Emmanuel Yewah,

Howard L. McGregor Endowed Professor of Humanities

Emmanuel Yewah grew up in Cameroon, West Africa. After completing his education at the University of Yaoundé in 1979, he taught for a year in a Government High School. In 1980, he moved to the United States to pursue graduate studies in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He completed his Ph.D. in 1987, a year after he joined the Department of Foreign Languages, Albion College where he has been teaching French, African (Francophone), Caribbean, and interdisciplinary studies. He is the Howard L. McGregor Endowed Professor of Humanities.

Scholarly interests

- (Anti) dictatorial Discourses in African and Caribbean Literatures
-African Detective Fiction
-Colonial/PostcolonialTheories
-African visual cultures with focus on friction between visuality and textuality
-Law in/and African literatures – exploration of the “misunderstood relation” between African literatures and the indigenous and received traditions in the law
-20th Century French Narrative

Work in Progress

-Textuality and Visuality: An Examination of the Works of Photojournalists
-Betrayal/Treason in the African Literary Text
-The Intervention of Supernatural Agencies in Trials in African Works of Fiction
-The (Re) conceptualization of Memory in Literary Works
-Imagined Crime or Crime of the Imagination: the African Writer and the Burden of Literary Creativity
-Traditional African Medical Knowledge: a Literary Perspective

Selected Publications
Edited Book

African Images: Studies in Cinema and Text, co-eds. Maureen Eke, Kenneth Harrow, Emmanuel Yewah, Africa World Press, fall 2000

Articles

-“The Depiction of Law in African Literary Texts” International and Comparative Law Review, fall 2002
-“The Nation as a Contested Construct” Research in African Literatures, fall 2001
-"Congolese Playwrights as Cultural Revisionists" Theatre Research International, Oxford University Press, fall 1996
-"Court Stories in Selected African Short Narratives" Research in African Literatures, fall 1996
-"Multiple Witnesses, Multiple Stories: the Subversion of Storytelling-Interpretation Processes in Le Procès d'un Prix Nobel and Le Procès du muet" African Literature Today, vol. 19,1994
-"Ideology and the De/Naturalization of Meaning in the Cameroonian Novel." Afrika Focus, vol. 9, Nr. 3-4, 1993, Gent, Belgium
-"Sony Labou Tansi and His Unstable Political Figures" The French Review, October 1993
-"Traditions, Politics and the African Detective Fiction" UFAHAMU, UCLA, fall 1991
-"Legal Discourse and African Fiction" Literary Griot Indiana University, fall1991
-"Dictatorship and the Press in Henri Lopes' Le Pleurer-rire” UFAHAMU, UCLA, summer 1990
-"Political Rhetoric in/and the African Text" Research in African Literatures, spring 1990
-"Gender and Power Space in Toiles d'araignées" Literary Griot, fall 1988

Reviews

Veronika Gorög-karady’s L’Univers familial dans les contes africains: liens de sang, liens d’alliance, Research in African Literatures, fall 1998
Clara Tsabedze's African Independence from Francophone and Anglophone Voices, Research in African Literatures, spring 1997
Richard Bjornson's The Quest for Freedom and Identity. Callaloo, summer 1993

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