiction, " in Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, Duke: Duke University Press, 1995.Neil ten Kortenaar, Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004.Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991, London: Penguin, 1992.Timothy Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation, London: Macmillan, 1989.
ISABEL ALLENDES THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS: MAGICAL REALISM AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2024-11-10 | This episode will focus on the relationship between class consciousness and magical realism in Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. Like Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Allende’s novel centers on an inter-generational family saga, this time of the Trueba family. But unlike Marquez’s novel there are extraordinary cycles of political violence from outside the family as well as personal violence inside of it. The novel reflects the historically violent political history of Allende’s own country in Chile. As we shall see, the principle of violence threatens to upend one of the core principles of magical realism, namely, the scrupulous equivalence between the fantastic and the real. This is because the violence in the novel is tied to the unfolding of class war, such that the magical realist elements in the novel must be judged according to their relationship to different historical classes and thus, to questions of equity and justice. The careful navigation of this problematic of violence and class war is central to the novel’s success, and it achieves this partly by structuring many fantastic incidents and events around well-rounded and admirable magical realist characters such as Rosa, Clara, and Alba, as well as the furry Barrabás, a cross between a sheep, a dog, and a mythical being.Suggested ReadingJohn Rodden, ed., Critical Insights: Isabel Allende, Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2011. Karen Wooley Martin, Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits Trilogy: Narrative Geographies, Rochester, NY: Tamesis Press, 2010.Karen Castelucci Cox, Isabel Allende: A Critical Companion, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003.
GABRÍEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ’S One Hundred Years of Solitude: Devices and Themes Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2024-11-03 | In this episode we will be looking at some devices and themes in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. We will see that his brand of magical realism is an amalgam of different narrative techniques and that he combines them in such a way as to create a partly humorous and partly tragic reflection on Latin American history.Suggested ReadingGerald Martin, Gabríel García Márquez: A Life, London: Bloomsbury, 2008.Christopher Warnes and Kim Anderson Sasser, Magical Realism and Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.Christopher Warnes, "Magical Realism and Defamiliarization in Gabríel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude," in Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Magical Realism and History in GABRÍEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ’S One Hundred Years of Solitude Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2024-10-28 | In this episode we will be looking at Gabríel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, considered one of the best examples of magical realism in world literature. We shall see in the novel how Marquez mixes various fantastic motifs from biblical and Greek mythology and The Thousand and One Nights to provide a lively resource base for his brand of magical realism and also how he interweaves magical realism with events from Columbian and Latin American history. As we saw from our episode last week, magical realism is a mode of writing that sets up a scrupulous equivalence between the fantastic and the real. The ways in which this equivalence is established varies from text to text, but generally aims at eliminating any surprise or alarm by the appearance of fantastic alongside realistic details. Furthermore, the fantastic is not the source of either relief, or terror, or the resolution of a narrative or ethical impasse within the narrative. The fantastic is also not the sign of a systemic disorder of which it might be taken to be a symptom. We will see all these features amply illustrated in One Hundred Years of Solitude.Suggested ReadingGerald Martin, Gabríel García Márquez: A Life, London: Bloomsbury, 2008.Christopher Warnes and Kim Anderson Sasser, Magical Realism and Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.Christopher Warnes, "Magical Realism and Defamiliarization in Gabríel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude," in Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
AMOS TUTUOLAs My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and Inter-Species Ontologies Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2024-10-20 | In this episode we will be focusing on Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Tutuola draws upon Yoruba traditions for his novella. In the Yoruba tradition, the bush or forest is taken to be the domain of extreme uncertainty and trials that form a contrast to the settled communities of villages and towns. The bush was traditionally the place that established thecredentials of the hunter, a very important hero figure in Yoruba folklore. Unlike the Yoruba hunter, however, in Tutuola’s novel the 7-year-old-boy who gets lost in the bush has no powers to start with and is regularly at the mercy of grisly and grotesque spirits. He is constantly being chased and detained, is changed into various animals, and is even beheaded during his traversalthrough the bush of ghosts. But he also gets married and enters a contest of fluid metamorphoses with a powerful ghost. Unlike in Tutuola’s earlier The Palm-Wine Drinkard, the young boy in Bush of Ghosts acquires spiritual power in the spirit world only piecemeal and by virtue of a series of accidents and coincidences. His is not the quest for a specific boon but rather adesperate search for a way back home to his family. As we shall see, more important than the quest motif is the way in which the various metamorphoses he undergoes come to define a mode of inter-species ontology in the novel that later offers an important inspiration for the magicalrealism we find some forty years later in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road.
