l'Afrique

États-Unis d'Amérique

Associate Professor

Columbia University

jw2497@columbia.edu

Department of English & Comparative Literature
602 Philosophy Hall
MC 4927
Columbia University
1150 Amsterdam Avenue
New York, NY 10027

Joint Appointment with: Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, & African Studies

(212) 854-8109

South Africa ; India ; Nigeria

1998. University of Texas at Austin, Ph.D., English.
Dissertation thesis: “Promised Lands: J.M. Coetzee, Mahasweta Devi, and the
Contested Geographies of South Africa and India.”

1995. American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS), Summer Hindi Language Program
Mussoorie and Varanasi, India

1992. Indiana University: M.A., English

1990. Austin College: B.A., English and History (with Honors in English)

Postcolonial literature and theory, with particular emphasis on the Anglophone literatures of West and Southern Africa.

See also: http://english.columbia.edu/people/profile/499

Books

2009. Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond. (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press; Durban, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press)

Co-edited book

2017. Co-edited with, Imre Szeman and Patricia Yaeger
Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment. (New York: Fordham University Press)

Selected Peer-Reviewed Articles or Book Chapters

2014. “Petro-Magic-Realism Revisited: Un- imagining and Re- imagining the Niger Delta,” in Oil Culture, edited
by Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) Pp. 221-225.

2011. “Consumption for the Common Good?: Commodity Biography Film in an Era of
Postconsumerism.” Public Culture 23.3 (Fall 2011): 573-602.

2010. “Literacy and Futurity: Millennial Dreaming on the Nineteenth Century Southern African
Frontier.” Utopia/Dystopia: Historical Conditions of Possibility, edited by Michael Gordin,
Gyan Prakash, and Helen Tilley. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Pp. 45-72.

2006. “Petro-Magic-Realism: Toward a Political Ecology of Nigerian Literature,” Postcolonial
studies 9.4 (December 2006): 449– 64.

Postcolonial theory ; decolonization ; African & South Asian literatures ; environmental humanities