Although Francis Ngaboh-Smart’s IU fellowship appointment, like his current assistant professorship at the University of Wisconsin, was offered by the Department of English, he received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Georgia.  Three of his area specializations–African Literature, Postcolonial Studies, and Theory–overlap with important English studies research, and figure strongly in his dissertation, “Self, Identity, and Narrative in African Fiction.” 

 “I looked at nationalist constructions of identity in African literature.  Issues of nationalism seem to have influenced the ways Africans talk about identity; I examined this phenomenon from a literary perspective,” he said, adding that this project concentrated on such foundational novelists writing during the late 1950s as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Ngugi Wa Thiongo; but this subject material has prompted a new vision, one he is exploring in a different writing project altogether.

 Ngaboh-Smart said that Heinemann, a New Hampshire publishing company, has accepted his book proposal, and offered him a contract: “Its title is Beyond Empire and Nation: Transnational Arguments in Recent African Fiction.”  The text is in the editing phase and should be off to the publishers by the year’s end;  his dissertation topic, however, figures “purely as an introduction to the book.  Because this work really focuses on post-national issues.  My argument here is that we use literature, not just as a way of rebelling against colonial rule, but as a way of thinking about a new identity, an African identity reclaimable from colonialism.  By the time I came to Beyond Empire and Nation, I saw that era as over.  In fact, the types of identity that we constructed–to go hand in hand in our creation of new nations–are now being questioned.” Ngnaboh-Smart highlighted that in the new post- or transnational narratives  “we are looking at identity more in terms of fluidity, more in terms of impurity, of hybrids, that kind of thing.”  Many current authors–like Kojo B. Laing and Nuruddin Farah–are “rewriting their literary tradition in ways that reflect our contemporary condition.” He feels confident that production of his book will be handled expertly by Heinemann, particularly because they have a strong African studies division.  

 Bound as they are to questioning current definitions of globalization and technological impacts on economy when applied to Africa, and “this continent’s relationship to the rest of the world, especially in the 21^st century,” the underpinnings of his current research intersect with those that informed his course offered this summer.  Ngaboh-Smart taught L204, Introduction to Fiction, for the Department of English.  He tailored the investigation of narratives to address global perspectives, with books on his list such as Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.