James Hodapp

About

James Hodapp is an associate professor in residence in the Liberal Arts Program specializing in African, comic, world, and postcolonial literatures. Hodapp received his PhD from the University of Maryland, his MA from the University of Chicago, and his BA from the American University. Before joining NU-Q in Fall 2018, he served as an assistant professor in the department of English at the American University of Beirut. He has also taught at the University of Maryland, Harold Washington College, Wilbur Wright College, and several other universities and colleges.

His scholarship has focused on novels, short stories, films, comics, graphic novels, pedagogy, and television programs of the Global South with particular attention to Africa. His work on Africa considers how specific people and places in Africa are represented on the continent and beyond in a variety of media. These concerns with how the local travels in global circuits have led him to his current book project on “African world literature” and Afropolitanism as well as a secondary book project on Global South coming of age stories in comics and graphic novels.  These topics are also the subjects of his two edited collections:  Afropolitan Literature as World Literature and Graphic Novels and Comics as World Literature. 

He has taught courses on African literature, postcolonial literature, comics, and graphic novels, world literature, transnational literature, the global south, gender studies, writing, literary theory, environmental fiction, and trauma studies.

Books

Graphic Novels and Comics as World Literature.  Editor. New York: Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2022. (ISBN 978-1501373428).

Afropolitan Literature as World Literature. Editor. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020. (ISBN 978-1501342585)

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

“Irreducible Difference: Abdulrazak Gurnah as an Indian Ocean Writer.” Monsoon: Journal of the Indian Ocean Rim.  Vol. 2, No. 1, May 2024, pp. 100-105.

“Fashioning Africanfuturism: Black Comics, Afrofuturism, and Nnedi Okorafor’s Shuri.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. Vol. 13, No. 4, July, 2022, pp. 606-619.

“Talking Books: The Paratextuality of African Literary Podcasts.” English Studies in Africa. Vol. 63, No.2, January 2021, pp. 123-134.  

“’Ndom Heaved’: Imagining Women in the Ugu Unumwanyi (1929 Women’s War) in T. Obinkaram Echewa’s I Saw the Sky Catch Fire.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. 55, No.2, June 2020, pp. 246-258. 

“A Serious Television Trickster: Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Political and Artistic Legacy in Basi and Company.” The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Vol. 54, No.4, December 2018, pp. 504-514. 

“The Postcolonial Ecopolitics of Consumption: Reimagining the Kola Nut in Chris Abani’s GraceLand.” Critical Arts: A Journal of South-North Cultural Studies, Vol. 32, No. 2, May 2018, pp. 1-14. 

“The Complications of Reading Egypt as Africa: Translation and Magdy el-Shafee’s مترو (Metro).” African Literature Today Vol. 35, October 2017, pp. 22-39. (with Deema Nasser, Brown University).  

“The Proto-Afropolitan Bildungsroman: Yoruba Women, Resistance and the Nation in Simi Bedford’s Yoruba Girl Dancing.” The Global South, Vol. 10, No. 1, February 2017, pp. 130-149.

“The Transnational African Short Story: From Resistance Literature to Prize Culture.” Short Fiction in Theory & Practice, Vol. 5, No. 1 & 2, 2016, pp. 81-90. 

“The Postcolonial Joe Sacco.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Vol. 6, No. 4, 2015, pp. 319-330.

“Imagining Unmediated Early Swahili Narratives in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise.” English in Africa, Vol. 42, No. 2, October 2015, pp. 89-108.

“The Problematic and Pragmatic Pedagogy of World Literature.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, Vol. 46, No. 1-2, May 2015, pp. 69-88. 

Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters

“The Crisis in the Humanities: A Perspective from the Middle East.” Asian English: Histories, Texts, Institutions. Eds. Myles Chilton, Steve Clark, and Yukari Yoshihara. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022, pp.165-184. (ISBN 978-981-16-3512-0).

“Departing from Anti-colonialism, Arriving at Afropolitanism: Africa United as an African Road Movie.” The Global Road Movie: Alternative Journeys Around the World. Eds. Timothy Corrigan and José Duarte. London: Intellect Books, pp. 63-81. 2018. (ISBN 978-1-7832-0877-7).

 “The Specter of the Postcolonial Child and the Faux Long Take in Cauron’s Children of Men.” The Child in Post-Apocalyptic Cinema. Ed. Debbie C. Olson. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015, pp. 171-185. (ISBN 978-0-7391-9428-7).

“Refusing to Rent Their Crowds: Early African Novels as Alternative Influences to Cary and Conrad in Things Fall Apart.” Blazing the Path: Fifty Years of Things Fall Apart. Ed. Chima Anyadyke. London: Heinemann, 2013, pp. 117-138. (ISBN 978-978-081-184-6).

Other Academic Writing

“Global South Comics and the Question of Method.” Living Handbook of Temporal Communities https://articulations.temporal-communities.de/contributions/global-south-comics/ , 2024.

“Filmic Discomfort: Adanggaman and the Legacy of Slavery in West Africa.” Cinematic Afterlives: Film and Memory in the Black Atlantic project for Georgetown University Qatar’s Center for International and Regional Studies, 2022. https://cirs.qatar.georgetown.edu/filmic-discomfort-adanggaman-and-the-legacy-of-slavery-in-west-africa/

“Lumpy Sympathies: An Interview in Beirut with Teju Cole.” Research in African Literatures. Vol. 48, No. 4, Winter 2018, pp. 243-249. 

“Why I Started My Faculty Career in the Middle East” (professionalization column). The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2016. http://chronicle.com/article/Why-I-Started-My-Faculty/236724

“The Empire Writes Back” (encyclopedia entry). Blackwell Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies.  Eds. Sangeeta Ray and Henry Schwartz. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016, pp. 1570-72.  (ISBN 978-1-4443-3498-2).

“Thomas Mofolo” (encyclopedia entry). Blackwell Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies.  Eds. Sangeeta Ray and Henry Schwartz. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016, pp. 1095-1097. (ISBN 978-1-4443-3498-2).

“Nairobi Half-Life” (film review). African Studies Review, Vol. 57, No. 1 April 2014, pp. 231-233.

“Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History and Heart of Darkness: A Graphic Novel” (book review). Wasafiri, Vol. 27, No. 2, 2012, pp. 105-106.