Charles J. Sugnet
Associate Professor
Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor
Ph.D. English, University of Virginia, 1970
310F Lind Hall
(612) 625-1528
sugnet@umn.edu
Department Affiliations
English
Areas of Expertise
postcolonial literature (especially fiction and film of the African diaspora); creative nonfiction writing; the contemporary novel; multi-cultural instruction in the high schools
Selected Publications
The Imagination on Trial: A Study of the Working Methods of Eleven Contemporary British and American Novelists. London: Allison & Busby, 1981. American distribution by Schocken Books, Inc. Co-authored with Alan Burns.
"African Film." Greenwood Press Encyclopedia of World Popular Culture: Sub-Saharan Africa. Ed Dennis Hickey. Westport & London: Greenwood Press, 2007.
“Real-time Africa: A traveling exhibit gives the lie to ‘primitive’ Africa.” Review of largest ever exhibition of African contemporary art at Hayward in London, Pompidou in France, etc. Utne Reader (March/April 2006).
“Wolof Orality, Senghorian Literacy, and the Status of Cinema in Djibril Diop Mambety’s La Petite Vendeuse de Soleil.” The French Review. 79.6 (May 2006).
"Francois Xavier-Verschave: A French Noam Chomsky?" West Africa Research Association Newsletter (Spring 2003).
Rev. of Against Normalization:Writing Radical Democracy in South Africa by Anthony O'Brien. Africa Today 50.2 (Fall/Winter 2003).
“Nuruddin Farah’s Maps: Deterritorialization and ‘the Postmodern.’” World Literature Today. (Autumn 1998). Reprinted in Emerging Perspectives on Nuruddin Farah. Ed. Derek Wright. Lawrenceville: Africa World Press, 2002.
Rev. of Subject to Colonialism: African Self-Fashioning and the Colonial Library by Gaurav Desai. Africa Today 49.1 (Spring 2002).
“Dakar Noir.” [Translation from Les tambours de la memoire by Senegalese novelist Boubacar Boris Diop] Transition 87 (Spring 2001).
"Things Fall Apart: Problems in Constructing an Alternative Ethnography." Meditations on African Literature. Ed. Dubem Okafor. Westport & London: Greenwood Press, 2000.
Graduate Courses
Workshop on Creative Nonfiction Writing
Teachers Institute Seminar:
International Studies in Literature and Film
Undergraduate Courses
Survey of African Film
Honors Seminar: Twentieth-Century Rewritings of Shakespeare
Introduction to "Third World" Literature in English
Literature of Zimbabwe and South Africa
Saro-Wima
West Africa: Fiction, Film, and Theory
Topics in Advanced Literary Non-Fiction