Project
Discipline of the Screen: Cinema and public order in South Africa
This project departs from the emergence of cinema in early 20th century South Africa, and its role in constituting a new public sphere around this form of leisure.
Project
The Truth About Crime
Many African postcolonies are haunted by the spectre of: the waning efficacy of law enforcement, the ambiguity of authority, and the apparent abandonment of subjects by the state.
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J.M. Coetzee: A Critical Biography
The Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee is currently South Africa’s most resourceful and influential writer.
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J.M. Coetzee, Connection, Cognition: Perspectives from the South
The project is a comparative study of the South African-born, now Australian writer J.
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Remembering anti-colonial struggles: The politics of memory, culture and national identity in postcolonial Namibia
Against the background of memory activism and decolonial movements in Southern Africa, much discussed since the South African #RhodesMustFall movement in 2015, this project traces the complex transfigurations of anti-colonial struggle memory, culture, and citizenship in postcolonial Namibia from the late 1990s through to the early 2020s.
Project
Storying the blue Anthropocene from the oceanic South: oscillating and turbulent perspectives on the planetary crisis
This project seeks new critical and creative perspectives on the planetary crisis in forms of storytelling from the global South and the southern hemisphere that address the oceanic and hydrological effects of the Anthropocene.
Project
Christianity and Social Thought in Contemporary African Literature
Against the background of ongoing debates about decolonisation and religion in Africa, this project examines the representation of, and engagement with Christianity in contemporary African literature.
Publication
Reframing the Black Atlantic
Phiri, Aretha. 2023. Reframing the Black Atlantic. Cultural Studies, 37(2), 191–203. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2022.2104898
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Assembling the Postcolony: Cultural Cold War and Filipino Area Studies
How did a film, a workshop, an anthology, and a department promote decolonization and steal its potential at the same time?
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The Amateur
Is a humanist intellectual with a popular audience more likely to be a credentialed expert or an autodidact?
Project
The Geopolitics of Language and Literature Migration
The Anglophone diaspora arose during the period we identify as the Anthropocene.
Publication
Pandemic Literatures and Being Human in Times of Mass Infection and Catastrophe: Some African Perspectives
Manase, Irikidzayi and Thabisani Ndlovu. 2022. Pandemic Literatures and Being Human in Times of Mass Infection and Catastrophe: Some African...
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Speaking Animals in African Literature
This project deals with the representation of the narrating animal in present-day African texts written in English, French and Portuguese.
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Methodological Work Towards a Contemporary African Ephemeral Literature Archive
The published novel is on the decline across the African continent.
Publication
Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora (Keguro Macharia)
Ncube, Gibson. 2021. Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora (Keguro Macharia). Tydskrif Vir Letterkunde, 58(1), 172–174. ...
Publication
Amílcar Cabral. The Life of a Reluctant Nationalist
Tomás, António. 2021. Amílcar Cabral. The Life of a Reluctant Nationalist. https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/amilcar-cabral-2/
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Response
Phiri, Aretha. 2021. Response. Interventions, 23(1), 170–175. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2020.1843518
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African Philosophical and Literary Possibilities: Re-reading the Canon
Phiri, Aretha. (Ed.). 2020. African Philosophical and Literary Possibilities: Re-reading the Canon. Lexington Books. https://rowman.com/ISBN...
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Transgressing Borders: (Re)imagining Africa(ns) in the World
Phiri, Aretha. (Ed.). 2020. Transgressing Borders: (Re)imagining Africa(ns) in the World. In African Philosophical and Literary Possibilitie...
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Introduction: Re-reading the Canon, Re-reading Africa
Phiri, Aretha. (Ed.). 2020. Introduction: Re-reading the Canon, Re-reading Africa. In African Philosophical and Literary Possibilities: Re-r...
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Skin and Silence in Selected Maghrebian Queer Films
Ncube, Gibson. 2021. Skin and Silence in Selected Maghrebian Queer Films. Journal of African Cultural Studies, 33(1), 51–66. https://doi.org...
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Queues of Limitless Hope: The Novel and Social Crisis in the African Republic of Letters
Queues of Limitless Hope asks: what happens to the novel form under the conditions of protracted socio-political crisis?
Publication
Unsettled Subjects: Sex Work in Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street
Okolo, Ifeyinwa G. 2019. Unsettled Subjects: Sex Work in Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street. English Studies in Africa, 62(2), 112–123....
Publication
Doing being middle-class in the global South: comparative perspectives and conceptual challenges
Lentz, Carola. 2020. Doing being middle-class in the global South: comparative perspectives and conceptual challenges. Africa, 90(3), 439–46...
Publication
Fingering the Jagged Grain: Rereading Afropolitanism (and Africa) in Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go
Phiri, Aretha. 2020. Fingering the Jagged Grain: Rereading Afropolitanism (and Africa) in Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go. In James Hodapp (Ed....
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Urban Connections in African Popular Imaginaries
The study of popular culture in Africa illustrates that ordinary African residents in urban settings use their local specificities to create popular forms of African cultural production that respond in innovative ways to global cultural imports.
