A Global Narrative History

My new project explores one of the most widespread yet understudied narratives in the world. This is a tale of desire, deception, and escape that was told all over pre-colonial Africa and spread across the globe by slavery and imperialism. The story tells of a defiant young woman who refuses all suitors only to fall in love with a handsome stranger. But when that stranger turns out to be a malevolent creature in disguise who has assembled a human body for himself out of rented parts, the young woman must find a way to escape.

By exploring the connections between some of the many people who collected, adapted, or responded to this story over the last two centuries – including some of the most influential creative writers, philosophers, editors, and anthropologists of their day – this project aims to rethink the globalization of narrative by bringing into view a constellation of stories stretching across Africa and its diasporas. The project has two outcomes: a book and a companion website.

I am currently completing a book that explores the forms of aesthetic and political imagination that have emerged around the defiant girl story. Archival research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. An excerpt of the project was recently published as “A Curious Creature from the Market’: World Literature and the ‘Complete Gentleman’ Stories” in African Literature in Transition: Print Cultures and African Literature, 1860–1960 (Karin Barber and Stephanie Newell eds.), Cambridge University Press, 2025.

The book will be accompanied by a companion website featuring visualizations of global patterns in the circulation of the defiant girl story. This site is currently in development with research support from the UC Davis DataLab and in collaboration with Agile Humanities Agency.