Professor of English Vincent Odamtten and students Sean O'Connell '05 and Janine Knight '05 each presented a paper at the 30th anniversary conference of the African Literature Association held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from April 14-18. Odamtten chaired a panel titled "Broadening the Horizon: Amma Darko and other Africana Women Writers," at which O'Connell and Knight presented their work.
Knight's paper examined similarities and departures between Amma Darko's Beyond the Horizon and Assia Djebar's A Sister to Scheherazade. In addition, it offered a poignant examination of the experiences shared by African women in their quest to deconstruct the burdens of patriarchy in the post-colonial setting.
O'Connell's paper, titled "Why Haven't I Seen You People Before?: Beyond the Horizon and Dirty Pretty Things," examined the ways in which the illegal immigrants portrayed in both of these narratives embody a racialized underclass of invisibles. Moreover, it addressed the problematic ways in which race and citizenship intersect to form a virtually insurmountable barrier for the modern immigrant to overcome in assimilating into Western nations as a visible member of civil society.
Odamtten's paper, titled "Tales of Obedient Daughters and Other Secrets: Darko and Frear," also examined similarities between Darko's novel Beyond the Horizon and Stephen Frears' film Dirty Pretty Things with emphasis on understanding these narratives as cautionary tales which expose the dangerous secrets of neocolonial ideology.
Janine Knight is a junior concentrating in Africana Studies. Sean O'Connell is also a junior, pursuing a double-concentration in government and Africana Studies. Both were students in Odamtten's fall 2004 course in Africana Literature.
