Duncan Yoon on China in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century African Literature

ALA Lecture Series
Speaker: Duncan Yoon
Introduced by: Gabriel Bámgbóṣé
Saturday, October 25, 2025 at 11:00 AM EST/ London, 4:00 PM/ Lagos, 4:00 PM/ Johannesburg, 5:00 PM/ Nairobi, 6:00 PM

China in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century African Literature unpacks the long-standing complexity of exchanges between Africans and Chinese as far back as the Cold War and beyond. This scope encompasses how China, which emerged as a main engine of the world economy by the end of the twentieth century, has transformed patterns of globalization across the continent. In this ground-breaking work on cultural representations, Duncan M. Yoon examines the controversial symbol of China in African literature. He reads acclaimed authors like Kofi Awoonor, Henri Lopes, and Bessie Head, as well as contemporary writers, including Ufrieda Ho, Kwei Quartey, and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. Each chapter focuses on a genre such as poetry, detective fiction, memoir, and the novel, drawing out themes like resource extraction, diaspora, gender, and race. Yoon demonstrates how African creative voices grapple with and make meaning out of the possibilities and limitations of globalization in an increasingly multipolar world.

Duncan M. Yoon is an associate professor at NYU Gallatin. He is the author of China in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century African Literature, which was published in 2023 with Cambridge University Press. The book won the African Literature Association's First Book Award in 2025 and received the American Comparative Literature Association's (ACLA) Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Award in 2020. He has published in journals such as Comparative Literature, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Publications of the Modern Language Association (PMLA), Journal of World Literature, Research in African Literatures, and The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry. He chaired the executive committee for the Modern Language Association's forum "African Literature to 1990" in 2022. He also served as a Fulbright Scholar to South Korea in 2004 and was a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress in 2018.