Ayo A. Coly

|Professor
Academic Appointments
  • Class of 1925 Professorship

  • Professor, Comparative Literature & African and African American Studies

I am an interdisciplinary scholar of discourses about Africa and gender and sexuality in African contexts. My first book, The Pull of Postcolonial Nationhood (2010), uses the works of migrant women writers to interrogate the gender politics of African nations. My second book, Postcolonial Hauntologies (2020), is an interdisciplinary study that analyzes legislative documents, historical archival documents, literature, film, and performance and visual arts to show the politicization of African women's bodies. I am in the finishing stages of a third book on African literatures and the category of world literature. I am currently writing a 4th book entitled The Arts of Gender Parity: Politics, Literature, and the Arts in Senegal, 1975-2023. The book seeks to illuminate Senegalese women's forms of political presence and contest the prevailing underestimation of women as political actors in scholarship on electoral gender parity in Africa.  By entering the conversation on electoral gender parity via literature and the arts, the book also brings the humanities to bear on sociopolitical questions which have been thus far monopolized by social scientific methods.

Contact

XXXX
Choate House, Room 202
HB 6134

Department(s)

African and African American Studies

Education

Ph.D. Pennsylvania State University

Selected Publications

  • Postcolonial Hauntologies: African Women's Discourses of the Female Body. (University of Nebraska Press, 2019.)

  • The Pull of Postcolonial Nationhood: Gender, Migration, and the Claims of Postcolonial Nationhood in Francophone African Literatures. (Lexington Books, 2010)

  • Homophobic Africa?, editor; special issue of African Studies Review, special issue 56.2 (2013)

     

  • "He who Sows Colonization Will Reap Immigration: Some Insights from the New Migritude." The Minnesota Review  94 (Spring 2020)

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Works In Progress

  • African Literature from Above Meets World Literature from Below (book on World Literature and Congolese/French writer Alain Mabanckou)

  • The Arts of Gender Parity: Namibia, Rwanda, Senegal (book)

Postcolonial Hauntologies