The lecture considers ways in which children and the idea of childhood are depicted in postcolonial African literature written in English. This consideration will allow us to explore the connections between literature, individuality, and collective social experience in African countries since the 1960s era of decolonization. The writers to be discussed are Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Adichie, NoViolet Bulawayo, Wole Soyinka, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o.

Olakunle George is Professor of English and Africana Studies at Brown University. George did his undergraduate studies at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria and doctoral work at Cornell University. He has taught at Northwestern University in Evanston and the University of Oregon, Eugene. He has held fellowship awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. George teaches courses on African literature, Black diasporic internationalism during the decolonization era, postcolonial studies, and literary and cultural theory. From 2011-16 he served on the Executive Committee of the Modern Language Association’s Forum on 20th- and 21st- Century Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, serving as chair in 2014-15. And from 1999-2004 he was on the Executive Committee of the Division on African Literatures, serving as chair in 2003-04. He is author of Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters –selected as a “CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title”; and African Literature and Social Change: Tribe, Nation, Race. He was co-editor (with Peter M. Logan, Susan Hegeman, and Efraín Kristal) of Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel. His articles have appeared in Comparative Literature; Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East; Diacritics; Novel; Representations; and Research in African Literatures.