The African Fantastic: the Invention of an African Aesthetic

The last century has seen African artists and writers articulate surreal worlds of excess, myth, nonlinearity, and otherworldly beings. What is the place of the fantastic in African thought? What kind of politics does this aesthetic generate that realism does not? What sort of archive can we assemble around the question of the fantastic in relation to African modernity? And how has the idea of Africa and the fantastic shaped diasporic aesthetics? For this symposium, the influential early Nigerian novelist Amos Tutuola will serve as our point of entry into the question of fantasy as it takes form in modern African artistic expressions. What we are calling the ¿Tutuolaesque¿ will guide us as we assemble a set of questions around the idea of fantasy, extract transferable stylistic and formal elements from various non-realistic archives, and trace iterations of the fantastic across geographies, artistic disciplines, and historical moments.