Welcome to our critical casebook on Nnedi Okorafor's novel Who Fears Death.
This casebook was crafted by Millikin University students enrolled in Dr. Tony R. Magagna's English 202: Writing About Literature course during the Fall 2019 semester. Although Who Fears Death has enjoyed incredible critical acclaim since its release in 2010 — and is currently being adapted into an HBO series — there has as yet been relatively little published scholarship dedicated to the book. Thus, the students whose work is collected here have put together this casebook as an effort both to build on the scholarly conversation of the work, and to showcase their own original critical contributions to the field of literary scholarship. By exploring this website, we hope that you will learn more about this incredible novel and the varied perspectives and themes that it confronts.
In addition to the in-depth academic analyses presented here, you will also find contextual information that we feel is useful to understanding and appreciating Who Fears Death. This includes: background information on Nnedi Okorafor, with links to interviews, profiles, and social media; an overview of the characters and cultures that populate the world of the novel; a closer look at the key concepts and terms that appear throughout the book; a reconstructed timeline of events in the novel; and an analysis of the objects, incidents, and beliefs in our own world that may have inspired Okorafor's plot and themes. Throughout, you will also find links to additional useful resources elsewhere online.
All of the information and scholarship presented in this casebook has been selected and generated by the English 202 students themselves. Who Fears Death: A Critical Casebook joins several other casebooks produced by students in Millikin University's English department. In 2017, Dr. Magagna's students explored the interactive text/game 80 Days , while in 2016 they took on Ernest Cline's Ready Player One. Additionally, Dr. Magagna's students have studied Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones (2015), Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs (2014), Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad (2013), Gregory Maguire's Wicked (2011), Marjane Satrapi's graphic memoir Persepolis (2010), and Junot Díaz's novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2009).