Spring 2021
Don t be scared away by this book s academic title: Yes, Johns Hopkins Assistant Professor of English Jeanne-Marie Jackson knows her contemporary literary criticism, and you will run into allusions to and discussions of Dostoevsky, René Girard, Fredric Jameson, Immanuel Kant, Paul Virilio, and terms such as decolonizing, modernity, and subjectivity. In
The African Novel of Ideas (Princeton University Press), however, African literature and intellectual history specialist Jackson isn t applying these thinkers and terms in the service of understanding or interpreting the 20th-century African novels she explores. Instead, she s reading through these books and authors to consider, what if we looked at these texts as sources of