What is MAGICAL REALISM? Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2024-10-13 | This episode will be focused on providing a definition of magicalrealism. Magical realism is a mode of writing that sets up a scrupulousequivalence between the fantastical and the real. The ways in which thisequivalence is established varies from text to text, but generally aims at eliminating any surprise or alarm by the appearance of fantastic alongside realistic details.Furthermore, the fantastic is not the source of either relief, or terror, or theresolution of a narrative or ethical impasse within the narrative. The fantastic is also not the sign of a systemic disorder of which it might be taken to be asymptom. The sources of the fantastical in magical realism vary widely, and can include folktale motifs, fragments from Greek myths, African and indigenous mythologies from different parts of the world, characters and elements from sacred texts such as the Bible, the Qu’ran, the Mahabharata, the Mayan Popul Vuh, and many others. We will see that magical realism has been manifested in writings from many cultures, and that it is not limited only the magical realist literature that marked the Boom period of Latin American writing from the 1960s.Keywords: magical realism, fantastic literature, Amos Tutuola, Gabriel GarciaMarquez, Ben Okri, Mikhail Bulgakov, Toni Morrison, Angela Carter, LaurenBeukes, Gloria Esquivel, Junot Diaz.#magicalrealism, #fantasticliterature, #AmosTutuola, #GabrielGarciaMarquez, #BenOkri, #MikhailBulgakov, #ToniMorrison, #AngelaCarter; #LaurenBeukes, #GloriaEsquivel, #JunotDiaz.+++Suggested ReadingsAto Quayson, “Fecundities of the Unexpected: Magical Realism, Narrative, and History,” in The Novel vol 1: History, Geography, and Culture, Franco Moretti, ed., (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).Ato Quayson, “Magical Realism and African Literature,” in The CambridgeCompanion to the African Novel, Abiola Irele, ed., (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2009).Christopher Warnes and Kim Anderson Sasser, eds., Magical Realism andLiterature, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).Christopher Warnes, “Magic and Otherness,” in The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel, pp. 13-29.Theo D’haen, “Magical Realism: The European Trajectory,” The CambridgeCompanion to the African Novel, pp. 117-130.Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds., Magical Realism: Theory,History, Community, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).Stephen Slemon, “Magic as Postcolonial Discourse,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, pp. 407-426.Theo D’haen, “Magic Realism and Postmodernism: Decentering PrivilegedCenters,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, pp. 191-208.
Announcing Magical Realism Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2021-05-08 | Critic.Reading.Writing is taking a break for the month of May but we will return in June with a series of episodes on Magical Realism. Apart from defining what we mean by the term magical realism, the series will include the works of Amos Tutuola, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri, Lauren Beuke, Toni Morrison and Laura Esquivel. Thank you for your support of our channel and see you in June!
