Great Books from the World at Large: Latin America and Africa

As David Damrosch reminds us, “Reading a work from a different place and time involves a back-and-forth movement between the familiar and the unfamiliar. A view of the world is always a view from wherever we are, and we inevitably filter what we read through our own experience. But if we don’t impose our expectations onto the new work, its distinctive qualities will enlarge our field of vision.” The Latin American works we read—and write about—include stories by Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina), Carlos Fuentes (Mexico) and Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombia) about the discovery of the New World, European conquest and the efforts to free Latin America from colonial imposition. The African works we read—and write about—include, in addition to stories by Chinua Achebe (Nigeria), Nadine Gordimer (South Africa) and Nugugiwa Thiong’o (Kenya) that protest colonization, call for independence and celebrate African pride, a play about British presence in West Africa (Death and the King’s Horseman) by Nobel Prize-winner Wole Soyinka.