Princeton University

Professor Wendy Belcher specializes in medieval, early modern, and modern African literature. Her current research addresses the circulation of African thought in Europe and England before the nineteenth century. She works at the intersection of diaspora, postcolonial, and eighteenth-century studies, theorizing transcultural intertextuality as a form of discursive possession in which African discourse animates representations in the English canon. These scholarly interests emerge from Professor Belcher’s life experiences growing up in East and West Africa, where she became fascinated with the richness of Ghanaian and Ethiopian intellectual traditions. Her other research interests include race and gender in eighteenth-century English literature; rhetorical indirection as a form of resistance in twentieth-century African diasporic novels, and intellectual autobiography. Her teaching focuses on how non-Western literature has participated in a global traffic in invention, pairing texts across national and continental boundaries in order to debunk stereotypes of Africans as peoples without history, texts, or influence until the 1950s. Professor Belcher has published an award-winning memoir about Ghana, is co-editor of volumes on the Chicano personal essay and African politics and development, and has written for such media as the BBC, Salon.com, The Seattle Times, LA Weekly, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Ethiopian Review, Index on Censorship, and others.

Selected Publications:

Honey from the Lion: An African Journey (E. P. Dutton, 1988). Winner of Washington State Governor’s Writers Award; Finalist in the Martha Albrand/PEN Society Award for first book of nonfiction; translated into French by l’Ecole des Loisirs as Le Miel du Lion.

       
“After the Freedom: Post-War Cultural Production and National Identity in Eritrea.” Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture 50 (spring 2000): 87-98.

    
“Indirect Resistance: Rhetorical Strategies for Evading Power in Colonial French West African Novels by Camara Laye, Ferdinand Oyono, and Sembene Ousmane.” LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory 18, no. 1 (spring 2007): 65-87.