REVIEW of URBAN STUDIES and SPATIAL THEORY Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2021-05-02 | This week’s episode will be a review of previous episodes we have shared on concepts in urban studies and spatial theories. The principle that space is not a container but a symptom and producer of social relations is central to urban studies. Concepts such as chronotopes, spatial traversal, and means of locomotion will be explored as vantage points from which to interpret urban space and the idea of spatiality in general. Also important as an analytical focus is that urban studies is fundamentally interdisciplinary, thus also raising questions about how we define the term and the methods by which we undertake spatial analysis.+++++++++Suggested ReadingsThomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 50th Anniversary Edition, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012).Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007)Christopher Norris, Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism: Philosophical Responses to Quantum Mechanics (2000)Gillian Beer’s Darwin, Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (2009)Julie Thompson Klein, Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice (1990),Ato Quayson, Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).Lindesy Green-Simms, Postcolonial Automobility: Car Culture in West Africa, (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2017).Jesse Weaver Shipley, Living the Hiplife: Celebrity and Entrepreneurship in Ghanaian Popular Music, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013)John Parker, Making the Town: Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra, (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000).Nat Nuno Amarteifio, Visions of the City: Accra in the 21st Century, (Accra: Woeli Publishers, 2002).Jenna Burrell, Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).Christopher Grau, ed., Philosophers Explore The Matrix, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).Farah Mendleshon, Rhetorics of Fantasy, (Wesleyan University Press, 2014).Edward James and Farah Mendleshon, The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).Edward James and Farah Mendleshon, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).Robin Winks and Gail McGrew “Eifrig, Spy Fiction – Spy Reality: From Conrad to le Carré,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Genre 76: 2/3 (1993): 221-224.David Seed, “Spy Fiction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Martin Priestman, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 115-134.Allan Hepburn, “Detectives and Spies,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century Novel, edited by Robert L. Caserio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 210-222.Clive Bloom, Spy Thrillers: From Buchan to le Carré, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990).David Trotter, “Women Spies,” in The Literature of Connection: Signal, Medium, Interface, 185-1950, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
TONI MORRISON, Jazz: Harlem, Jazz, and Narrative Counterpoints Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2021-04-25 | Like James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” that we discussed last week, Toni Morrison’s Jazz is set in Harlem but in the 1920s. The novel is set after World War 1 thus also during the Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance, where a new cultural flowering of both music and literature took place that came to have resonance all over America and indeed in the rest of the world. Morrison’s novel uses jazz as a template for establishing a rhythm for her narrative and also for introducing contrapuntal notes between different events, characters, and between the past and the present. While the just-ended First World War provides a certain sense of worldly weariness for the characters in the novel, the real backdrop to their attempts at self-fashioning is provided by the history of the American Great Migration, of which the 1920s furnished the tail end of the first big wave. The central characters Joe Trace and Violet had themselves migrated from the South to escape its anti-Black violence, but we later find that they are not entirely free of the memories and impulses that the South had inculcated in them. The overlaying of structures of feeling between the South and Harlem then provides a number of contrasting notes to their lives, manifest most clearly in the crisis with which the novel opens. Joe has killed his lover the 18-year-old Dorcas and Violet goes to the funeral parlor where she is lying for the funeral to slash her face with a knife. Violet finds a picture of Dorcas among her husband’s things and places it on their mantlepiece at home, and both Joe and Violet sneak up in turns at night to take long glances at the picture for different reasons. This peculiar routine leads husband and wife gradually to mourn for their individual and mutual losses. From this strange set of events the story unfolds, not as a straightforward narration, but as a series of sometimes jerky and sometimes smooth narrative movements, all amply modulated with references to the cityscape, its architecture, the people that populate it, and the various kinds of music that provide it with its soundtrack. We will see how Morrison weaves all these together into a story that echoes some of the themes in her previous novels, but also breaks new ground in representing the city as itself a character in Jazz.+++Suggested ReadingToni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, (London: Vintage, 1992).Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, (New York: One World, 2015).Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris, “Toni Morrison’s Jazz and the City,” African American Review 35.2 (2001): 219-231.Dale Patterson, “Building Intimacy: The Erotic Architectures of Toni Morrison’s Jazz,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 58:2 (2017): 129-145.Justine Tally, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).Ato Quayson, Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).+++Suggested videosTayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North Orientalist Archetypes as Colonial Desire: youtu.be/xSLg8ZMEtDs The Railway Station Chronotope in Bourne Ultimatum: youtu.be/JMMSyXzv1CYBlack Panther and the Question of Black Atlantic Melancholy: youtu.be/Yij10ZJxQhAToni Morrison, Beloved (2): youtu.be/gu_vf-q10XMJean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea: youtu.be/h1LJRCz5I50
JAMES BALDWIN, “Sonny’s Blues”: Rapture and the Ambient Menace Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2021-04-18 | This week’s episode will be focusing on “Sonny’s Blues”, one of my favorite short stories of all time, by James Baldwin. The story is set in 1950s New York between Harlem and Greenwich Village and turns on the relationship between two brothers seven years apart. It is told from the older brother’s first-person perspective and is a series of memories couched as the difficult relationship between the two brothers. The older brother and narrator remains unnamed throughout. He is an algebra teacher at a school in Harlem, and we see that he has shaped his life around certain life choices that give him respectability as a Black man and thus some measure of protection from the ambient menace that surrounds the lives of all Black folk in the period. This is in contrast to his brother, who simply wants to be a jazz pianist and also has a heroin problem. But the contrast between the two brothers is not that straightforward, as we quickly find out. The story puts in circulation subtle ideas about the relationship between darkness and light, hearing and listening, and Black creativity and history that all come together in an exquisite scene at a night club where the older brother goes to see Sonny play with a blues band in a club in Greenwich Village at the end of the story. We will see how Baldwin builds up a structure of subtle incremental repetitions of various images and echoes into a mighty crescendo of insight, humanism, and the affirmations of jazz’s transcendent value as a bearer and witness of matters pertaining to Black life.+++Suggested ReadingMichele Elam, The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).Eddie S. Glaude, Jnr., Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, (New York: Crown, 2020).James Baldwin and Raoul Peck, I am Not Your Negro, (New York: Vintage International, 2017). Based on the film I am Not Your Negro, directed by Raoul Peck, 2016.Alice Mikal Craven and William E. Dow, Of Latitudes Unknown: James Baldwin’s Radical Imagination, (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).+++Suggested videosSophocles, Oedipus RexChinua Achebe, Things Fall ApartWhat is Urban Studies?What is Postcolonialism?
