Description:

Please join the Weinberg College Center for International and Area Studies for our Global Lunchbox series, a weekly colloquium designed as an informal conversation.

Evan Maina Mwangi is a professor in the English Department at Northwestern University and teaches 20th Century Anglophone African Literature. He studied at the University of Nairobi, from where he graduated with a First Class Honours degree and a PhD in literature. He researches the intersection of nationalism, gender, and sexuality in canonical and popular artistic expressions, relating local texts to global theories.

Mwangi's most recent monograph, The Postcolonial Animal: African Literature and Posthuman Ethics  (Michigan, 2019), examines the interface of critical animal studies and postcolonial literature to bring to the fore the vegan impulses in African writing. He demonstrates that these vegan motivations and affects that are not a copy of western practices but draw from indigenous sources. His primary texts in this book include African folktales, religious texts, philosophical materials, and work by anti-colonial movements, as well as postcolonial and other literary sources, which the authors have repurposed to call for ethical treatment of non-human others and sexual minorities. By includi ng work by East African writers such as Rebecca Nandwa, Nuruddin Farah, Henry ole Kulet, and Yuda Komora in its study of the figure of the animal in African literature, the book seeks to debunk the implied belief in critical animal studies that only white African writers (exemplified by J.M. Coetzee) have been attentive to the animal question. 

Mwangi is currently at work on two new book projects: one exploring the global re-writings of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the other on Indian Ocean literatures and philosophies.​

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