Tobias Warner

Tobias Warner’s research explores points of friction in the globalization of literary cultures. Trained as a comparatist, his work is grounded in the study of modern African literatures with a particular focus on Senegal. His research and teaching interests include francophone literatures, postcolonial/decolonial theory, world literature, print cultures, translation, film, and comics.

Warner’s writing and translations have appeared widely in such venues as PMLA, Small Axe, Yale French Studies, Research in African Literatures, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Journal of African Cultural Studies, Two Lines, Etudes Littéraires Africaines, and the Times Literary Supplement. His research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the UC Humanities Research Institute, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Hellman Family Foundation, and the Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago.

Warner’s first book explored the language question in literature from Senegal. The Tongue-Tied Imagination: Decolonizing Literary Modernity in Senegal (Fordham, 2019) won first book awards from the African Literature Association and the American Comparative Literature Association. Drawing on extensive archival research and an under-studied corpus of novels, poetry, and films in both Wolof and French, the book traces the emergence of a politics of language from colonization through independence to the era of neoliberal development.

Warner is at work on two new projects exploring the global circuits and uneven archives of African literature.

For the past several years, Warner has been working to translate and promote the forgotten early works of the Senegalese novelist Mariama Bâ, author of the foundational feminist novel So Long a Letter. In 2023, his translation and introduction of a previously unknown poem of Bâ’s appeared in the “Little-Known Documents” section of PMLA as “FESTAC… Memories of Lagos.” Warner is currently guest editing a "Theories & Methodologies" section of PMLA around the rediscovery of this poem.

Warner’s newest 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. Probably the best-known version of this tale is the story of the ‘complete gentleman’ from Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard, but versions of it have been widely adapted or collected by a staggering array of creative writers and anthropologists. Supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Warner is currently completing a book that explores the forms of aesthetic and political imagination that have emerged around this story. The book will be accompanied by a companion website featuring visualizations of global patterns in the story’s circulation. This site is currently in development with research support from the UC Davis DataLab and in collaboration with Agile Humanities Agency.