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Black Archives and Intellectual Histories
Black Archives and Intellectual Histories brings together a range of scholars from South Africa, the continent at large and the black diaspora whose work has transformed our thinking about black intellectual histories and archives.
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The politics and poetics of old age: Drawing on Law and Literature to assess the (cultural) legitimacy of African Union norms on the rights of older persons
The African Union in January 2016 adopted a treaty – the Protocol to the African Charter on the Rights of Older Persons – dealing with the rights of older persons in Africa.
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The Disorder Project
The Disorder is a body of work developed under the rubric of an ongoing project namely, To Be King.
Publication
Postcolonial Studies: A Spiritual Turn
Michael Chapman. 2008. Postcolonial Studies: A Spiritual Turn. Current Writing 20, pp. 67-76
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Coetzee, Gordimer and the Nobel Prize
Michael Chapman. 2009. Coetzee, Gordimer and the Nobel Prize. British and American Studies 15
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Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading
Isabel Hofmeyr. 2013. Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading. Harvard University Press, 218 pp. ISBN 978-0-674-07279-4.
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“Conoces tu historia?”
Saurabh Dube. 2014. “Conoces tu historia?” Estudios de Asia y África, 49 (1), 193-217
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J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing
Attwell, David. 2015. J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing. Johannesburg: Jacana. http://jacana.co.za/book-categories/fiction-poetry-a-writi...
Publication
Native, Natural, Indigenous, Indigenised? Trout in the Postcolony
Brown, Duncan. 2016. Native, Natural, Indigenous, Indigenised? Trout in the Postcolony. Critical African Studies 8(2):179–95. http://dx.doi....
Publication
Ethics and Human Rights in Anglophone African Women’s Literature: Feminist Empathy
Eze, Chielozona. 2016. Ethics and Human Rights in Anglophone African Women’s Literature: Feminist Empathy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. http://...
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The moral challenge of expatriate employment in developing countries
Okeja, Uchenna. 2017. The moral challenge of expatriate employment in developing countries. Nord J Appl Ethics, 65–77. https://doi.org/10.53...
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Navigating epistemic disarticulations
Musila, Grace A. 2017. Navigating epistemic disarticulations. African Affairs, 116(465), 692–704. https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adx031
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Drinking from the Cosmic Gourd: How Amos Tutuola Can Change Our Minds
Nyamnjoh, Francis B. 2017. Drinking from the Cosmic Gourd: How Amos Tutuola Can Change Our Minds. Cameroon: Langaa RPCIG. http://langaa-rpci...
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Subjects of Modernity
Dube, Saurabh. 2017. Subjects of Modernity. Time-space, disciplines, margins. (1st ed.). Stellenbosch: African Sun Media. https://doi.org/10...
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The History of Intimacy (1st ed.)
Baderoon, Gabeba. 2018. The History of Intimacy (1st ed.). Cape Town: Kwela Books, NB Publishers
Publication
STIAS Series Volume 10: Subjects of Modernity: Time-space, disciplines, margins
Subjects of Modernity: Time-space, disciplines, margins Saurabh Dube AFRICAN SUN MeDIA (2017, 190 pp) ISBN: 978-1-920689-99-5 https://doi.o...
Project
Southern imaginaries, or, thinking from the South
At a time when the focus of economic development is often the so-called Global South, yet when countries of the north continue to grow in geopolitical dominance, this interdisciplinary project offers a series of cultural, historical, and literary reflections on southness.
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Religious Pluralism, Hybrid Identities, and the Postcolonial Religious Other
The focus of this research is religious pluralism and hybrid identities, particularly the construction of religious identities resulting from the African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Project
The Power of Injury: Memory, Decolonization, and the Challenges of Modernity in Africa
This book examines the political and social effects of Africa’s prioritization of the experience of colonization in its response to the world, and analyzes the role of Nelson Mandela’s notion of forgiveness in Africa’s inevitable path to modernity.
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Interrogating Blackness, Locating ‘Africanness’: Call-and-Response in the (literary) works of Toni Morrison and Zoë Wicomb, NoViolet Bulawayo, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Taiye Selasi
This project offers a fresh, comparative, transatlantic and transnational analysis of leading African-American author, Toni Morrison’s, work on blackness through the diasporic lens of contemporary female writers of the African diaspora, Zoë Wicomb, NoViolet Bulawayo, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Taiye Selasi.
Project
Traditional leadership, democracy and development in the rural eastern Cape: a study of futures past
The problem of how to marry constitutional democracy with traditional authorities in the postcolonial context is not unique to South Africa and has been substantially explored in other contexts.
Project
The Importance of Being Modern: A Chronicle of Contemporary India
This project involves the writing of a rather particular anthropological history of contemporary India.
Project
Crime-focused Law and Colonial Sovereignty at the Cape of Good Hope, circa 1795-1810
Through quasi-inquisitorial procedures for identifying particular subjects as criminals, law at the Cape circa 1795-1810 fashioned hierarchies of criminals in the name of a particular sovereign’s justice.