Moving the Center: Language, Culture and Globalization
Ngugi wa Thiong'o (UCI)
Thursday, January 22 / 4 PM / FREE
Girvetz 1004, UCSB

World-renowned as a novelist, essayist, playwright, and critic whose oeuvre forms a bridge between earlier African writing and a younger generation of post-colonial writers, Professor Ngugi wa Thiong’o has authored a number of acclaimed works of fiction including Weep Not, Child (1964), The River Between (1965), A Grain of Wheat (1967), Petals of Blood (1978), as well as critical works like Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986), and, most recently, Pinpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: The Performance on Literature and Power in Post-Colonial Africa (1998). Born in Kenya in 1938, Professor Ngugi began his academic career as an English lecturer at the University of Nairobi where he wrote novels and plays chronicling the development of modern Kenya. In 1977 he was imprisoned without charge for his outspoken views, then released after pressure from Amnesty International. He chose exile in Britain to avoid being re-arrested in 1982, and, in 1989, moved to the U.S.A. Ngugi wa Thiong’o serves as a distinguished professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, as well as director of UCI’s International Center for Writing and Translation.

For more information on the series see: http://acc.english.ucsb.edu/NWO/Index.asp

Top of Page

<<Back