PhD Candidate
Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Fields of Study
- African Literature in English
- Critical Race Studies
- Diasporic, Postcolonial, and Transnational Literature
- Literary and Critical Theory
Areas of Interest
- Global Modernism
Biography
Sylvanna is interested in postcolonial and critical race theory. Her dissertation looks at experimental African literature from the 1950s to the 1980s, through the lens of global modernism. She is especially interested in the early novels of Wole Soyinka, Driss Chraïbi, Bessie Head, and Dambudzo Marechera. What might modernism as an aesthetic movement mean in postcolonial Africa, and how do the crises of modernity appear differently in Africa? She is looking at the centrality of cultural hybridity to all modernism, and the particular role of the grotesque in African modernism.
Cohort
- 2020-2021