⭐️ Presented by the African American and African Studies Department
The speaker series features research talks from our own UC Davis AAS faculty and Designated Emphasis Affiliate Faculty across departments including Sociology, Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies, French and Comparative Literature, School of Education, History, and Community and Regional Development. *Lunch is provided.
Our first speaker event for Winter Quarter features Dr. Tobias Warner, Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Director of the Critical Theory Program. Full details below. Please join us for a great presentation, conversation, and food!
Title: The Defiant Girl and the Incomplete Gentleman: The Global Lives of an African Story
Abstract: This talk will explore the circulation of one of the most widespread yet understudied narratives in the world – a tale of desire, deception, and escape told all over the African continent and spread across the globe by slavery and imperialism. The story tells of a defiant young woman who refuses all suitors only to fall in love with a handsome stranger. But when that stranger turns out to be an evil creature in disguise who has assembled a human body for himself out of rented parts, the young woman must find a way to escape. Probably the best-known version of this tale is the story of the ‘complete gentleman’ recounted by Amos Tutuola in The Palm-Wine Drinkard but over the last two centuries hundreds of versions of this narrative have been collected, adapted, and reimagined across the African continent and the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds by creative writers, artists, and thinkers including Ama Ata Aidoo, Lydia Cabrera, Maryse Condé, David Diop, Melville and Frances Herskovits, Langston Hughes, Ahmadou Kourouma, Alan Lomax, Taban Lo Liyong, Achille Mbembe, Ngũgĩ Wa’Thiongo, Okot p’Bitek, and Efua Sutherland. This talk will examine some of the forms of aesthetic and political imagination that have emerged around this story.
Bio: Tobias Warner is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Director of Critical Theory at UC Davis. Warner’s first book explored the language question in literature from Senegal. The Tongue-Tied Imagination: Decolonizing Literary Modernity in Senegal (Fordham) won first book awards from the African Literature Association and the American Comparative Literature Association. Warner is at work on two new projects exploring the global circuits and uneven archives of African literatures. Since 2022, Warner has been working to translate and promote the forgotten early works of the Senegalese novelist Mariama Bâ, author of the foundational feminist novel So Long a Letter. He is also completing a second book on the global circulation of Amos Tutuola’s “complete gentleman” story.