NAGUIB MAHFOUZ, Midaq Alley: Space and Historical Constriction Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2021-04-11 | This week’s episode will be focusing on Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley and how it gives us an example of historical constriction in African literature. The novel is set predominantly in the Midaq Alley of the title, but we find that the setting is used to introduce us to a range of diverse characters from different social classes and backgrounds. More importantly, the novel establishes a link between the sleepy alley that represents a form of traditional way of life and the outside world of Cairo that encapsulates rapid historical transition. The historical period that the life in the Alley is set against is the Second World War, and it will be shown how the presence of the British Army in Cairo during the War produces an overarching if invisible matrix of aspirations and social mobility for characters in the novel. This matrix of aspirations however also conceals a form of colonial ideology that ultimately situates Egypt as an appendix to world history. As we shall see, within the novel this secondary status is translated into forms of impatience and anger expressed in interpersonal relations between characters. I will be arguing that these are really inchoate responses to a liminal sense of historical constriction generated by the historical conditions within which they live. A comparison between Midaq Alley and Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God and other novels will be made with respect to the representation of anger as an unconscious response to historical constriction in African literature.+++++++++++++Follow on:Twitter: twitter.com/CriticReadingFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/CriticReadin...Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/critic.read...+++++++++++++Suggested ReadingsMuhammad Siddiq, Arab Culture and the Novel: Genre, Identity, and Agency in Egyptian Fiction, (London: Routledge, 2007).Marius Deeb “Najib Mahfuz’s Midaq Alley: A Socio-Cultural Analysis,” British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, 10.2 (1983): 121-130.Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, (London: Penguin Classics, 2008). First published in 1935.Waïl S. Hassan and Susan Muaddi Darraj, eds. Approaches to Teaching the Works of Naguib Mahfouz, (New York: Modern Languages Association, 2012).Matti, Moosa, The Early Novels of Naguib Mahfouz: Images of Modern Egypt, (Miami: University of Florida Press,1994).Raymond Stock, “Naguib Mahfouz: A Translator’s View,” The Kenyon Review 23.2 (2001): 136-142.Naguib Mahfouz and Alan Byrne, ed. and trans., On Literature and Philosophy: The Non-Fiction Writing of Naguib Mahfouz, Volume I, (London: Ginko Library, 2015).Naguib Mahfouz and Rashid El-Enany, ed. After the Nobel Prize 1989-1994: The Non-Fiction Writing of Naguib Mahfouz, Volume IV, (London: Ginko Library, 2020).+++++++++++++Related videosChinua Achebe, Arrow of God : youtu.be/hNv9Y5UvgToSpatial Analysis: The Airport as Chronotope: youtu.be/1_-_KX3xxyoWhat is Urban Studies?: youtu.be/XlJ6rpFgLswThe Railway Station as Chronotope in The Bourne Ultimatum : youtu.be/JMMSyXzv1CYTayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the NorthDoctor Strange and The Matrix: The Geometries of Space and Time: youtu.be/0_tC-kbA-Sc
BLACK PANTHER and the Question of Black Atlantic Melancholy Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2021-04-04 | This week’s episode will focus on the film Black Panther (directed by Ryan Coogler). It will be argued that the film illustrates a form of Black Atlantic melancholy that connects the Black diaspora to the continent of Africa in a particularly complex way. It will also be shown that the theme of nostalgia in the film also allows us to think of the different forms of African dispersal not just to the New World from the 16th to the 19th centuries, but also following decolonization in the middle of the twentieth century. All these waves of the African diaspora establish different relations of nostalgia to the continent so that it becomes productive to compare various depictions of the relationship between the two. Because of its immense success as a Marvel movie, Black Panther allows us to start thinking about these comparisons in a situated and productive way.