Sylvanna Baugh

Sylvanna's dissertation looks at experimental African literature from the 1950s to the 1980s, through the lens of global modernism. She is especially interested in the early novels of Wole Soyinka, Driss Chraïbi, Bessie Head, and Dambudzo Marechera. What might modernism as an aesthetic movement mean in postcolonial Africa, and how do the crises of modernity appear differently in Africa? She is looking at the centrality of cultural hybridity to all modernism, as well as the alienation of the modernist protagonist in African fiction.