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LINGUE E LETTERATURE DELL'AFRICA
UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI NAPOLI "L'ORIENTALE"
Dati Generali
Periodo di attività
Syllabus
Obiettivi Formativi
EXPECTED LEARNING OUTCOMES: The course aims to train students in the methodologies of historical-literary research within the context of Muslim African societies.
ABILITY TO APPLY KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING: Students must demonstrate the ability to identify key debates regarding the study of the literary history of Islam in Africa.
ADDITIONAL EXPECTED LEARNING OUTCOMES:
Critical thinking: Students must demonstrate the ability to take a critical stance regarding the various methodological approaches and theoretical debates examined during the course.
Communication skills: Students must demonstrate the ability to effectively summarize the information acquired during the course and to establish logical connections between the ideas presented and the data cited in their support.
Learning skills: Students must demonstrate the ability to contextualize debates, identify problems, and establish connections between these problems and the methodologies suitable for addressing them.
Prerequisiti
None
Metodi didattici
The teaching method will alternate frontal lectures and seminar sessions. For each of the 13 topics covered, one or two compulsory readings will be summarized and discussed by the lecturer in a frontal lecture. In the seminar sessions, students will take turns in summarizing one of a list of recommended readings that will be provided by the lecturer. During the seminar, the discussion will be focused on identifying links (of convergence or of opposition) between the methodological and/or theoretical approach of the compulsory reading that has been summarized by the lecturer, and that of the recommended reading that has been summarized by the student.
Verifica Apprendimento
Students will be assessed based on their grasp of the key approaches to the historical-literary study of Muslim societies in Africa discussed during the course; on their ability to express themselves in a correct terminology; on their capacity to offer critical insights into the debates analyzed; and on their ability to formulate ideas and cite relevant data in their support.
Testi
- Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias (2025), “Epigraphy and the understanding of the African past”. In: General History of Africa, vol. IX, General History of Africa Revisited (Paris/London: UNESCO/James Currey), 267-278.
- Mauro Nobili and Mohamed Shahid Mathee (2015). “Towards a new study of the so-called Tārīkh al-fattāsh”. History in Africa, 42, 37-73.
- Clarissa Vierke (2016). “From across the ocean: considering travelling literary figurations as part of Swahili intellectual history”. Journal of African Cultural Studies, 28, 2, Special issue: African Philosophy (June 2016), 225-240.
- Anne K. Bang (2011). “Authority and piety, writing and print: A preliminary study of the circulation of Islamic texts in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Zanzibar”. Africa, 81, 1, 89-107.
- Rüdiger Seesemann (2009). “Three Ibrāhīms: Literary production and the remaking of the Tijāniyya Sufi Order in twentieth-century Sudanic Africa”. Die Welt des Islams, 49, 3-4, 299-333.
- Salma Khadra Jayyusi (1996). “The Persistence of the Qasida Form”. In: Stefan Sperl e Christopher Shackl (edited by), Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill), 63-86.
- Jean Boyd and Graham Furniss (1996). “Mobilize the people: The Qasida in Fulfulde and Hausa as purposive literature”. In: Stefan Sperl and Christopher Shackle (edited by), Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill), 429-449.
- Britta Frede (2025). “Historical amnesia at work: Reflecting about the ‘absence in the presence’ of female authors in Saharan Arabic manuscript collections”. In: Hawwa, 23, 3-4, 433-469.
- Oludamini Ogunnaike (2020). Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection: West African Madīh Poetry and its Precedents (Islamic Texts Society, 2020), Part 1: “The Form and Function of West African Sufi Madīh”, 7-72.
- Graham Furniss (1988). “The language of praise and vilification in two poems by Muhammadu Audi of Gwandu about Abubakar, emir of Nupe”. In: Graham Furniss and Philip J. Jaggar (edited by), Studies in Hausa: Language and Linguistics (London: Kegan Paul), 181-201.
- Andrea Brigaglia (2017). “Sufi poetry in twentieth-century Nigeria: A khamriyya and a ghazal by Shaykh Abū Bakr al-‘Atīq (1909–1974)”. Journal of Sufi Studies, 6, 2, 190-232.
- Mbye B. Cham (1991). “Islam in Senegalese literature and film”. In: Kenneth W. Harrow (edited by), Faces of Islam in Africa literature (London: James Currey), 163-186.
Contenuti
Section (a): Historical approaches.
2. Epigraphies and inscriptions.
3. Arab chronicles by North African travelers.
4. Arab chronicle by local historians.
5. Religious literature as historical source.
6. Circulation and authorship: The nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Section (b): Literary approaches.
7. The Qasida in Africa (1): reflections on a literary genre.
8. The Qasida in Africa (2): social, cultural and linguistic studies.
9. Women authors - presence and absence.
10. The Qasida in Africa (3): Poetics of praise.
11. The Qasida in Africa (4): Poetics of vilification.
12. The Qasida in Africa (5): Poetics of allusion and dissimulation.
13. Islam and the postcolonial African novel.