SASUF Goes Digital 2022

Presentations: 13.00-14.00
Q&A: 14.00-14.30


Zoom:  https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/67087110215 

The word solidarity carries positive connotations of mobilisation across divides to challenge inequality and injustice. However, such collective action inevitably raises questions about how common interests are imagined and liaisons are sustained. Solidarity is built upon the formation of imagined collectives across difference and therefore necessarily brings into play relations of hierarchy and power.  African literatures have long contended with these questions in a multitude of ways, as belonging and relationality have been and are challenged by migration, state building, and multicultural and multiethnic societies. However, to date, there have been comparatively few studies focused on African literature in relation to both gender and solidarity. This workshop aims to explore how literary writing engages solidarity in three interrelated ways: first, as a theme explored in literary writing, second, as collective action that can be produced by literature’s engagement with gender politics, and third, as networks involved in literary production and circulation.

Agenda:

1. Nomonde Ntsepo - Networks of Care: Gender, Friendship and Solidarity in Makhosazana Xaba’s Running and Other Stories
2. Gül Bilge Han: Afro-Asian Solidarities across Borders: Poetic Visions of Decolonization in Turkish Modernism from Hikmet’s “Taranta Babu” to Lav’s “Mau Mau”
3. Tasnim Qutait: From the Harem to the Square: Solidarity in Ahdaf Soueif’s Memoir of Cairo
4. Sanja Nivesjö - Gender and Aesthetics of Solidarity: Bessie Head and the “Drum style”

Moderator: Maria Zirra

Zoom:  https://uu-se.zoom.us/j/67087110215 

Bios: 

Nomonde Ntsepo is a lecturer in the Department of Literary Studies in English at Rhodes University, and a PhD candidate in English Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her research interests include African literary Studies, Women’s Fiction and Queer Fiction. 

Gül Bilge Han is a lecturer and researcher at the Department of English, Mälardalen University. Her current research lies at the intersection of global modernist studies, world literature, aesthetic theory, and literary pedagogy. Her recent work includes Wallace Stevens and the Poetics of Modernist Autonomy (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and The New Wallace Stevens Studies ((coeditor) Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Sanja Nivesjö is a Swedish Research Council postdoctoral researcher at Uppsala University (Sweden) and University of Salford (UK). Her current project concerns depictions of interracial love in Southern African literature, 1900-1950. She has previously worked on space and sexuality in South African literature and published on Olive Schreiner.

Tasnim Qutait is senior lecturer in English at Uppsala University. She is the author of Nostalgia in Anglophone Arab Literature: Nationalism, Identity and Diaspora  (Bloomsbury 2021). Her research interests are in migration studies and world literature with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa. She is currently working on a monograph on security and Arab diaspora culture during the long war on terror.

Maria Zirra is a postdoctoral researcher at the English Department of Stockholm University and the Department of Literatures in English at Rhodes University. Her current research project, “Reading Art Worlds in Small Print: Prismatic Combinations of Literature and Visual Art in South African Little Magazines” is funded by the Swedish Research Council and focuses on how African visual art is discussed in literary periodicals. Maria’s upcoming monograph Visual Poetic Memory deals with postcolonial poetic writing about visual art and its aesthetic, political and material implications. She has published work on contemporary ekphrastic poetry, new materialism, multidirectional memory and complicity in Anglophone poetry.