+++++++++++++Follow on:Twitter: twitter.com/CriticReadingFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/CriticReadin...Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/critic.read...+++++++++++++Suggested ReadingAdélékè Adéeko, “Postcolonial Critique in Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther,” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 7.2, Black Panther Special Issue, (2020): 136-146.Ananya Jahanara Kabir, “Alegropolis: Wakanda and Black Panther’s Hall of Mirrors,” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 7.2, Black Panther Special Issue, (2020): 121-135.Dilip Menon, “Fifty Shades of Blackness: Recovering an Aesthetics of the Afrifuge,” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 7.2, Black Panther Special Issue, (2020): 107-120.Tolulope Akinwole, “Embodied Masculine Sovereignty, Reimagined Femininity: Implications of a Soyankaesque Reading of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther,” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 7.2, Black Panther Special Issue, (2020): 147-157.Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2007).Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud vol. XIV, trans. James Strachey, (London: Hogarth Press, 2014), 243-258.Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction, 2nd edition, (London: Routledge, 2008).Gabriel Sheffer, Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).Stéphane Dufoix, Diasporas, (Berkeley: California University Press, 2008).Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani, eds., Companion to Diaspora and Transnational Studies, (New York: Blackwell, 2013).
A REVIEW of POSTCOLONIALISM Critic.Reading.Writing with ATO QUAYSON 2021-03-28 | This week's episode is a snapshot overview of previous episodes on postcolonialism, Frantz Fanon "The Fact of Blackness", Shakespeare's Othello, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North. Apart from the distinction between the “post-” as a temporal marker and then as the insignia of a particular theoretical orientation, the episode will also lay out the different forms of colonialism and colonial space-making from which postcolonialism derives, as well as the range of literary texts via which we can understand the concept and its various permutations.+++++++++++++Follow on:Twitter: twitter.com/CriticReadingFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/CriticReadin...Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/critic.read...+++++++++++++Suggested Reading:- Orientalism by Edward Said- Location of Culture by Homi Bhabha- Death of a Disciple by Gayatri Spivak- Empire, Colony, Postcolony by Robert J.C. Young- Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? by Ato Quayson- The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, ed. by Ato Quayson- The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel, ed. by Ato Quayson- Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” version revised for the 3rd Norton Critical edition of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, 1988. First published in 1977. - Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 5th Norton Critical Edition, edited by Paul B. Armstrong (2017).- Roger Casement, “The Congo Report,” in Peter Singleton-Gates and Maurice Girodas, The Black Diaries: An Account of Roger Casement’s Life and Times with a Collection of His Diaries and Public Writings (1959)- Adam Hoschsild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998).- Benita Parry, Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers (1983)- David Van Reybrouck, Congo: The Epic History of a People, trans. Sam Garret (2014)- Silverman, Debora L. "Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism, Part I." West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 18, no. 2 (2011): 139-181.- Silverman, Debora L. "Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism, Part II." West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 19, no. 2 (2012): 175-195.+++++++++++++Related Videos:WHAT IS POSTCOLONIALISM?youtu.be/PlKeutz0zxUJOSEPH CONRAD’s Heart of Darkness: Representing Colonial Atrocityyoutu.be/qgYZEZvtQlsFRANTZ FANON, Black Skin, White Masks and the Black Bodily Schema youtu.be/Hqiao-2nTMMTAYEB SALIH, Season of Migration to the North youtu.be/xSLg8ZMEtDsSHAKESPEARE's Othello and the Question of Raceyoutu.be/6VY9Z8AO3Bw
