Duncan Brown

This is a collaborative, interdisciplinary project, located in the Faculty of Arts at UWC, which seeks to rethink the ways in which we conceptualise and understand the field of South African literatures, almost three decades after the legislated ending of apartheid, and just over two decades after Michael Chapman’s landmark study, Southern African Literatures (1996), arguably the first (and last) study to engage thoroughly with literatures in all languages in the region.

In this project, I engage with the concept of ‘wildness’, initially in the very problematic ways in which it is often used, but then more substantially in its possibilities for (re)thinking human, plant and animal identities, including in ways which decentre the human.

South African literary studies has, in a sense, lost its intellectual project.

There has been substantial attention paid in literary and postcolonial studies to issues of environment and ecology, and especially the environmental transformations which colonial and imperial histories have wrought upon the (post)colony.