Wendy Belcher's Research

I specialize in medieval, early modern, and modern African literature. My current research addresses the circulation of African thought in Europe and England before the nineteenth century. I work 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 my life experiences growing up in East and West Africa, where I became fascinated with the richness of Ghanaian and Ethiopian intellectual traditions. My 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. My 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. I published an award-winning memoir about Ghana, was co-editor of volumes on the Chicano personal essay and African politics and development, and have 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.

In Ethiopia I lived near monasteries that contained a thousand years of African literature. In Ghana I knew families whose ancestors had written dissertations in eighteenth-century Germany. In both countries, I was an omnivorous reader of the classics that the British colonialists had left behind (medieval epics, restoration dramas, eighteenth-century novels, and a variety of travel accounts) as well as the novels and poetry being written on the continent (from Ayi Kwei Armah, Ama Atta Aidoo, and Peggy Appiah to Amos Tutuola, Chinua Achebe, and Nadine Gordimer). These interests began to coalesce in graduate school.

One day I was discussing my reading with an older Ethiopian friend and mentioned the eighteenth-century English author Samuel Johnson. My friend lit up and told me that this fellow had written a very good book about Ethiopia, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. When I expressed surprise that he thought highly of a foreign fiction, my friend told me with some satisfaction, “this book, it is very Ethiopian.”

I started to ask how that could be, since Rasselas had been written by an Englishman who had never traveled to Africa. Instead, I suddenly wondered: what if the grammar of my friend’s statement was radical and important? He did not say that Johnson was a great writer who had managed, where other Europeans had failed, to capture parts of Ethiopian thinking. He did not say that Rasselas was a good representation of Ethiopia. He said that Rasselas was Ethiopian. I had a dissertation topic.

My dissertation focuses on how the representations by England's others assisted in producing English literature. I appropriate spiritual possession as a valuable metaphor of manifold agency and mediated discourse to portray how African discourse circulates in English texts and to complicate literary theories of representation that center the European author. Based on extensive historical research and primary sources in several languages, I argue that the self-representations of the Habasha (modern-day highland Ethiopians) shaped a number of European discussions and canonical texts, including the work of that most English of authors, Samuel Johnson. My project challenges the hermeticism of current theorizing about representation and posits a new model for understanding the English canon as globally produced.

In addition to my dissertation, I have done other research on eighteenth-century British literature, including English transculturation in the Pacific; Jeremy Collier and the rhetoric of censorship; and indirection in the work of Samuel Johnson, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen.

In learning more about eighteenth-century English literature, I learned more about eighteenth-century African literature, a body of texts that many do not imagine exists. I have done research on such texts' representations of slavery, women, and Europeans. My focus has been West African and East African texts, including letters, diaries, theses, chronicles, and hagiographies. For more information on these texts themselves, please see my web page on Medieval and Early Modern African Literature.

Along with my cotranslator Kesis Melaku, I recently received a grant from Ngugi wa Thiongo's translation institute at the University of California at Irvine to translate two African hagiographies written in the liturgical and scholarly African language Ge'ez about Habasha women who resisted Roman Catholicism and Portuguese para-colonial efforts in Abyssinia in the seventeenth century. The first, about the Habasha saint Walatta Petros, was written down in the 1600s with the help of the women who lived in community with Walatta Petros. It is one of the earliest written African texts documenting African resistance to European colonialism and celebrating women's contribution to history.

I also have an interest in twentieth-century African literature (Anglophone and Francophone novels, autobiography, periodicals, and film), postcolonial literature (including South Asian novels in English), and twentieth-century British literature (including post-war British drama and modern lyric poetry), as well as African American and Latino novels, women’s intellectual autobiography, and travel literature.

My theoretical interests are in representation, transcultural transmission, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, new historicism, race and gender, indirection, and censorship.

To learn more about my research, you can read my articles on Indirect Resistance in Colonial Francophone Novels or Cultural Production and National Identity in Eritrea or Medieval African and European Texts about the Queen of Sheba or First Lines of Travel Books about Africa or Dating the Medieval African Epic Kebra Nagast or Indonesia's Leading Author Pramoedya Ananta Toer. I have been fortunate to know and write about many African novelists, poets, and journalists--for such articles, see my writing page.

Education

University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA.

Ph.D., English Literature, 2001-2008

M.A., Urban Planning, 1992-1993.

M.A., African Area Studies, 1989-1992.

Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA.

B.A. magna cum laude English Literature, 1980-1984.